pogo88 Eliyahu Rips, Who Claimed to Find Secret Codes in the Torah, Dies at 75
pogo88 Eliyahu Rips, Who Claimed to Find Secret Codes in the Torah, Dies at 75
It sounds like a headline ripped from a supermarket tabloid: In 1994, three Israeli researchers claimed to have found a secret code embedded in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.
But this wasn’t junk science. The paper in which they revealed their findings appeared in an esteemed, peer-reviewed journal. And the academic reputations of the three authors — Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg and Doron Witztum — were unimpeachable, especially that of Dr. Rips.
A math prodigy born to Holocaust survivors in Latvia, he had received his doctorate from, and spent his career at, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he became known for his work in a field called geometric group theory.
He had also become convinced that statistical tools and newer, more powerful computers that were becoming available in the 1980s could be used to identify hidden meaning within the Bible, and he teamed up with his two partners to discover them. Their biggest finding was the names of 32 Jewish scholars in the text, along with their birth or death dates; several of the scholars had lived thousands of years after Genesis was written.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTTheir results, reported in the journal Statistical Science, set off a tempest in the worlds of biblical scholarship and statistical analysis. In 1997, Michael Drosnin, a journalist, used the team’s tools to write “The Bible Code,” a global best seller that claimed to find not just rabbis’ birthdays but also predictions about world events, including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, in 1995, all embedded in the Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament. (Mr. Drosnin died in 2020.)
The book put Dr. Rips in an international spotlight. Magazine and newspaper profiles proliferated; with his Gandalfian white beard and wide-brimmed hat, he seemed to embody the intersection of science and Jewish mysticism.
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At first Dr. Rips endorsed parts of Mr. Drosnin’s book. But as criticism of it as unscientific mounted, he tried to distance himself from it. “The Bible Code,” he told Newsweek in 1997, “is on very shaky ground, and is of no value.”
He died on July 19 at a hospital in Jerusalem at 75. A representative from the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, a research center at Hebrew University, where Dr. Rips worked, said the cause of his death was stomach cancer.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTTo conduct their experiment, Dr. Rips and his colleagues took the 304,805 letters in the Hebrew version of Genesis and arranged them in a grid, without spaces between words. Using a computer, they scanned the text using skip codes — a fixed number of letters that would be repeatedly skipped from any starting point, with the caveat that the results could appear forward, backward, diagonally or vertically.
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Learn more about our process.In their paper, they claimed not only that their method — known as equidistant letter sequences, or E.L.S. — had found the names and dates in near proximity, but that it had done so with relatively low skip codes, the odds of which were about 650,000 to 1, they said.
“We conclude that the proximity of E.L.S.’s with related meanings in the book of Genesis is not due to chance,” they wrote, without speculating about alternative reasons.
The paper, when published in Statistical Science, came with an unusual note from its editor, Robert Kass, who called it “a challenging puzzle” for his skeptical review board.
“Their prior beliefs made them think the Book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern-day individuals,” he wrote, “yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks, the effect persisted.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSeveral researchers initially stepped up in support, among them Harold Gans, a retired cryptanalyst with the National Security Agency, and Robert Aumann, a future Nobel winner in economics.
Others were more skeptical. In 1999, a team of researchers, including three from Hebrew University, led by Brendan McKay of the Australian National University, published a 45-page rebuttal in Statistical Science.
They pointed out a number of flaws in the original work. For one thing, they wrote, not all the discovered names had the same low probability of occurring; for another, they said, removing just a few names from the list vastly lowered the odds of the rest of them appearing by chance.
Dr. Kass, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, used the occasion of Dr. McKay’s paper to distance himself, and the journal, from the work of Dr. Rips and his colleagues, all but accusing them of intellectual malfeasance.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“There is good reason to think that the particular forms of words those authors chose effectively ‘tuned’ their method to their data, thus invalidating their statistical test,” he wrote. It appeared, he concluded, “that the puzzle has been solved.”
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Eliyahu Rips was born Ilja Ripss on Dec. 12, 1948, in Riga, Latvia. Both his parents had narrowly survived the Holocaust: His mother, Tsila (Nuruk) Rips, lost her eight siblings, while his father, Aharon, a mathematician from Belarus, lost his first wife and children.
Ilja, who changed his name after emigrating to Israel, excelled at mathematics and entered the University of Latvia, in Riga, at 16.
He stayed for graduate school, and in 1969 he learned about a student in Czechoslovakia who had died after setting himself on fire in protest against the Soviet invasion of his country the year before. Overcome with emotion, Dr. Rips attempted to do the same in a plaza near the university. Passers-by put out the flames, but his neck and hands were severely burned.
The Soviet authorities placed Dr. Rips in a mental institution, effectively a prison. While there he debunked a major mathematical proof, and when the international mathematics community heard about his achievement, they petitioned for his release. He got out in 1971 and left for Israel the next year.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTHe received his doctorate in mathematics from Hebrew University in 1975, then joined the faculty.
Dr. Rips is survived by his wife, Dvorah; his children, Benjamin, Moshe, Miriam, Aharon and Meir; and more than 30 grandchildren.
Despite the criticism of Mr. Drosnin’s book, its popularity catalyzed a cottage industry of Bible code breakers. Dr. Rips distanced himself from those, too, but stood by his original paper.
“The only conclusion that can be drawn from the scientific research regarding the Torah codes,” he told The Jerusalem Post in 1997pogo88, “is that they exist and that they’re not a mere coincidence.”