Divine Authorship? - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > October 1995

Divine Authorship?

Computer reveals startling word patterns

By Jeffrey B. Satinover

Among the oft-derided Christian literalists, it is said that the Bible is the wholly inspired and inerrant Word of God, and that Holy Spirit guided the mind and hand of its human authors. Orthodox Jews are even more extreme in their literalism: Among them, tradition holds not merely that every word of the Bible is inspired, but that every letter of the Torah (the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) was dictated directly by God to Moses in a precise and unerring sequence. So-called “higher criticism” and modern linguistic analyses have tended to undercut these claims, […]

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Footnotes

1.

Literally iota, equivalent to the Hebrew yod, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet.

2.

Literally tittle, a reference to the small decoration or “crown” on some Hebrew letters in handwritten scrolls of the Torah.

3.

For example, Rabbi Solomon [Shlomo] ben Isaac [Yitzchak] is regularly referred to as Rashi.

4.

Numbers are represented by letters in Hebrew.

Endnotes

1.

Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg, in “A Discussion of the Paper by Professor Bartholomew,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 15:1 (1988) pp. 173–178.

2.

Professors H. Furstenberg (Hebrew University); I. Piateski-Shapiro (Yale University), the renowned mathematician; D. Kazhdan (Harvard University); and J. Bernstein (Harvard University).

3.

Introduction to the Sifra Ditzniut.