Bri:
Sorry about that. By way of excuse, I'm still very new here, and I haven't gotten to know anybody.
You've probably noticed, as I have, that there are a lot of posts here that OUGHT to be jokes, but aren't...
I really wanted to go look at some other threads, but I'll try to address your criticisms by trying, at least, to explain what this phenomenon IS. That might help in the discussion, since no one has yet done so.
This may take a while.
First, then: words may be found "encoded" in the Torah--or, as you say, in ANY book--by programming a computer to search for the letters in the words that appear in sequence at equidistant intervals. The word "Joshua", for instance, might appear at a 7-letter interval: "J", then six letters, then "O", then six letters, then "S", and so on (I know, Hebrew has no vowels; this is an example). Now, clearly, this means nothing. Since the computer can easily find words at intervals of thousands of letters, one can obviously find literally any word in any book; the shorter the word, or the longer the book, the more instances of the word's appearance can and will be found. Big deal. If this were all there was to the phenomenon, it would not rate a filler paragraph on the back pages, but some apparently believe that this is the case.
The phenomenon of the codes, and its statistical improbability, is in this: Say we find a word--in the initial experiment, the name of a medieval rabbi--encoded in the text in this manner. Not difficult; Jewish names tend to repeat, just as English names do (how many "Roberts" do you know?). The name has to appear SOMEWHERE, and is in fact quite certain to appear in MANY places. But now we focus on the place where the name appears at its SHORTEST interval, obviously a much smaller portion of the text. Again, that means nothing--it has to happen somewhere.
But now we search for a related word or phrase--again, in the initial experiment, the date of that rabbi's birth or death, whichever is known; and we find that that information appears, again at its SHORTEST interval, IN THE SAME PLACE. To make the improbability of that clear, imagine the whole Torah spread out on a football field, and the place where both words appear at their shortest intervals is the size of a paperback book. That should strike anyone as rather unlikely; still, though, it might be a mere coincidence, and one such example still proves nothing.
The problem, for those who wish to dismiss the codes as meaningless or trivial, is that this strange coincidence appeared over and over with a rather long list of rabbis and their dates which were chosen by an arbitrary standard before the searches began.
These results were so shocking that the journal, Statistical Science, insisted that the experiment be repeated, this time with an entirely different list using another arbitrary standard--one chosen by reviewers at the journal and not by the scientists involved. The results were the same.
[Edited to add: I do not claim that these extreme outcomes occurred with every rabbi on either list; they did not. But the degree of correlation was extremely high, with a probability calculated at p < 0.000016. When precisely similar experiments were conducted with exactly the same data sets on the book of Isaiah and a Hebrew translation of "War and Peace", no such correlations were found.]
The standard was, for the record, the amount of space devoted to the rabbis' biographies in the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel, a standard work [for clarity, "Israel" here refers to the Jewish people and not to the nation-state]. The first sample included rabbis with at least three columns of text; the second, those with between 1.5 columns and three. There is, therefore, no question of the researchers using carefully selected data to ensure positive results; the standard was totally arbitrary and determined beforehand.
Similar experiments with other texts--significantly, including other books of the Bible--have yielded no such consistency of results.
Perhaps, in the Moby Dick experiment, a similar encoded pair or two were found, after searching dozens of possibilities; that would not, as we have seen, be particularly surprising. But I know of no experiment with any other text that either used these arbitrary standards or that has produced such a long list of positive results or with an equally low predicted probability..
I hope this has clarified things a bit.
