The Sons of Haman

The Sons of Haman

Alexander Rotenberg, Israel

The well known article [1] (WRR) claimed the existence of statistical evidence for an “unusual closeness”, in the Book of Genesis, between encoded names of famous rabbis of the past, and their birth or death dates. The result was supported by a paper [2], examined the statistical connections of the names of the rabbis with the names of the places where they had been born or died. Later there appeared an article [3] (WRRII) where the name of the list was used as a key word together with the members of the list. In 1995 the author performed an experiment intended as based on the precedents set by these experiments.

The method of obtaining the list of rabbinical names as well as dates and places was complicated and demanded special knowledge. For those who opposed the idea of Torah Code it resulted in a doubt as to the accuracy of the experiment. Thus, to confirm the Torah Code phenomenon an additional experiment had to be performed. In doing so, it was better not to invent a new approach but to take something similar to that which had already been performed. That is why the experiment had to satisfy certain specific conditions.

First, it had to follow the way shown in the former experiments [1-3]. It limited the new experiment to a list of names, dates, places and the name of the list.

Second, the choice of words had to be simple and unique. Thus, it was preferable to use a fixed pre-existing list of names with accepted known dates, places of birth, and places of death.

Third, the experiment should follow the WRR protocol.

In fact, there is a well-known list of names of people, all of whom died on the same day and in the same place: the 10 sons of Haman, whose father had been a powerful prime minister for the king of Persian, Achashveros. The Book of Esther recounts how Haman had failed in planning extermination of the Jews of Persia in the year 353 BCE. The Book of Esther listed the names of Haman's sons along with the place and date that they all died: in Shushan, the capital, on the 13th of Adar. In the Hebrew Bible, this list of names is one of a very few that is stressed by a special columnar format in Biblical scrolls. It is also one of the few sets of related names for which the date and the place of death is known.

The experiment was contained three successive steps. The first step was a precise repetition of WRR experiment with death/birth dates: the date was the 13th of Adar and the names were those of Haman's sons. The experiment therefore used the data that initially had the same structure as WRR. Using the WRR protocol, the proximity of ELSs of the ten sons’ names, as spelled in the Book of Esther, to ELSs of the date of death was calculated. The p-level obtained was not statistically significant.

However, it was noted that one of the ELSs of the 13th of Adar (י"ג באדר) having skip of 2547 has an extension “Purim”[1] (פורים) ([4], page 166). So the resulting expression (י"ג באדר פורים) was considered as an “informational axis” around which ELSs for related key words might appear.

The experiment followed the WRR methodology. Its protocol is (the notation follows [5]):

• Skip Specification is the smallest integer so that the expected number of ELSs is just greater than 10, and = 2.

• Resonance Specification φ: follows WRR for each non-axis key word, by using the WRR criterion with = 10.

• ELS Compactness: .

• Combining over Resonance Cylinder:

• Key Word Set Compactness:

• Text: The Book of Genesis.

• Alternative hypothesis 4 (more key word sets than expected have compact meetings), tested with BST.

Taking the axis with the list of the names of the sons of Haman[2] was the second step in our experiment, gave a p-level of about 1:1000.

Remind that the initial intention of the experiment was a forming of a set of key words based on the precedents set by former experiments: date, place and title. It was the final step of the experiment.

(1) From WRR, were taken the two other date formats for the 13th of Adar: י"ג אדר and בי"ג אדר.

(2) From WRRII the idea of “headline” key words: “sons of Haman” (בני המן) as the title of Haman sons list, and

(3) “Purim” as the general title of the whole event prompted by the "informational axis" were taken. The word “Purim” is recorded in the Book of Esther with three spellings[3] in 9:26, 9:28 and 9:29: פורים, הפורים and הפרים.

(4) From [2] there was taken the city of their death: it is written in the Book of Esther as: “BeShushan Habira” (בשושן הבירה), meaning ”in Shushan, the capital”.

Table. The data used in the Sons of Haman experiment.

Key word / Translation
1 / י"ג אדר / 13th of Adar
2 / בי"ג אדר / on the 13th of Adar
3 / בשושן / in Shushan
4 / הבירה / the capital
5 / פורים / Purim (variant 1)
6 / הפורים / Purim (variant 2)
7 / הפרים / Purim (variant 3)
8 / בני המן / sons of Haman
9 / פרשנדתא / Parshandata
10 / דלפון / Dalphon
11 / אספתא / Aspata
12 / פורתא / Porata
13 / אדליא / Adalia
14 / ארידתא / Aridata
15 / פרמשתא / Parmashta
16 / אריסי / Arisai
17 / ארדי / Aridai (spelling 1)
18 / ארידי / Aridai (spelling 2)
19 / ויזתא / Vaizata

Prof E. Rips performed an experiment using a control population of ten million monkey texts, there was only one text which included ELSs that exhibited a stronger attraction to the axis than did the Torah ELSs. This yields a p-value of 1.5 × 10. The 19 key words used in this run are listed in table. The experiment used:

• Control population: Word-shuffled (within verse) monkey texts, with the axis “preplaced” at the same fixed location of every text.

This was the first experiment that revealed the structure of words encoded near a specific axis, rather than near various ELSs of some word. This phenomenon has been observed many times since this initial discovery.

References

[1] D. Witztum, E. Rips, and Y. Rosenberg. Equidistant letter sequences in the book of Genesis. Statistical Science, 9(3):429–438, August 1994.

[2] H. Gans, Z. Inbal, and N. Bombach. Patterns of equidistant letter sequence pairs in Genesis. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, August 2006.

[3] D.Witztum, E. Rips, and Y. Rosenberg. Equidistant letter sequences in the book of Genesis: II. the relationship to the text, preprint. 1994.

[4] Alexander Rotenberg. And All This Is Truth! Lavi P. Enterprises, Ltd, Israel, Jerusalem, 2005.

[5] Robert M. Haralick. Basic Concepts For Testing The Torah Code Hypothesis. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, August 2006.

2

[1] Purim is the name of the holiday which celebrates the events recorded in the Book of Esther.

[2] There are two variant spellings of one of the son’s names, both of these were used.

[3] Note that the skip specification limits the ELSs of Purim to a skip of 71, while the occurrence of Purim in the axis has skip 2547.