Eliyahu Rips, mathematician who found codes in the Torah that seemed to predict the future – obituary
Eliyahu Rips, who has died aged 75, was a brilliant mathematician who claimed to have found codes hidden in the Torah that predicted the future, most sensationally the date of Saddam Hussein’s first Scud missile attack on Israel in 1991.
Rips’s startling analysis, which seemed tantamount to scientific proof of a miracle, was published in 1994 in Statistical Science under the unassuming title Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis.
The idea was seized upon by the investigative journalist Michael Drosnin, who used the computer programme Rips’s team had devised for analysing scripture to predict the assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, 12 months before it happened.
After that Drosnin became messianic, and in his 1997 book The Bible Code, serialised extravagantly in the Daily Mail, he claimed to have found Torah predictions for the assassination of JFK, the moon landings and the death of Princess Diana.
It became a runaway bestseller, as did its sequel The Bible Code II (2002), which found a retrospective prediction of 9/11 and claimed that Armageddon was slated for 2006.
Pressure mounted on the scientific establishment to debunk this New Age craze, but the stumbling block was Rips, Drosnin’s unworldly boffin, whose wild, white beard and black robes placed him firmly in the lineage of Jewish mystics, but with the added charisma of the emerging science of computing.
Rips in Jerusalem in 2003: when he was a young man in the Soviet Union, he had poured gasoline on himself and tried to burn alive to protest the Prague Spring crackdown – BBC
He was also a man of unimpeachable integrity. Born in Riga on December 12 1948 to Holocaust survivors, he had been a 19-year-old mathematics student at the time of the 1968 Prague Spring. When the Soviet tanks rolled in, Rips felt “buried alive”, he recalled, and decided to burn himself alive in protest, as the student Jan Palach had done in Prague.
Rips doused himself in gasoline and unfurled a banner saying “I Protest against the Occupation of Czechoslovakia”. But some passing sailors extinguished the fire, leaving Rips badly burnt but alive. He was consigned to a Soviet psychiatric prison for two years.
To pass the time, on a piece of lavatory paper supplied by a guard, he refuted a widely accepted proof of a mathematical problem called the dimension subgroup conjecture. This feat stunned western mathematicians, who petitioned the Soviet Union for his release.
In 1972 he was permitted to emigrate to Israel, where his interest was piqued by a phenomenon that had engaged Jewish mystics since the Middle Ages (and had obsessed Isaac Newton). Taking every 50th letter in Genesis, starting with the first “t”, the word TORAH is spelt out. The same pattern occurs in Exodus. This is known as a “skip code”.
Rips began working with Doron Witztum, and together they built a computer programme to search for other skip codes, and found the word “CHANUKAH” interlocking as if in a crossword puzzle with “HASHMONI” (the Hasmoneans, who witnessed the miracle of the lights). However, the Torah was written centuries before the events of the Chanukah story, in 164 BC.
Rips then put to the test the Torah’s seeming power to predict the future. In 1991, on the brink of the First Gulf War, he searched the Torah for a “SADDAM” skip code. Nearby were the words: “fire on the third of Shevat” – a date that would fall on January 18. When Saddam’s first Scud missile arrived in the early hours of January 18, Rips felt a jubilation not widely shared with his compatriots.
The Bible Code
His 1994 Statistical Science article, co-written with Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, was based on an empirical test they had then constructed, showing that the encoded names of famous medieval rabbis occurred in the Torah in close proximity to their birth or death dates, and that this “compactness” was unlikely – to the tune of 62,500 to 1.
Statistical Science’s editor Robert Kass expected his moderators to give the article short shrift, but was astonished when they could find no holes in the science. Fearing he would become a laughing stock, he tried a third moderator, but to no avail, and he was forced to publish.
After Drosnin’s Bible Code circus, however, the problem came to the attention of the probability theorist Brendan McKay, who showed that any text would throw up similarly spooky juxtapositions. (In Moby Dick he found “LADY DIANA” next to “mortal in these jaws of death”.)
McKay then set about attacking Rips’s original experiment, pointing out that the famous rabbis’ names could be spelt in various ways. When he ran the rabbi list with variant spellings, the statistical significance evaporated. A test run in 2004 by the BBC programme Horizon, looking for clusters of the rabbis’ names and dates with their places of birth, found no particular pattern.
Rips stood by his idea, which he felt had been highjacked and made ridiculous by Drosnin. He came to believe that “all attempts to extract messages from Torah codes, or to make predictions based on them, are futile and are of no value. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the scientific research regarding the Torah codes is that they exist and that they are not a mere coincidence.” But in this belief he became increasingly isolated.
In 1997 he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Literature. In mathematics, his greatest impact was in the field of geometric group theory, where he gave his name to the “Rips machine” and the Vietoris-Rips complex.
Eliyahu Rips, born December 12 1948, died July 19 2024
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