Rival Bible Code Partisans Tout Different Cookie Recipes From Genesis

Jeffrey and Coombs have publicly questioned the statistical validity of the Witztum-Rips chocolate chip cookie, and the two factions have been exchanging heated e-mails ever since.

Jerusalem, July 20 – Separate groups of academics working to gather more evidence of divine codes hidden in the Biblical text have clashed over differing chocolate chip cookie recipes derived from those codes, with each side challenging the legitimacy and rigor of the other’s cookie formula.

Academics Doron Witztum and Eliyahu Rips of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who were the first to describe the controversial phenomenon of the so-called Bible Code in an academic journal in the late eighties and early nineties, published an addendum last month to the original article in the journal Statistical Science, in which they describe their use of the Equidistant Letter Sequence method (ELS) to discover a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. ELS uses a given fixed number of letters to skip from any starting point, stringing together the results to form words and sentences. The recipe anchored the sequence in a passage in Genesis where Abraham instructs his wife Sarah to prepare cakes for wayfarers who have engaged their hospitality.

However, two other researchers named Grant Jeffrey and Dean Coombs claim to have found a superior recipe later in Genesis, anchored where Pharaoh instructs his viceroy, now revealed as Joseph, to settle his family in Egypt where they will “eat the fat of the land.” Jeffrey and Coombs have publicly questioned the statistical validity of the Witztum-Rips chocolate chip cookie, and the two factions have been exchanging heated e-mails ever since.

Witztum and Rips write of a recipe that calls for an equal ratio of brown to white sugars, and offers the baker a choice between butter and other shortenings. Jeffrey and Coombs, however, insist on butter, and favor a brown-to-white sugar of two-to-one, resulting in a less crispy cookie. Moreover, Jeffrey and Coombs do not include salt in their recipe, which Witztum and Rips have decried as a “fatal flaw” in any recipe that purports to have divine origins.

“The scientific name for the cacao plant is Theobroma Cacao,” they note. “The name itself means ‘drink of the gods.’ As the Pentateuch will later instruct, all foodstuffs brought on the altar – the divine ‘table’ – must include a measure of salt. Any occurrence of chocolate must perforce be accompanied by the proper measure of salt. To omit this essential component of flavor enhancement is to engage in literary, scholarly, textual, and culinary chicanery.” What is more, they emphasize, Jeffrey and Coombs suspiciously selected an obscure variant of the Biblical text for their recipe, which does not bear out the same results in the standard version appearing in most Hebrew publications.

For their part, Jeffrey and Coombs dismiss the legitimacy of any recipe that calls cookies “cakes.” “The most amateurish dolt plodding about the kitchen knows the difference between cake and cookies,” they write in rebuttal. “The occurrence of such a recipe anchored on the word ‘cake’ can be dismissed as coincidental.”

Witztum and Rips retorted that given the texture that results from the ratio of brown to white sugar in the Jeffrey-Coombs recipe, the latter were in no position to claim authority on the difference between cake and cookies.