Solving the Bible Code Puzzle
Abstract
A paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg in this journal in 1994 made the extraordinary claim that the Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis encodes events which did not occur until millennia after the text was written. In reply, we argue that Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg’s case is fatally defective, indeed that their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it. We present extensive evidence in support of that conclusion. We also report on many new experiments of our own, all of which failed to detect the alleged phenomenon.
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One can be sure to find a significant interaction in any data set by conducting many statistical tests, even without a true signal, unless alpha is corrected for multiple testing.
“one can be sure to find a “significant” interaction in any data set, simply by conducting many statistical tests, even in the absence of a true signal in the data, unless the test level alpha is corrected for multiple hypothesis testing (43,44).”
From Is there a Publication Bias in Behavioural Intranasal Oxytocin Research on Humans? Opening the File Drawer of One Laboratory (2016) · cites this paper as [44]
Cites
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Lane, A., Luminet, O., Nave, G., & Mikolajczak, M. (2016) · Journal of Neuroendocrinology · doi:10.1111/jne.12384 · Cited by 134 · see citing works
- Authors
- Bar-Hillel, M., Bar-Natan, D., Kalai, G., & McKay, B.
- Affiliations
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IL)
- Australian National University (AU)
- Venue
- Statistical Science
- Publisher
- Institute of Mathematical Statistics
- Published
- 1999-05-01
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 150-173
- ISSN
- 0883-4237 (ISSN-L)
- 2168-8745
- OpenAlex
- W2122677169
- Cited by
- 38
- References
- 18
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 2 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 12.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Statistical Science (publishedVersion)
- Project Euclid (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- ANU Open Research (Australian National University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Biblical Studies and Interpretation
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Digital Humanities and Scholarship
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Fractal and DNA sequence analysis
- Keywords
- Genesis, Hebrew text, statistical significance, experimental design flaws
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