Editing Bible code (section)

===Criticism of the original paper===

In 1999, Australian mathematician [[Brendan McKay (mathematician)|Brendan McKay]], Israeli mathematicians [[Dror Bar-Natan]] and [[Gil Kalai]], and Israeli psychologist [[Maya Bar-Hillel]] (collectively known as "MBBK") published a paper in ''[[Statistical Science]]'', in which they argued that the case of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR) was "fatally defective, and that their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it."<ref>{{cite journal |author1=B. McKay |author2=D. Bar-Natan |author3=M. Bar-Hillel |author4=G. Kalai |name-list-style=amp|year=1999 |url=http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009212243 |title=Solving the Bible Code Puzzle. Statistical Science 14 |journal=Statistical Science |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages= 150–173 |publisher=projecteuclid.org|doi=10.1214/ss/1009212243 |doi-access=free }}</ref> The MBBK paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians prior to publication. In the introduction to the paper, Robert Kass, the Editor of the Journal who previously had described the WRR paper as a "challenging puzzle" wrote that "considering the work of McKay, Bar-Natan, Kalai and Bar-Hillel as a whole it indeed appears, as they conclude, that the puzzle has been solved".<ref name="projecteuclid.org" />

From their observations, MBBK created an [[alternative hypothesis]] to explain the "puzzle" of how the codes were discovered. MBBK's argument was not strictly mathematical, rather it asserted that the WRR authors and contributors had intentionally:

# Selected the names and/or dates in advance, and;
# Designed their experiments to match their selection, thereby achieving their "desired" result.

The MBBK paper argued that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations, and the WRR result "merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it."

The MBBK paper demonstrated that this "tuning", when combined with what MBBK asserted was available "wiggle" room, was capable of generating a result similar to WRR's Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of ''[[War and Peace]]''. Bar-Hillel subsequently summarized the MBBK view that the WRR paper was a hoax, an intentionally and carefully designed "magic trick".<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/Maya.html |title=Madness in the Method |date=December 1999 |author1=Maya Bar-Hillel |author2=Avishai Margali |name-list-style=amp |publisher=dartmouth.edu |access-date=October 6, 2010 |archive-date=July 29, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100729062047/http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/Maya.html |url-status=dead }}</ref>