The Criminologist Who Tested the Torah: How a Forensic Truth Expert Proved Its Authenticity

Criminologist and forensic investigator, Avinoam Sapir is an expert in detecting deception. For decades he has conducted polygraph tests for the Israeli Police and for private companies, and he trains professionals in Israel and abroad in the science of interrogation, including how to question people and determine whether they are telling the truth or lying.

Sapir is the developer of SCAN — Scientific Content Analysis, a method that provides linguistic and structural criteria for evaluating truthfulness within written or spoken statements. His system is used worldwide — by intelligence agencies, police departments, and military organizations, to improve investigation and intelligence-gathering techniques.

A Forensic Approach to the Torah

After years of analyzing witness statements, Sapir began encountering various publications — some scholarly, others speculative, that questioned the Torah’s authenticity.

As a religious Jew and Torah reader (baal koreh) several times a week, Sapir asked himself a daring question: “If I’ve developed a system that can determine whether a text is truthful, why not apply it to the Torah itself?”

And so he did. Using his own forensic-linguistic tools, Sapir spent years examining the Hebrew text of the Torah. His conclusion was stunning: by every linguistic and structural criterion, the Torah text demonstrates unity, coherence, and authenticity. It could not have been written by multiple, unrelated authors — and, he insists, its content is truthful.

“Every Sentence Fits Like Sudoku”

In an interview with the Israeli press, Sapir explained his method: “In my professional work I receive a transcript — a testimon, and I can determine who wrote it and whether it’s truthful. Each of us has a kind of linguistic DNA. We may use the same words, but we give them different meanings.

Just because we all speak Hebrew doesn’t mean we can read the Bible — a 3,000-year-old text, in the same way that people of that era read and understood it. Instead of analyzing the statements of murder suspects, I decided to analyze the biblical text itself, to show how the same method works there too.”

His findings astonished even him: “The first thing that emerges is the cohesion of the text. The Torah is like a Sudoku puzzle — every piece fits perfectly, and nothing contradicts anything else. Everything interlocks into one grand narrative. This contradicts the common assumption among some modern scholars that the text can be divided into independent fragments or understood without seeing how all its parts connect. From a linguistic standpoint, that’s simply false. The text reveals a single, consistent authorial voice.”

Sapir adds that, even as someone who regularly reads the Torah aloud, he never saw these patterns until he began applying his forensic-analysis framework: “The story doesn’t change, but it gains a depth that wasn’t visible before. My analysis proves that the Torah is a reliable document. Truthful writers conceal information subtly; liars invent freely. The Torah does neither. It’s not a book of myths, but a historical record.”

Writing the Findings

Sapir has since begun writing a comprehensive book presenting his research. In it, he demonstrates how certain keywords and repeated expressions — often highlighted or emphasized within specific Torah portions, reveal the central theme of each section.

This principle, he notes, was already recognized by the ancient Sages, who observed that words appearing seven times in a portion often convey its core message. Sapir’s forensic-linguistic lens refines this insight, showing how deliberate repetition and structure serve as conceptual keys to understanding the divine text.

Through his fusion of criminology and theology, Avinoam Sapir illustrates that when one reads the Torah with the same precision used to detect truth in a courtroom, the result is nothing less than evidence of divine authorship.