When the Critics Own Books Were Tested: Zero Signal

The Challenge

In the late 1990s, mathematicians — Professor Brendan McKay, Professor Dror Bar-Natan, Professor Maya Bar-Hillel and colleagues — selected two specific books to challenge Torah code research (commonly known as "Bible Codes" but actually focused on the Torah): a Hebrew translation of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Their argument: given enough flexibility, any text can produce patterns that appear significant to an eye that cannot distinguish genuine structure from artificial construct.

At that time, a scientific paper on Torah codes using the ELS (Equidistant Letter Sequences) method had been published by Professor Eliyahu Rips, Doron Witztum and colleagues. War and Peace and Moby Dick were chosen as books that no one claims contain intentional codes, yet — with sufficiently large degrees of freedom — one could present something that looks like a code even in such books (and in fact in any text, even gibberish).

The claim is correct in relation to the mathematical expectation of the representation against the tested text, its length, letter frequencies, and so on. This debate was long and fascinating. By expanding parameters of freedom beyond what existed in Professor Rips’s (of blessed memory) and Doron Witztum’s original work, they managed to present a theoretical possibility for something that an untrained person might mistake for a code. The great difference between a genuine code and an artificial product is like the difference between glass and diamond — with precise tools, one can distinguish between them clearly.

Now, decades later, thanks to that historical debate, the random books were locked in and are now a priori choices for testing the critics’ claims — including regarding researcher Evron’s discovery of significant patterns and extensive information in the connection between the first verse of the Torah and Pi.

Why Pi? Why the First Verse?

The first verse of the Torah is intrinsically connected to the creation of the world. It describes the act of creation while maintaining complete conceptual unity as a self-contained unit:

• Who creates — Elohim (God)
• What is the act — "bara" (created)
• When and how — "Bereshit" (in the beginning)
• What was created — the entire world and its subdivisions: "the heavens and the earth"

Kabbalistic tradition describes the beginning of creation through the act of Tzimtzum (contraction) from a singular point from which the Creator created the world: a central point of a perfect circle, as written in the Etz Chaim and explained in depth in the Zohar’s description of the ring of creation.

For these reasons — and for broader reasons related to the creation of the world, physics, dimensions, geometry and more — Pi (π) is the most fundamental and important constant to test against. None of this exists in the random books, and therefore they have no semantic right to be tested against Pi. But as the results show: you cannot dilute zero. The random books fail utterly, even when given the right to compete in a contest they are not entitled to enter.

The Results

Test 1: Opening Sentences — All Translations

The Pi Pattern Detection Framework comprises 272 independent criteria that were defined and locked before testing [1]. Each criterion examines a different aspect of the relationship between the verse’s structure and the digits of Pi: digit sums, positions in Pi, symmetries, squared digits, chains, and more. The degrees of freedom are granted equally to every text tested — 272 opportunities to succeed.

The first verse of the Torah (Genesis 1:1): “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”: 27 anchored matches out of 272 criteria, with statistical significance far exceeding the threshold of direct empirical computational capability.

War and Peace — Trivush translation (1920s): 0 matches. War and Peace — Goldberg translation (1952, McKay version): 0 matches. Moby Dick — Bortnicker translation (1952): 0 matches. Moby Dick — Amir translation (1981): 0 matches. Moby Dick — Giron translation (2009): 0 matches.

Every translation. Every version. Zero. Not one produced enough Pi-related structure to pass Gate 0 — the minimum threshold of scientific viability. Scientifically, the test ends here. Nevertheless, we extended the test and gave the random books many more lottery tickets they were not entitled to:

Test 2: War and Peace — Every Sentence

32,921 sentences were tested through the identical framework. The random books were thus granted the right to present every sentence as if it were the opening sentence, and as if it were connected to the creation of the world or to Pi. The result? Zero patterns found. Only a handful of isolated words here and there — as expected from any text, including gibberish — that happen to contain mathematical properties of diverse natural language.

The best sentence in the entire 1,400-page novel scored only 4 basic matches: "And again he looked a little at the rows of his men" — a general inspecting soldiers. How did this sentence score 4? The word "veshov" (ושוב, "and again", gematria 314) passes Gate 0, and the system then checks how many of the 272 criteria are satisfied in subsequent gates. 4 basic criteria were met — all deriving from the fact that a single word contains the value 314, with no additional structure. The word "veshov" appears 131 times in War and Peace and has no connection to Pi, circles, geometry, or creation. This is precisely within the (low) range of what we would expect from any random book or sufficiently long gibberish.

Test 3: Moby Dick — Chapter 1

We were unable to obtain the complete Hebrew translation of Moby Dick despite considerable effort, including purchasing the book from an online Hebrew bookstore (we bought the book but were not permitted to use it as a file). We therefore tested the 121 sentences from the opening chapter that were publicly available.

Best result: 2 matches. The best sentence: "Further away curls sleepy smoke from a village house chimney" — because the word "rachok" (רחוק, "far") equals 314. Smoke from a chimney. Again, not encoding — but white noise of the kind expected from any sufficiently long random text.

Why These Results Are Not Encoding

Finding the number 314 in a text is not the same as finding Pi encoded in a text. The Hebrew language has a rich vocabulary and therefore a rich array of accompanying numerical values, with no intention by the author for those values. Finding a word that sums to 314 in a sufficiently long text is precisely white noise — and this is what one should expect from any text.

This is like finding someone’s ID number in the digit sequence of Pi — it does not mean Pi encodes that person’s identity. Even if we write random digits now, they will contain all sorts of numbers that people recognize from various aspects of their lives. That does not mean we intended to encode something from their lives here.

Intentional encoding is one whose definitions are a priori, has an orderly and linguistically appropriate structure, is predictable, possesses a clear mathematical/geometric pattern, and when degrees of freedom are accounted for, demonstrates significant statistical significance. It is like winning the lottery intentionally, versus buying millions of tickets and boasting about a success that is not even the best one.

In the random books: 1. The opening sentence scored zero. The text’s own starting point has no Pi-adjacency. 2. No semantic alignment. The words producing 314 matches — "veshov" (again), "rachok" (far) — have no connection to Pi, creation, physics, or geometry. 3. No pattern structure. Genesis 1:1’s 27 matches span all gates in a coherent, interlocking sequence. War and Peace’s 4 matches derive from a single word that passed Gate 0 alone. 4. Expected under the null hypothesis. With 33,000 sentences and hundreds of Hebrew words with values near 314, finding scattered matches is statistically guaranteed.

The Measurement

Genesis 1:1: 27 matches across all 7 gates. Symmetry confirmations: 6. Independent SGV confirmation: yes. Squaring regeneration: yes. Position matching: yes. Semantic alignment: creation ↔ circle geometry.

Key examples from Genesis 1:1’s matches:

• The sum of the first 611 digits of Pi = 2701 (the verse’s gematria). 611 = "Torah". • The sum of the first 17 digits of Pi = 82 (the verse’s small gematria value). 17 = SGV of "Torah". • 2701 first appears in Pi at position 165 = "Nekudah" (Point) — the foundational concept of Tzimtzum. • The sum of the first 82 squared digits of Pi = 2701 — the verse returns through the squaring operation. • 2701 ÷ π ≈ 860 = Elohim (86) × 10 Sefirot. • 82 ÷ π ≈ 26 = YHWH — the Tetragrammaton.

War and Peace best (of 32,921): 4 matches. Gates passed: 0. Symmetry: 0. Semantic alignment: military inspection ↔ nothing.

The framework does not protect Genesis 1:1. It tests it — with the same rigor applied to every other text. The critics’ books were tested under identical conditions. The result is a measurement.

Methodological Note

The books tested in this study were selected by the academic critics of prior Torah code research — not by the present researchers. The Pi Pattern Detection Framework comprises 272 independent criteria and was locked prior to testing. No criteria were added, modified, or tuned based on the results. The full list of criteria is available in the scientific paper.

[1] See: "10 Trillion Trials" paper — full specification of all 272 criteria, testing methodology, and simulation results. Available on the Research page at TheFirstVerse.com.

Full study reference: Evron, O.J. (2026). Statistical Analysis of Numeric-Textual Correspondences Between Genesis 1:1 and the Decimal Expansion of Pi. Available at TheFirstVerse.com