תורה backward at skip 49 in Deuteronomy

The observation

Deuteronomy 1:5 says that Moses took it upon himself to expound "this law", in Hebrew התורה הזאת. Start at the ה that opens the word התורה. From there, reading forward at 49 letters apart, you meet ר in the word בהר in verse 6, ו in ובנגב in verse 7, and ת in נתתי in verse 8. Reversed, that spells תורה.

That is an attractive detail. Deuteronomy 1:5 is the first place the book uses the word, and a sequence spelling the word ends on that word's own first letter. This is the sort of connection that gives a pattern its appeal. It also needs a fair measurement.

Why 49 and not 50

Genesis, Exodus and Numbers use 50, so this change stands out. Some retellings comment on it. We looked at the choice directly. Backward at skip 50 in Deuteronomy, the book has 4 sequences, the first starting at Deuteronomy 5:22. None is near the opening. So the observation needed skip 49 to work at this spot.

The sequence itself is real. What the skip shows is how the story was put together. A rule of skip 50 holds in three books, and in this one it shifts by one so that the pattern can continue. A pattern with a free setting is an easier target than one with none.

The measurement

Two found against 2.0 expected is as average as a count can be. The other backward sequence starts at Deuteronomy 18:4. More than 6 shuffled texts in 10 do as well or better. Of the five books of the classic pattern, this has the weakest count.

The five books together

Each row can be checked, and each one reproduces on the Leningrad text. Together they form a shape someone saw in the text and passed on to his students. The counts are mostly unremarkable. What people remember is the arrangement, and an arrangement noticed first and described afterward has no fair chance figure. We print the rows and leave the shape to you.

The openings, measured

The fairest way to credit this pattern is to measure the part people remember, which is the openings. Take the first 300 letters of each of the five books. Search תורה at skips 49 and 50, forward and backward. That makes 20 small searches. Chance alone gives about 0.2 sequences across all of them. There are 4: Genesis and Exodus forward at 50, Numbers backward at 50, Deuteronomy backward at 49.

Those ranks are as high as a rank can be. תורה comes first among 4,133 word forms, and 49 and 50 come first among 198 skip pairs. No other word form reaches 4, and two reach 3. We report this plainly, because fairness runs in both directions. In a gallery of mostly ordinary counts, this one is not ordinary.

Now the caution, which is just as plain. Every part of this test was shaped by the pattern. We chose 300 letters because the Deuteronomy sequence begins 278 letters in. At 100 letters, the count is 3. We chose skips 49 and 50 because those are the skips in the story. We chose four books out of five without penalty, and we did not count the many other shapes a reader might have noticed in the opening of a book. A rank tells you how this result stands among the alternatives we listed. It cannot tell you how many other patterns would have been told as stories if they had turned up.

The word beside itself

We can test the other attractive detail too. The form התורה stands in the Torah 26 times. How often does a sequence of תורה, at skips 2 to 100 in either direction, end on the first letter of that plain word? It happens at 3 of the 26 places: Numbers 19:2, Deuteronomy 1:5 and Deuteronomy 31:24. Chance alone gives about 1.8. So the link between this sequence and the word it touches is close to what you would expect.