The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

The coding scheme: Jewish tradition - the Torah itself - says that the Torah was originally dictated by G-d and recorded by Moses, 3,300 years ago. It is said to have been dictated as one long string of Hebrew letters, with no spaces between each word. Here is how it is pictured, using the following English sentence: This is the form we use for finding codes but I added letters precisely placed to form a longer example.

Full sentence:

THISISTHEF
ORMWEUSEFO
RFINDINGCO
DESBUTIADD
EDLETTERSP
RECISELYPL
ACEDTOFORM
ALONGEREXA
MPLE

Partial display:

ESBUTIA
DLETTER
ECISELY
CEDTOFO
LONGERE

Notice that the blue letters form a word, "ORDER" (called an ELS, defined next); the red letters form a "FOOD" ELS; and the yellow letters form a "ROSES" ELS. We can display the full table or just an area of special interest, as shown above in the partial display, but in both cases the letters running down each column must be a fixed interval apart. The same principles are used in Torah Code research, except that the language used is exclusively the original Hebrew.

Definition of ELS: When we skip an equal distance between each letter of the word, as we did in each picture above, we call the resulting string of letters an "equidistant letter sequence", or ELS.

Definition of "skip": The number of letters skipped between each letter of an ELS is called the skip of the ELS. Both "ORDER" and "FOOD" have a skip of 10. "ROSES" has a skip of -11.

Definition of "table": We call each of the above pictures a "table" with width 10. The width of 10 was chosen in order to see the ELS's more easily. In the pictures on this site, the (pink) number in the upper right corner is the width of the table (which is also the skip for any ELS that appears vertically in the table).

Definition of "code" and "meeting" A "code" is a set of related concepts, found as ELS's, that have significant "meetings" - that is, they appear to be intentionally placed in close proximity to each other (but statistical measurements must support that observation).

Finding ELS's vs Finding Meetings: The majority of ELS's, by themselves, are not interesting, because they occur in any large text. It is the meeting of two or more related ELS's in a table that is (often) interesting. We also often see the close meeting of one or more ELS's with relevant words or verses in the underlying text.

Definition of "minimal skip": Very often - usually - we see the same word appearing many times in a text as an ELS. These ELS's have varying skips. From among these, the ELS with the lowest skip is called the minimal skip ELS. Often we find that the minimal or near minimal skip ELS participates in the most interesting codes in the Torah.

Locations in the Underlying Text: For those wishing to delve deeper when looking at the pictures on this site: if you know (or learn) only the Hebrew alphabet, you can decipher the chapter and verse numbers, which are in standard notation in Hebrew letters on the right side of each picture. The rightmost letter gives the book: aleph for the book of Genesis, beit for Exodus, gimmel for Leviticus, dalet for Numbers, and heh for Deuteronomy. Following the book number (reading right to left) are the chapter and verse numbers.

The Talmud is a vast collection of explanations and expansions on the Torah, transmitted orally since the time that the Torah was given, and finally recorded, over a 400 year period, beginning 1900 years ago. There are many interesting codes in the Torah that connect to teachings from the Talmud. A few are mentioned on this site.