Serendipity

An important chapter in the history of the Torah, which I personally became interested in as a result of serendipity - a Talmud class - was the translation of the Torah into Greek. This translation, known as the Septuagint, is described in the Talmud (Gemara) in Megilla 9a and 9b. There we learn that King Ptolemy of Egypt required 72 sages to do the translation. They were all isolated from each other, and the Gemara reports the miracle that they all made the same 14 adjustments during translation. The first of these 14, and the last of them, are the subject of two codes below, each of which yielded, conservatively, results better than 1 in 1000 (for the other 12, no immediate hits were found).

The first adjustment

The last adjustment

So it appears that the Coder knew these details of the Greek translation, which would occur about 1,050 years after giving the Torah (the translation was done about 2,250 years ago).

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