CONCERNING THE USAGE OF THE MASORETIC TEXT OF GENESIS FOR THE ELS'S EXPERIMENTS

JEWISH ACTION, Vol 59, No. 2/ Aish HaTorah/Discovery Seminars ^ | 5759 1998; 4 JULY 1999 | YAAKOV ELMAN & DORON WITZTUM

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CONCERNING THE USAGE OF THE MASORETIC TEXT OF GENESIS FOR THE ELS'S EXPERIMENTS

In the Statistical Science paper we wrote: "We used the standard, generally accepted text of Genesis known as the Textus Receptus. One widely available edition is that of the Koren Publishing Company in Jerusalem. The Koren text is precisely the same as that used by us." That is, we didn't choose arbitrarily one of many available texts of Genesis, but chose the text of Genesis which is considered kosher in almost all Jewish communities.

Critics have questioned the usage of this Masoretic text of Genesis for the purpose of ELS's experiments. Here we present a typical question and its answer, published originally in Jewish Action (V. 59 No. 2, winter 5759/'98).

A QUESTION:

I read with great interest the articles by Dr. Simon, Mr. Witztum and Rabbi Mechanic, but was somewhat surprised that very little attention was paid to what seems to me to be the essential problem in proposing ELS Codes for Chumash, and that is the fact that the Gemara, Rishonim and Achronim agree that the text of the Torah we have today, while in all essentials the same as Moshe's Torah, differs in regard to malei and chaser. That is, we cannot be certain that all the vowel letters (vavs and yuds mainly) are exactly in accordance with the Sinaitic Torah (Kiddushin 30a). As is well known, the Rashba, the Ritva, the Meiri, the Tashbatz, the Radvaz, down to the Chasam Sofer and more contemporaneously Rav Shach and Rav Yaakov Weinberg, have all acknowledged this situation.

If Dr. Rips and Mr. Witztum maintiain that our Torahs are correct, then those available to the Tannaim and Amoraim were not.

Unfortunately for their argument, the Tannaim relied on the spellings in their sifrei Torah from which to derive specific halachos, and so the poskim I just listed (down to the Chasam Sofer) advised correcting our sifrei Torah to conform to the Gemara's spellings in those situations. How does one square the circle?

Yaakov Elman
Brooklyn, New York

DORON WITZTUM REPLIES:

Dr. Elman asks a very reasonable question that is frequently addressed to proponents of the Torah Codes: How can any conclusions be based upon Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELSs) given that we are not knowledgeable as to chaseirot (missing letters) and ye'theiroth (added letters).

A full treatment of the Gemara in Kiddushin (30a), and the distinguished poskim that Dr. Elman mentions is beyond the scope of this reply [A treatment of this Gemara can be found in an article (in Hebrew) on chaserot veyeterot , which was printed in "Moria" year 22 V. 1-2, Elul 5758, pg.93]. But several points should be made relating specifically to the validity of our findings.

First, it must be remembered that the spelling differences in the various texts of Torah mentioned by the poskim are few in number. And of all the differences between the Masoretic text and the quotations from the Talmud used to derive specific halachos none are found in Genesis. As the Meiri writes in Kiryath Sefer: The absence of disagreement between ba'alei ha'mesorah and the Talmud is itself the greatest proof of authenticity for a given text –

."åæî äìåãâ úåàé÷á êì ïéà ú÷åìçî åá ïéàù ìëù"

In addition, there are almost no divergences in Genesis between the kosher sifrei Torah of different communities. There are no differences in Genesis between sifrei Torah of Sepharadim and Ashkenazim, and the standard Yemenite text differs in just three places.

When we repeated the "Great Rabbis Experiment" reported in Statistical Science using the Yemenite text of Genesis, we achieved results of the same statistical significance as those of the published experiment.

From a scientific standpoint, our decision to run our experiment using the Masoretic text of Genesis was the natural choice. Moreover, we were specifically asked by the referees to run the second "Great Rabbis Experiment" using the same text we had used for our first experiment. Finally, as a believer in Torah, I am not just concerned with scientific proofs of information encoded in ELSs. If it were shown that the phenomena exist only in the Masoretic text but not in any deviant texts, our belief in the hashgacha pratith that caused this particular text to be accepted throughout the Jewish world would be strengthened, without the probative value of our experiment being diminished in the slightest.

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Continuing background documentation on the Code debates.