TC Networks (example 1, involving Messiah, joy and revenge)

Preview and summary

The breakthrough in Torah Codes research (spring/summer 2008) is Professor Rips' new "TC Network" idea. "TC Network" refers to a series of inter-related tables, with repeatedly occurring key words among them. Such networks reveal an increasingly apparent organized structure of the codes.

The following partial TC Network is a small but very strong subset of Professor Rips' growing collection. It is pictured below in Figures 1-6, summarized here:

The simplicity and strength of the result:

Figure 1 (below) is the simplest kind of code, being a single long phrase (surrounding the key word "bin Laden"). Figure 3 is equally simple - it is a single long phrase surrounding "Messiah". Figures 2 and 4 serve to establish the key words "revenge" and "joy". Figures 5 and 6 use those established key words to find two clusters that, together, are more compact than we find in 1 million competing texts ("monkey" texts).

To find a monkey text that could compete with even the basic framework of this TC Network (Figures 1, 5 and 6) would require searching through more than 35 billion texts, which is over 1500 times the number of catalogued books in the Library of Congress.

Here are more details, showing why this number is both a simplification and an understatement.

The reasons for the high significance:

The high significance is due to the fact that the choices of both the key words and their locations are highly constrained by the TC network itself. This will be detailed below.

How this TC network is found

We start with the most significant, grammatically correct long phrase concerning a famous person which has been found to date [copied from this site's Twin Towers page (from 2007-and-prior), and previously evaluated by 100 reviewers]:

Figure 1

Based on previously published studies, such as this one, we know that we need to search through 1 million or more monkey texts to find anything comparable. That is, the significance of Figure 1 exceeds 1:1,000,000 (1 in a million).

The next step is to use the newly found words to collect more codes, forming a growing network of codes. The above code has just "handed to us" an idea, revenge, related to Messiah. In other words, we did not choose these words - the codes chose them for us (and a similar idea also occurs in the plain reading of Tanach itself - Deuteronomy 32:35 has a similar grammatical construct ["vengeance is Mine"], and Isaiah 66:6 shares a root and synonym with the former verse, meaning retribution, again referring to Messianic times).

Now, let us see if this connection between Messiah and revenge will help us expand our network. That is, let us see if these words are repeated in a "closely allied" code location of Torah (here is a description of how we identify closely allied code locations and their key words). In fact, Figure 2 is such a spot. It is actually the same location as Figure 1 - only the table width has been halved, so that the ELSs appear "double spaced". Figure 2 reveals a repetition of the two concepts, in the form of a parallel "The Messiah", "takes revenge":

Figure 2

Figure 2 is more significant than 1:100,000. This makes sense, because two difficult constraints were both satisfied: new occurrences of both words of interest were found at the (originally established) location of interest (and in a very compact, parallel arrangement).

Now let us see if the codes present us with another key word associated with Messiah. Let us start with the following grammatically correct and meaningful long phrase (as rated by 20 reviewers) about the Messiah (copied below, from this site's Messiah page; notice the small skip of Messiah [8] and the highly relevant surrounding words):

Figure 3

Indeed, this code hands to us another idea associated with Messiah, joy (again, such a connection is seen in the plain reading of Tanach as well - for example, Isaiah 65:18 and 66:10 concern the consolation, and joy - same Hebrew word as the code - in Jerusalem in the final age of peace, in Messianic times)

Repeating the procedure used above for revenge, let us see if there is a closely allied code location which repeats the connection between joy and Messiah.

One of the first locations to check is the smallest skip ELS of "The Messiah", with skip 5. And in fact, contiguous with this ELS we find the word joy, as well as rejoice (Figure 4):

Figure 4

If we take this location as a given, Figure 4 has significance 1:2,800 (based on only the key word originally sought, joy, being near Messiah).

We can now look for additional tables that further expand the above network of tables. For this purpose, we use our accumulated vocabulary, or lexicon, which contains the repeated key words found so far. There are 3 such words, Messiah, revenge and joy, and there are only a few main spelling or grammatical variations possible (for example, Messiah may or may not be encoded with the 1-letter definite-article-prefix; revenge can be spelled with or without the final letter; takes revenge can be spelled with or without the letter VAV). We allow for these and a few other variations in all of our searches (both in our Torah search and in our searches for competitors among thousands of monkey texts).

Here are the two results that Professor Rips found in the Torah. First, Figure 5 contains all three words in an extremely compact cluster, and at the very low skip of 28:

Figure 5

The probability for Figure 5 is 7:1,000,000. That is, when we run the same experiment against 1,000,000 other texts (the monkey texts), we find only 7 competitors to this Torah result.

In addition, Professor Rips found precisely the same 3 key words (but without the definite article) appearing in a single column (with revenge and joy sharing one letter):

Figure 6

This result has probability better than 1:100 (not as dramatic due to the large skip of 20591, but certainly noteworthy). Having both Figure 5 and Figure 6 occur in a single text is on the order of 1 in 1,000,000. The total result, even excluding Figures 2, 3 and 4 for simplicity, is 1 in more than 35 billion.

Conclusion

There are at least 7 critical reasons why this TC network, and a great many other more intricate examples, are a breakthrough, revealing an organized structure linking several codes together:

1) The key words are "handed to us" by the Torah Codes themselves (and they often echo themes in the original Tanach). Key word choice is a critical issue in codes research. By having the key words chosen for us, this answers the main (decade-long) point from codes critics that questions how key words were obtained. This criticism implies that there is a large pool of unreported failures, but the new TC networks demonstrate that this is not the case.

2) Not only the key words, but also their locations, are handed to us. The significance of such a result is many orders of magnitude higher than if we had freedom of key word choice and freedom of location.

3) The results obtained are unlike any obtained to date in a monkey text. In the current example which starts with only the key word bin Laden, it would be extremely rare (1 in a million plus) to find a monkey text with a starting table of similar quality to Figure 1 - let alone also finding additional tables that repeat the themes of that starting table; let alone also finding further repetitions of these themes to the tune of 1 in a million.

4) The networks combine several former discoveries of the last several years: repetition of encoded ideas among multiple tables (Haralick, Levitt, Rips); pointers, which are significant locations in the text where encoding is likely to occurr (Rotenberg); passing significance hurdles in order to be accepted (Bombach, Levitt, Rips and others); recombination of compound phrases to form new key word candidates (Schwartzman); and statistical measuring methods (Gans, Haralick, Rips and others).

5) Further, all of this is accomplished without using diagonal ELSs - we permit only horizontal and vertical ELSs.

6) The high relevance/importance of our topics (bin Laden, Messiah, etc) demonstrates that it is only necessary to try a few ideas in order to uncover these "gems".

7) New and old tables in the network reinforce each other. This becomes more pronounced as the network grows: new key words are discovered alongside the existing ones, and these are found repeated far more frequently than expected in the previously established codes of the network.

In summary, the idea of TC networks gives a self-regulatory, self-unfolding, self-test for Torah Codes.