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[Copyright (1999), The Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Limited copying for personal use permitted.]
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The publication of the paper was accompanied by a press release from the journal's parent society, the Institute for Mathematical Statistics. It includes the introduction to the paper written by the Executive Editor of Statistical Science at the time the paper of Witztum et al. was published, Robert Kass. Read it here.
A brief biography of the authors is here.
Due to space limitations, the paper refers to several experiments without presenting the data for them. That data is presented here.
Due to the volatile nature of the web, pages and links tend to change or disappear. Thus, we preserve here many of the web documents referred to by the paper, in the form they were in at the time of acceptance of the paper. We also provide scans of a few less accessible documents.
A few typos have been found.
In this place we will reference serious critiques of our paper, and sometimes comment on them. Readers should be aware that our paper is not an opening gambit, but a summary of years of investigation that included extensive debates with Witztum and Rips. We do not feel obliged to reply to every recycled quibble, especially to those already answered in our paper.
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Witztum's "refuted refutation" concerns the appellations we found
that perform strongly in War and Peace. It is thoroughly refuted
here (PDF).
In Dec 2000, Witztum published what he again called a "complete refutation", but few of our points are even mentioned let alone refuted. As a postscript to this sorry episode, we make a few final remarks that include proof that Witztum's own expert Shlomo Havlin does not himself adhere to the "rules" that Witztum claims his data to be based on. (August 2001) - Doron Witztum has challenged our account of the history of the permutation test used in WRR's paper. In reply, we provide a detailed analysis, including scans of the primary source documents. (September 1999)
- Another paper of Witztum alleges that our experiment with Dr. Simcha Emanuel was improperly conducted and the result in fact supports codes! In our reply, we catch Witztum with his fingers in the till. (July 2001)
- Witztum has further claimed to refute our observations about his choices of ways to write dates in Hebrew. Our reply shows that his case is nonexistent, as it is based on false procedures or incorrect data. (July 2001)
- Witztum has replied to our analysis of variations, arguing that it is either invalid or proves something different from what we claim. Our reply shows where his errors are while nevertheless questioning one of our own previous conclusions. (Note: both Witztum's and our papers on this subject require deep knowledge of the background and some mathematical expertise.) (March 2002)
- Witztum has written some comments on the issue of changes to the text of the Torah. He appears to have abandoned his earlier approach, which was to claim that the Koren text "can be relied on", in favour of alternative ad hoc arguments. We are not going to reply to them. However, for people who are interested in this topic, we present some relevant articles by scholars. (March 2002)
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Witztum found quite a few errors in Barry Simon's replication of
the experiment of Gans, but fixing them still leaves a completely
negative result. More seriously, two careful replications
attempted by a committee of supporters and skeptics, using data
compiled by independent experts, could not find the slightest
trace of codes. We have a preliminary
report available.
(September 2002).
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Apart from Witztum's efforts, the major reply to our work was
the "primer" of Harold Gans. In reply we will make a
few comments.
(January 2003).