Bible Code Software Pioneer David Mandel’s Story Began in a “Shtetl” Founder of Computronic Corporation, an Israeli firm that began selling Bible code research software 12 years ago, David Mandel learned love of the Bible from his grandfather in his native Lima, Peru, where the family had a successful furniture business. Hershel Mandel, his wife and David’s parents were among the few Jews who escaped from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, thanks to a relative who was able to get them Peruvian visas. By David Mandel Charles Dickens starts his autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, with the phrase "I am born." In my case, I must go back two generations, and start by writing "My grandfather Hershel Mandel is born." I must start with my grandfather because he is the one who taught me to love the Bible, to explore its surface, and to research its depths. He is the person directly responsible, although he passed away fifty years ago, that today I make my living directing a firm which specializes in Judaic and Biblical software, such as Bible Codes 2024, Bible Quiz, The Bible in Pictures, The Jerusalem Dictionary, and many others. He is also responsible for the fact that I, my children, and my grandchildren live in Israel, but more of that later. My grandfather was born in a region of Poland, originally called Ruthenia, which, at the end of the 18th century, was annexed by the Austrian Empire, and given the name of Galicia. The small town where he was born, a shtetl in Yiddish, was, at different times, part of the Austrian empire, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Today it is Ukrainian. Escape from Germany Hershel, after marrying my future grandmother, moved to Frankfurt in Germany, where my father was born and grew up. In the thirties the growing anti-Semitism and persecution of the Nazi regime, made it impossible for Hershel and his family to continue living in Germany. They desperately tried to find a country that would accept them, but were unable to get visas, until, fortunately, a nephew, who had moved to South America years before, was able to get them immigration permits to Peru. My father, who at that time had recently married my mother—also from a Galician Jewish family—arrived in Lima, Peru, with his parents shortly before the war started in Europe, a war which brought with it the Nazi extermination of the majority of the Jewish population in Europe, including close relatives of my grandparents. My grandparents and my parents settled in Lima, and became active members of its small Jewish community, which at that time had about one thousand members. The community eventually grew to its largest size, six thousand members, in the 1960s, and then it started to decline, and today there are only about 3,000 Jews in Lima, a city which has over seven million inhabitants.

Settling in My grandfather found work as a tailor, but his main satisfaction was to teach classes on the Bible and the Talmud in the synagogue, which he had helped to found. My father, less learned and also less devout, opened a furniture store, which eventually became the first of a large and successful chain of stores, and, through the years, he became one of the leaders of the community. I was born in 1938, and when the time came to send me to school, my parents had a dilemma. There was no Jewish school at that time in Lima, and they had to choose between sending me to a school run by Catholic priests, or one run by the government, which was attended by children of the poorest social and economic class. They solved the problem by sending me to a Protestant school run by missionaries of the Church of Scotland. Mine was not an isolated case, as most of the Jewish parents in Lima at the time sent their children to that same school, with the result that over one third of the students in the school were Jewish. To the great merit of the school's staff, there was never an attempt to convert us. My grandfather came to live with us when my grandmother passed away. I was probably about six or seven years old at the time. He would call me in the afternoon, when I returned from school, and would tell me stories from the Bible. As time went by these story-telling sessions became teaching sessions, and my grandfather taught me Hebrew by reading the Hebrew Bible, and translating it word by word. I loved to hear the stories about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob; how Joseph went from being a prisoner in jail to becoming the second most powerful man in Egypt; how God worked through Moses to liberate the Hebrew slaves, and to mold them into a nation, which has now survived for over three millennia, based on His teachings. It got so that I identified more with the Israelite history and heroes than with the Peruvian history that I learned at school. And then in 1948 the Peruvian Jewish community gathered together to celebrate a miracle, the rebirth of an independent Jewish state after two thousand years of exile and wanderings. I, still a small boy, was present in that celebration, standing next to my grandfather, and it was probably then that I promised myself that one day I would live in Israel.

My Education Continues To quickly jump over the years, after finishing school in Lima, I studied in the States, graduated from the Wharton School of Business and finance, returned to Lima, went into the family business, married and had three children. When our first born son was old enough to go to school, my wife and I decided that the time had come to move to Israel. Which we did. Eventually my parents followed us, and they lived their last years in Israel. During my first years in Israel I worked in a furniture import business in partnership with my brother, who had also immigrated to Israel with his family. When the first personal computers came out (how primitive they seem now!), I was fascinated with them, sold my shares in the furniture business, and went back to study, this time Computer Science. In 1987 I founded a software company, Computronic Corporation. As I had always been interested in languages, speaking German with my parents, Spanish with my wife, Hebrew with my children, and English with all my business contacts overseas, I decided that the company should develop software that would allow anybody, anywhere, to write in any of many languages on his home computer. Our first product, which fortunately for us was very successful inside and outside Israel, was a DOS based multi-lingual word processor, MultiWriter. Since then, we have developed bilingual dictionaries, such as The Jerusalem Dictionary, and Targumatik, the only Hebrew-English automatic text translator currently available, and which is now in use in Israel and many countries. Getting Technical On my own and after hours, I continued studying the Bible. And now I must introduce some technical definitions. Methodologically, a complex system of exegesis has been traditionally employed in the study of the Hebrew Bible. It consists of a diversified analysis of the text by one, two or all of the following procedures: peshat, (literal and objective meaning of the text by analysis of the language); derash, (subjective homiletic comprehension); remez, (implied meaning); and sod, (mystical, allegorical meaning). Peshat and derash are the more popular methods of exegesis, since they are comprehensible to most, while remez and sod represent the esoteric, mystical, and kabbalistic approaches. I became intrigued by the ancient Jewish tradition that claims that God dictated the books of the Torah (the Pentateuch) to Moses, in a precise letter by letter sequence, and that divine encrypted information was placed there. If this would be the case, we would have to add one more method of researching the Bible, Zfunot, or decoding the Bible. During the Middle Ages a famous rabbi, Moses Cordevaro, wrote, “The secrets of the Torah are revealed . . . in the skipping of letters.” In the 18th century the greatest Jewish thinker of his time, Rabbi Elijah Solomon, known as the Vilna Gaon, said, “All that was, is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible”. I started studying the Bible from another perspective, to see if I could find some indications, some internal evidence for the existence of the codes. The following Bible verses seemed to me a clear indication that the old tradition had a sound basis: God dictated the Torah to Moses: “And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord.” (Exodus 24:4) God encrypted but man is encouraged to decode: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.” (Proverbs 25:2) Messages have been hidden: “But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book.” (Daniel 12:4) Man is encouraged to unlock the codes and find understanding: “Happy is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gets understanding.” (Proverbs 3:13) Somebody brought to my attention the work of Michael Ber Weissmandl, a mathematical and Talmudic prodigy who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. He had read about the possible existence of the codes in ancient commentaries, and decided to investigate and research them. He patiently wrote out the entire text of the Torah, all 304,805 letters, on ten by ten grids, to see the words and phrases that could be found. In the 1980s, Israeli researchers continued building on the research pioneered by Weissmandl, and made many discoveries. However, their work was slow and difficult. PCs Change Everything With the appearance of personal computers, software programs were written to decode the programs. Computronic Corporation, my firm, also became interested in this challenging field, and in 1991 we released the first commercial Bible codes decoder program, based on the same algorithms, “equidistant skip intervals,” which, a few years later, in 1994, three Israeli mathematicians, Professor Elyahu Rips, from the Hebrew University, Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, used to research the Book of Genesis. The great and historical contribution of Rips, Witztum, and Rosenberg, was to provide a sound scientific basis to the old tradition. They used statistical methods and computers to research the Book of Genesis, searching by “equidistant skip interval” for the encrypted names of 32 sages who lived between the 9th and 18th centuries, checking every nth letter, where n can take any value. They published their study, Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis, in the scholarly journal Statistical Science, (Statistical Science 9:429-438), about what they called ELS (Equidistant Letter Sequences) in Genesis. The program found most of the names, with the odds against this occurring by chance calculated at 62,500 to 1. Their summary said, “When the Book of Genesis is written as two-dimensional arrays, equidistant letter sequences spelling words with related meanings often appear in close proximity, with analysis showing that the (statistical) effect is significant at the level of 0.00002 (i.e., the odds are 62,500 to 1).” This study gave mathematical and statistical evidence that information about personalities, events and dates can be found encoded in the Hebrew Scriptures. Our program at the beginning sold very slowly and in small quantities, mainly to a few Jewish scholars, even after the publication of the mathematicians’ article. Then, in 1997 The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin was published and became the number one best seller in the world. It caused a great sensation among scholars and also among the general public. Its thesis, that past, present, and future events are all encoded in the Bible, gave rise to great debates and controversies that are still taking place. Mass Sales For Computronics, the publication of Drosnin’s book opened the door to mass sales. We were inundated with orders. But these orders came from what for us was a completely new direction, the Christian market, and this brought to the fore a problem which we had not had before. Previously, because we sold mainly to the Jewish market, the fact that the search for the codes is done in the Hebrew Scriptures did not present any problem to our users. However most of our new customers had little or no knowledge of Hebrew, and they found it extremely difficult to research a text written in an alphabet that they couldn’t even read. The solution was staring us on the face: get our two separate departments, Dictionary Development, and Biblical Software, to cooperate in a joint project. They put a team together, and the result is our current version, Bible Codes 2024 (latest version released in July, 2024). It is based on our exclusive technology, including bilingual data bases, translation and transliteration features, which allow non-Hebrew speakers, to easily and successfully research the Hebrew Scriptures. Today, Bible Codes 2024 is our best selling program, and, I am happy and proud to say, it is considered one of today's best computer programs in the subject by scholars and beginners alike. There is not one day when I arrive in our offices that I do not remember Hershel Mandel, my grandfather, who taught me to love the Bible and to love Israel. Return to First Page Copyright ©2003 biblecodedigest.com All Rights Reserved The Bible Code Digest is a publication of the Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Subscribers may forward to one recipient without seeking permission from the publisher. The Bible Code Digest is published by a group of scientists and writers dedicated to a search for the truth. Our goal is provide accurate, unbiased reporting of news about cutting edge Bible code research conducted by our own group as well as by other credible researchers. We endeavor to report on the significant findings of Jewish, Christian and secular researchers, regardless of their views regarding the potential validity of some Bible codes. We do not necessarily agree with viewpoints expressed in news items and articles by contributors. Inquiries may either be addressed to Dave Swaney, Editor, or Ed Sherman, Director, at BibleCodeDigest.com, info@biblecodedigest.com. See you next month with much more about Bible Codes.

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