Sat Feb 8 17:55:06 1997

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On  8 Feb 97 at 13:43, Nichael Lynn Cramer wrote:

> I think I'll have to respectfully disagree with Lewis on this.
> 
> Whatever the validity of the original claims, the BR article
> presented only the must cursory and "hand-waving" description of
> what the original authors claimed and virtually no discussion
> whatsoever of the statistical issues involved.  It was very hard to
> come away from the article with any real understanding of what was
> going on.

Nichael is right; I had misremembered the author's response to 
various letters to the editor (BR  Feb. 1996) as if it were part of
the original article.  In that response he provides more information
about the procedure than he does in the original article.  However,
I'm not sure that what I regard as a "layman's description" would
necessarily be immune to a charge of "cursory hand-waving".


On  8 Feb 97 at 15:50, Robert B. Waltz wrote:

> But this still doesn't address the point that some of us are still wondering
> about. That point being, "What did the articles claim?"

The Bible Review article stated the conclusion of the JRS article was 
that "words [were] encoded into the Hebrew text that could have not 
been accidental - nor placed there by human hand".   This rather 
unfortunate slant extends to the title of the BR article:  "Divine 
Authorship?  Computer reveals startling word patterns".  The 
subsequent SS article is described as yielding "results [that] do not 
reveal any secret messages encoded in the Bible, but they do 
demonstrate certain sequences of letters forming words that cannot be 
the result of chance."    The BR article quotes the editor of SS as 
saying:  "Our referees were baffled: their prior beliefs made them 
think the Book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful 
references to modern day individuals, yet when the authors carried 
out additional analyses and checks the effect persisted.  The paper 
is thus offered to *Statistical Science* readers as a challenging 
puzzle."


Lewis Reich
lbr@sprynet.com

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