bible code: "Teaching them [wrong] things", The

the Aish HaTorah web-site. A related article may also be mentioned here: D. J. Bartholomew, "Probability, Statistics and Theology," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, vol. 151, part 1 (1988) 137-159. This article is followed by "Discussion of the Paper by Professor Bartholomew" (pp. 160-178), in which Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg (among others) provide some commentary on and interaction with Bartholomew's essay.

16 A list of more than fifty individuals who hold doctoral degrees in mathematics and/or are faculty members in various college or university departments of mathematics or statistics and who have gone on record as rejecting the validity of the Bible code theory from the standpoint of its mathematical probabilities is available at the following web-site: http://www.math.caltech.edu/ code/petition.html.

17 Bar-Hillel, McKay (of the Australian National University), and Bar-Natan (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) have pointed out certain methodological flaws in the research of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg. See the following article: Maya Bar-Hillel, Dror Bar-Natan, and Brendan McKay, "The Torah Codes: Puzzle and Solution,' Chance 1112 (1998) 13-19.

18 See the discussion in Carey A. Moore, Esther: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (AB 713; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971) 56. The words in question are as follows: oil 1P.11 Xih. f'.

19 More recently, Jeffrey claims to have found three instances of the tetragrammaton encoded in the Book of Esther with ELS intervals of 3, -37, and -31. See Jeffrey, Mysterious Bible Codes 83. For a similar approach to the Book of Esther see Yacov A. Rambsel, His Name Is Jesus (Toronto: Frontier Research Publications, 1997) 233-239.

20 Scholem labels the Zohar "the central work in the literature of the Kabbalah." See Gershom Scholem, "Zohar," in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 16 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972) col. 1193.

21 In the judgment of Scholem the Kabbalah was ". . . one of the most powerful forces ever to affect the inner development of Judaism. . . ." See Gershom Scholem, "Kabbalah," in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 10 (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972) col. 489.

22 Jeffrey, Mysterious Bible Codes 36-38. He refers to Zohar 1:117b-118a: "Rabbi Shim'on said to them: 'It is not the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, that too much be revealed to the world. But when the days of the Messiah approach, even the children of the world will be able to discover secrets of wisdom, and to know through them the Ends and the Calculations, and in that time it will be revealed to all." The discovery of "secrets of wisdom" that provide information about "the Ends and the Calculations," Jeffrey suggests, is a reference to the present-day phenomenon of the Bible code. But how could the authors of the Zohar been able to predict such a thing as the Bible code phenomenon? According to Jeffrey, it was already suggested by Dan 12:4.

221 Consider, for example, the surprising words of the fifteenth-century Christian writer Pico della Mirandola: "No science can better convince us of the divinity of Jesus Christ than magic and the Kabbalah." See Scholem, "Kabbalah" col. 644.