Titus and exile

Below is a long phrase with both mathematical significance and deep meaning, alluding to the momentous destruction caused by Titus. Titus was the Roman Emperor who led the war against Judea, conquering Jerusalem, destroying the Holy Temple and exiling the Jewish people (see J. Flavius, The Jewish War). This exile has continued for almost 2000 years, the major portion of Jewish history.

"Esau ambushes via Titus; he will raise one cry; it will continue like this". Note the code's "echoing" of 4 words from Genesis highlighted at bottom.

The historical significance

Actually, there are three separate allusions, all subtle and profound:

(1) The appearance of Esau in this code is especially interesting because the Talmud (Gittin 56b) indicates that Titus descended from Esau. And famous Kabbalist Rabbi Menachem Azaria of Fano even says that Titus was a reincarnation of Esau.

(2) Jewish history has unfolded based on the vision in the book of Daniel (chapter 7), which says that the Jewish people will be subjected to the dominion of Four Kingdoms (Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and currently Roman, also known as the Exile of Edom or Esau). Early Jewish sources (Pirkei Rabbi Eliezer, ch 35, and the Ramban's commentary on Torah) state that the dominion of the first three kingdoms was for a known amount of time, unlike the fourth one, the Exile of Esau, which continues to this day without having a known end. This is precisely reflected by the last component of our phrase, "it will continue like this".

(3) According to the Torah, the origin of Esau's enmity to Jacob (Yaakov) was the bitter rivalry over their father Isaac's blessings. When Esau realized that the blessings were given to his brother Yaakov (Jacob) and not to him, "Esau raised his voice and cried." (Genesis 27:38). The middle part of our phrase is actually a paraphrase of this quote.

We can see the tight link between all three parts of the code from the Zohar, which states, "these [Esau's] tears lowered Israel into exile. As soon as [the influence of] these tears will cease, through the weeping of Israel, they will come out of the exile." (Zohar Shemot 12b)

The mathematical significance

There are a few possible methods for measuring the significance, including one proposed by Professor Rips which makes use of Claude E. Shannon's concept of language entropy. However, for the time being, let us focus on a method which yields a less significant outcome, but is simpler to explain.

We note that our phrase contains four words that are derived from the verse referred to above, Genesis 27:38, namely: {Esau; will raise; one; cry}. To estimate this observation quantitatively, we produced a population of random ELS strings to determine how many of them contain words derived from this verse to a comparable extent. We generated a population of 280 million such strings, with similar lengths and numbers of words as "Esau will raise one cry". We found that only 103 of these contained four or more words derived from our verse (and we permitted variations in the grammatical derivations that were more generous than those seen in our original phrase). We submitted these 103 to a review by 2 Hebrew speakers, who determined that (at most) one of them makes grammatical sense (on par with "Esau will raise one cry"). Thus 1:280 million is the raw score, to which we apply a factor of (approximately) 6,000 total verses in Torah, yielding a final probability of 1:46,700.