Let us eliminate the spaces between the words and consider the text as a sequence of letters. Now, starting from a certain letter let us skip N-1 letters and read the N-th one, again skip N-1 letters and read the N-th one and so on. This will be called a reading with the interval N. The number N may also be negative in which case the read- ing is backwards. Of course, besides the interval N one has to know where to start counting and how many intervals to go. Let us make things more clear by showing a few examples. If one starts with the first letter T in the Genesis (i.e. the T of BRA$'T) and skips 49 letters one arrives at the letter ! in TH!M, again skips 49 letters and arrives at R in !'RAH, again skips 49 letters and arrives at H in ALH'M. Thus one finds that the word T!RH (Torah) is spelled out with interval 50 right in the beginning of Genesis. The number 50 has several important meanings in Judaism. The 50-th is the Jubilee year, there are 49 days of Omer which are counted from the second day of Passover until the Shavuot which is the 50-th day, and there are also 50 gates of wisdom in Torah..

The above example is a part of a bigger pattern found by Rabbi Michael Weismandel about 40 years ago (see at- tached fig.1). Namely, in the second book Exodus, the word T!RH is again spelled out with the interval 50 beginning with the very first letter T in the book (i.e. the T of !ALH $M!T). In the fourth book Numbers, the word T!RH is spelled out with the interval -50, i.e. backwards with the letter H starting in the first verse of the book. Finally, in the last book Deuteronomy, the word T!RH is spelled again backwards however with interval -49 instead of -50 and the letter H starts in the 5-th verse instead of the first. Why this deviation and why is there no T!RH in the third book Leviticus? Gaon from Vilna wrote in Aderet Eliahu that Deuteronomy actually starts from the 5-th verse, while the first four verses correspond to the first four books. Indeed, the fifth verse reads: "On the other side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to expound the Torah. He said ... ". It is claimed that Moses was given 49 gates of wisdom instead of fif- ty. Since the subsequent explanation of Torah is given from the mouth of Moses, the word T!RH is spelled out with the interval -49. We see that the system is symmetric - in the first two books T!RH is spelled out forwards and in the last two books - backwards. Hence, in the central book Leviticus you don't find the word T!RH. Instead, the four letter name of G-d who gave the Torah is spelled out with interval 8 starting with the very first letter ' of Leviticus.( the number 8=7+1 is closely related to 50=7x7+1 but this is a separate story on which we will not elaborate here).

At this point a sceptical reader would exclaim that the whole system is nothing but a coincidence and the above explanation with 50 and 49 gates of wisdom was "cooked up" to tie several unrelated ap- pearances of the word T!RH into a system. "I'm sure", this sceptic would continue, "you would be able to find such words and systems in any book". Since the author of this review was, until recently, such a sceptic -the question of coincidence versus intentional design will be addressed most forcefully in this article. Meanwhile let us mention that on the statistical basis the word T!RH is expected to appear with any given interval N in Genesis about 2 or 3 times. This estimate is based on the total number of letters in Genesis(78064) and on the amount of the letters T(4152), !(8448),R(4793) and H(6283) in the book. Indeed, T!RH appears 3 times in Genesis with the interval 50 which is what one would expect from any book of such length and of similar concentration of letters T,!,R,H. There is however no reason why one of these three appearances should start with the very first T of the book and why this should happen both in Genesis and Exodus. As a matter of fact the probability of such a coincidence is about 1 in 3 million!