The Hidden Math of the Torah: A 3,000-Year-Old Pattern Revealed | Saul Sadka

Tel Aviv scholar and author Saul Sadka thinks he's found something hiding in plain sight: a mathematical structure woven through the Torah for 3,000 years. Eighty sections, all built on repeating patterns of 13 and 8.  So what does that mean for the way we've always read scripture? In this episode, Sadka explains why the familiar chapter-and-verse system was never part of the original text — and why, once you start to see the pattern, you might not be able to unsee it.

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Transcript

Guest, Saul Sadka 0:00

The problem that the Bible fundamentally comes to address is the disunity and the fractiousness that we have on earth.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 0:13

Whether you're a Torah scholar or you've never even opened a Bible, this conversation is for you. Hi everyone, welcome back to the Israeli Trailblazer Show. I'm Jennifer Weissman, and our guest today is Saul Sadka. He discovered something scholars missed for a millennia. He is the author behind the intertextual Tanakh and the 80 steps of the Torah, and he's here to share the discovery that's equal parts ancient wisdom and modern breakthrough. Let's dive in. Hello, Saul. How are you?

Guest, Saul Sadka 0:49

Jennifer, so good to be here with you today.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 0:52

Let's go right down into the belly of the beast here. What did you discover, Saul?

Guest, Saul Sadka 0:57

So I was not a particular uh Torah scholar until about seven years ago, when I decided the time had come for me to go back to my roots and return to reading the weekly Torah portion that Jews traditionally read. And I started making notes for myself. And as I went through, I noticed the patterns were emergent from the structure of the texts, and I couldn't find anyone else that was talking about them. And I decided to print a new edition of the Hebrew Bible with those patterns revealed exposed within the text so everyone can see them. It's complicated. It's definitely not something that can really be explained in ten minutes, but I would argue that it's provable that those patterns are there in the text. They're patterns that are based on how the ancient world viewed numbers. Numbers meant a lot to them. Numbers to provide the structure to the text, the reasons why might have been because they thought they had magical powers, or that they were useful to them for remembering the text, or keeping the text in order, because in the ancient world it wasn't straightforward. It's not like today you would have pieces of parchment on them all linked together and they were copied from one to the other. Various elements of this had been seen by people before me in terms of both the numerology and that other people noticed structural patterns within the text. But until I came along, as far as I know, no one has contradicted me, it was me, in my estimation, exposed what was there all along that had gradually been forgotten, but had obviously been once a critical element in understanding the text. And once you understand the patterns in within that system that I expose, or so I argue, everything in the text of the Bible, which otherwise seems very, very complex and convoluted, starts to make a lot more sense. And so after I finished putting the text in order under this new structure, I published it. I just did it to get it out into the world. Then COVID came along the next year, and I had some time on my hands, as many of us did. And I sat down and wrote a translation to the text of the Torah, which is a reasonable translation, although other people have done better, but it was my translation. Imagine you took a Harry Potter book. This is a good example. You took a Harry Potter book. Okay. And you erased all the chapter headings, and then you erased all the paragraphs, and you erased all the punctuation, and now you just had a 150,000 long stream of words. Just words, one after the other. Understanding that Harry Potter book is not understanding what's going on, because you've got no punctuation, no paragraphs, and no chapters. In fact, actually, the situation with the Hebrew Bible is a bit worse. Because in addition to the fact that there is no punctuation, no paragraph breaks, none of the initial ones, over time, people came along and put in divisions at various points based on virtually arbitrary systems. So you have the ancient tradition going back about 1,500 years, 2,000 years perhaps, putting in essentially what looked like paragraph breaks into the text of the Torah. But there was no agreement on where those paragraph breaks were meant to be. And different rabbis and scholars and caryites decided to put in the paragraph breaks in different places, and for different reasons. Now they kept into one particular copy of the Torah that gets copied down to generations in one community, and it all went like that until Maimonides came along and he argued that there was one particular version of the text that is believed to have been the Aleppo Codex, that is the correct one. And everyone has to go according to that. And today, if you look in any Torah, you'll find the paragraph breaks in the same places, but that's artificial. That is an artifact of a historical process that started with Maimonides. But so imagine you've got this Harry Potter, and you've taken out all the sort of meta information about how to read the text, everything. And what's worse still, other people have now copied it down and made new editions, which have random paragraph breaks, random chapter breaks all over the place and based on different systems. But when I came down to write the commentary, I realized that a lot of the questions that the rabbis and many, many scholars have been asking over thousands of years were not inherent to the text. They were inherent to the fact that the structure wasn't clear. And as soon as the structure was clear, the questions not only were answered, the question didn't even arise. And I wrote as a result a million-word commentary on the first half of Tanakh on Torah and the narrative prophets, all the stories that you know, from Joshua to Judges and the kings of Israel. And that's volume one, and volume two is in progress.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 5:38

I love your Harry Potter analogy. I think everyone can relate to that. What is the meaning for everyday people to what you've discovered?

Guest, Saul Sadka 5:47

My book is not really something that you can pick up and understand innately. It really has to be studied as Jews study the Torah. There are people that do it. I get emails every day from people now, more and more, which is very gratifying. Asking me questions and criticizing the criticism is brilliant because it means I can, number one, argue back, which I like doing, and also refine any problems there might be, and it gives me other ideas. When the Hebrew Bible is understood properly, in its proper context, with all the additional layers that have been gloned on over the millennia, a very clear message comes out.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 6:26

What is the message, Saul? What's the message?

Guest, Saul Sadka 6:30

The message is humanity is given a task in this world. Humanity's task is to be united, united and peaceful, and that's really it. That's what God wants. The book has come along to the people of the world and said, look at the chaos, look at the chaos. And it presents, if you read the first eleven chapters, everything starts off perfectly. You have Adam and Eve in the garden, everything is perfect in this garden, and then you have disputaciousness. Adam and Eve are bickering over who was responsible, and they are separated. Initially, if you recall, Adam and Eve were one object, before they were chopped in two. God has given them a task of reuniting, and reuniting with a very particular purpose of creation. In other words, Adam and Eve are supposed to imitate God's own act of creation by coming together, being one, like God is one. And if they are one, then they have the privilege of creating. But gradually, as humanity develops in the first ten, eleven chapters of Genesis, which is the introduction to the Tanah. I'm not the first person to say this, that Rabbi Sack said this as well, and there are others, I'm sure, who said it before. But the first eleven chapters of the Bible are the problem. They set up the problem that humanity is divided into man and woman, into families that fight with each other, they're divided into nations that can't abide each other. Chaos. You end up at Babel. Everyone is separated. And the immediate, without any kind of segue, the immediate answer to these problems comes in chapter 12, when we are introduced to the hero of monotheism, Abraham. And we call him the hero of monotheism because he is the man that God said, you and your seed are going to be the people who will unite humanity. Humanity is disunited. We know that's the problem. The problem that the Bible fundamentally comes to address is the disunity and the fractiousness that we have on earth. Why does God care? You don't even need to believe in God to read the Bible. Why do I say that? Because if you look at the book, the book is obsessed with the fact that humanity is divided. That's the entire problem that's set up in the beginning. And Abraham is this guy who's going to come and reunite everyone. He is going to be sort of a beacon and a totem of blessing for the world. And anyone that sticks to him is blessed. And anyone that doesn't or that opposes him will end up being cast. And gradually, humanity over millennia edges towards ever greater unity. And we look at the world today and we think, well, things are pretty bad. Doesn't seem to have worked. But at the same time, you have to compare what we have now to what was before. Things are much better now, in almost every respect, than they were a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago. The second anniversary, October 7th. Yeah. We lost 1,200 Jews and we've lost another 800 people fighting the war since. So it seems absurd to say that, but we both know Holocaust the Bible's. It's only two generations before me and you, or maybe not even. What the Bible really wants from us. They want humanity towards greater unity and greater peace. Peace, despite our differences, it doesn't want to erase differences between is very clear about that as well. It says differences are good. It doesn't want everyone to be the same. It wants everyone to add something to the pie of human accomplishments. Not to erase everyone's differences, but to combine and unite despite our differences.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 10:03

Do you feel that the meaning that you've uncovered is something that most people in the world can understand? Or do they have to really be learned in the Torah?

Guest, Saul Sadka 10:13

The emergent meanings from the things that I noticed are elements of them have been noticed by other people. The difference is that what I found, to me, it just emerges from the text. Genesis chapters 1 to 11, which is the problem, which is disunity, and then Genesis 12 to the end, which is the solution, which is the history of how everything was supposed to get better, and then it kept getting worse, then it got better, and on and on and on until today. We're here today. We are living in the book of Esther, if you're curious. The book of Esther is the book for all time.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 10:50

Thank you for listening to the Israeli Trailblazer Show, a trailblazer like Saul, where we dig into stories and ideas that are quietly helping the world, one conversation at a time. Thanks for being here. Now go share this with all of your socials. Israeli Trailblazers, Bull Thinkers, Big Ideas, your better life.