


Update on March 31, 2017:
The significance of this find was previously reported as a conservative 1:10,000 on top of an initial ("mountain series") result of 1:1,000,000. Actually it is more like 1:1,000,000 on top of that initial 1:1,000,000 result.
This new estimate uses all of the words of Rashi's first two commentaries on the verse at hand, Deuteronomy 33:19, as follows:
Professor Rips realized recently that the simplest measure of compactness, the 1D measure, can be applied to this data. Recall that the 1D measure is simply the length of the text segment containing ELSs for a maximum subset of key words of interest. When 1D is used to guage the significance of Rashi's words appearing in this area of the text, it gives a result of 12 possible competitors in 5 million comparison texts. These 12 competing text segments [ranging from 52 for 3 key words to 433 for 5 key words] were shorter than that of the Torah's segment length of 892. However, none of these competitors contain more than 5 of Rashi's 9 significant words as ELSs (we exclude all 2 and 3 letter words with common letters because they have no statistical effect, appearing both in the Torah and in the competitor texts). In contrast, the Torah result contains 7 of Rashi's 9 significant words: (1) tribes; (2) of Israel; (3) gatherings; (4) they will gather; (5) on the festivals; [(6) and (7) are also in the same area of the text but with different skips, not shown above:] (6) calling; (7) righteousness. Not appearing as ELSs in the Torah's 1D segment are: "They will offer" and "offerings of" [righteousness].
These 7 successes are above and beyond the original success of Rashi's word "Moriah" in the mountain series.
Note that this 1D protocol is exactly the same as described in our February 2008 update to the peer-reviewed paper regarding the Twin Towers key words that were literally grabbed from the newspaper headlines (that updated result was 1:2M).
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