Discovering Truth: A Criminologist's Unique Take on the Torah

Avinoam Sapir is a criminologist, someone who specializes in identifying when people are lying. He works with the Israeli Police and private companies conducting polygraph tests. He also teaches a field known as 'interviewing': the art of interrogating individuals to determine truthfulness.

Sapir developed a method called SCAN – Scientific Content Analysis, which provides various criteria to precisely assess whether a person is truthful. This method is utilized by numerous organizations worldwide, and he lectures on it internationally. Intelligence agencies and military organizations globally have adopted his method to enhance their espionage, intelligence, and data mining capabilities.

For years, Sapir worked in this field until he encountered publications that questioned the authenticity of the Torah. Being a religious man and a 'ba'al kore' (a Torah reader) four times a week, he thought, 'Why not apply my method to the Torah?'

So he did just that. Over a long period, Sapir studied the Torah using his method and was not surprised to discover that his techniques could demonstrate the truth and reliability of the Torah. His analysis shows that the Torah was not authored by different figures and, importantly, proves the content is genuine.

In an interview, he shares, "In my expertise, I receive text, a transcript of testimony, and can determine who wrote it and whether it’s truthful...

"We all have a linguistic DNA. We use the same words but imbue them with different meanings. Just because we all speak Hebrew doesn’t mean we can read the Torah, which is 3,000 years old, in the same way ancient people understood it. Instead of analyzing murder suspects' statements, I decided to examine biblical text to illustrate how the method works there…".

According to his findings, "The first discovery is the text's coherence... A text is like a Sudoku puzzle. You quickly see that no point contradicts another, and they all fit into one big story. This contrasts with prevailing assumptions in these fields that you can derive conclusions from the text without understanding all sentences or finding alignment between them. To me, that’s simply inaccurate... The linguistic analysis shows there’s only one author here...

"What’s amazing is that even I, as a 'ba'al kore', hadn’t noticed these aspects until I began analyzing the text the same way I analyze intelligence or criminal texts. The story doesn’t change, but it gains a depth it didn’t have before. My analysis essentially proves the book’s reliability. Truth-tellers conceal information, whereas liars don’t—they just fabricate... It’s definitely not a storybook but a history book."

Sapir is currently writing a book about his research, in which he also clarifies various issues in the Torah through the discovery of special words emphasized over certain sections. These emphases express the portions' central ideas (a concept that appears in rabbinic literature, about words that appear seven times in a portion) and serve as a conceptual key to understanding the Torah’s words.