Fri Feb 14 06:16:28 1997

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Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 06:16:13 -0500 (EST)
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Subject: Re: Koren vs BHS text
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Lewis Reich wrote:

<< 
 I wonder if it is appropriate to describe the equidistant letters 
 matter as a theory, since what is being reported is a result, and as 
 far as I know, no particular theory was advanced in the statistical 
 articles to account for the result.  >>

The SS article did not propose a new theory, but was an attempt to test the
ELS codes in Genesis to see if they conform to an existing theory. The
existing theory was described in an article in the Journal of the Royal
Acadamy of Sciences which stated that, in an intelligent literary text, pairs
of meaningfully related words tend to be found in close proximity in contrast
with pairs of non-meaningfully related words. This literary phenomenon was
demonstrated to be generally true by rigorous statistical analysis. In other
words, intelligent literary texts exhibit this characteristic.

The authors of the SS article tested ELS codes in Genesis for this
characteristic. They selected the names of 32 medieval rabbis from an
encyclopedia, and paired their names with the date of their birth or death.
The assumption was that such name-date pairs constitute valid meaningfully
related word pairs. The experiment undertook to measure the overall proximity
of a number of instances of each name-date pair, and to statistically compare
the cumulative proximity of the 32 name-date pairs with that of 999,999
randomly arranged pertubations of the names and dates. That provided a large
control group of non-meaningfully related name-date pairs.  Their conclusion
was "that the proximity of the ELS's with related meanings in the Book of
Genesis is not due to chance."
 
This implies that the authors consider their experiment to demonstrate that
at least some ELS codes in Genesis exhibit one characteristic of intelligent
literature that cannot be accounted for by chance. This idea violates the
expectations of natural intuition. It suggests that in addition to the
intelligent arrangement of the letters in the surface text of Genesis, a
secondary intelligent arrangement was imposed to include 
additional hidden information. While such an idea is not impossible, it is
very unlikely and is open for very careful scrutiny. While I am very
skeptical, this work cannot be dismissed lightly. Several of us are going
through the methodology and assumptions of the experiment very thoroughly to
detect any flaws.

James D. Price

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