The Torah Code

In the summer of 1994, a Hebrew University mathematician named Eliyahu Rips published a paper in Statistical Science that appeared to demonstrate the impossible: that the names and birth dates of rabbis who lived centuries after the Torah was written were encoded in its letters, at intervals no human scribe could have planned. The claim survived peer review at one of the most respected journals in the field. Then the counterattack began.

Steven Knight follows the full record — from thirteenth-century Kabbalists and Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl’s hand-counted sequences, through the computers that turned a mystical practice into a search algorithm, to Michael Drosnin’s bestseller, the Rabin assassination matrix, and the long, bitter war between Rips and the Australian mathematician Brendan McKay.

This is a documentary investigation, which means it goes where the evidence goes. The mathematics of equidistant letter sequences are laid out plainly, as is the flaw that lets a determined searcher find almost anything in almost any text. What remains at the end is the harder and more interesting question: why the pattern is so difficult for any of us to let go of.