The Great Rabbis and other lists

Lists, such as the great Rabbis, were the first category of code experiments actually done.

As a result, torah codes became known to a wide scientific audience in 1994, with the publication in the journal Statistical Science (vol 9, number 3, pp 429-438), of the paper "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", by Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (known henceforth as WRR). This work found that in the book of Genesis, ELS's for a list of over 30 of the greatest Rabbis - living several centuries ago - occurred in unexpectedly close proximity to the respective ELS's for their dates of birth and death.

A paper critical to this study was published in the same journal in 1999 - vol 14, number 2, pp 150-173. A summary of this influential paper's attack and the reasons it is invalid are here.

The WRR work inspired a number of additional studies of lists, by a number of diverse researchers, many of which also gave extraordinary results.

Some of the more interesting ones included:

• Harold Gans' list of the community names where these same Rabbis were born or died.
• Doron Witztum's list of the same Rabbis with their fathers' names.
• Doron Witztum's list of the 70 nations of the world descended from Noah.
• Personalities in Genesis and their death dates, independently studied by Professor Rips and Doron Witztum.
• Dr. Rotenberg's list of Haman's 10 sons and their death date (the 13th of Adar - the date they were hung, in the Purim story). It is interesting that the first attempt failed to be significant, but Dr. Rotenberg noticed that one of the 17 ELS's for the date had an extension "Purim". Immediately he reran the experiment with only that occurrence, and the new results were significant.

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