Bible code

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For the book that publicized the codes, see The Bible Code (book).

Bible codes, also known as Torah codes, are words, phrases and clusters of words and phrases that some people believe are meaningful and exist intentionally in coded form in the text of the Bible. These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code, which suggests that these codes offer warnings for the future.

[edit] Overview

The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS. With a skip of -4, and ignoring the spaces and punctuation, the word SAFEST is spelled out.

Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each pair of adjacent lines.

Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy).

[edit] History

An early seeker of hidden messages in the Bible was Isaac Newton, who believed that the Bible "is a cryptogram set by the Almighty - a riddle of the Godhead of past and future events divinely fore-ordained. This prophecy is called the Revelation, with respect to the Scripture of Truth, which Daniel was commanded to shut up and seal, till the time of the end. Until that time comes, the Lamb is opening the seals."^[1]

But as far as is known, the 13th-century Spanish Rabbi Bachya ben Asher was the first to describe an ELS in the Bible. His 4-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Hebrew calendar. Over the following centuries there are some hints that the ELS technique was known, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by the Slovakian Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known only to a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of an Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partners Doron Witztum and Alexander Rotenberg, and several others.

Rips and Witztum invented the ELS letter array and used a computer to find many examples. About 1985, they decided to carry out a formal test and the "Great rabbis experiment" was born. This experiment tested the hypothesis that ELSs for the names of famous rabbis could be found closer to ELSs of their dates of birth and death than chance alone could explain. The definition of "close" was complex but, roughly, two ELSs are close if they can be displayed together in a small rectangle. The experiment succeeded in finding sequences which fit these definitions, and they were interpreted as indicating the phenomenon was real.

The great rabbis experiment went through several iterations but was eventually published (1994) in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. Although neither the Editor nor the referees were convinced by it, they also could not find much formally wrong with it, so the paper was published as a "challenging puzzle." Statistical Science, it should be noted, does not publish original research, but concentrates on surveys, interviews and interesting statistical puzzles.

Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none were published in journals. Another experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places of their births and deaths (rather than the dates), was conducted by Harold Gans, an employee of the United States National Security Agency^[2]. Again, the results were interpreted as being meaningful and thus suggestive of a more than chance result. These Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries.

In 2002, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject, called The Bible Code II. The Jewish outreach group Aish-HaTorah employs the Bible Codes in their Discovery Seminars to persuade secular Jews of the divinity of the Bible and to encourage them to trust in its traditional Orthodox teachings. Use of Bible code techniques also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, who is a Messianic Jew, and Grant Jeffrey. Another Bible code technique was developed in 1997 by Dean Coombs (also Christian). Various pictograms are claimed to be formed by words and sentences using ELS.^[3] By 2000, most books, and most web sites, devoted to the codes were produced by Christians.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Predictions

Drosnin's most famous success was to predict, in 1994, the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, using a Bible code technique.^[4] Drosnin uses this prediction as evidence for the validity of bible code techniques.^[5] Opponents claim that in the political atmosphere of the time, predicting with no additional details the fact that Rabin would be assassinated is not compelling, though dramatic.^{[citation needed]}

Drosnin, in The Bible Code II, suggested the possibility of nuclear holocausts and the destruction of major cities by earthquakes in 2006, saying that "The dangers will peak in the Hebrew year 5766 (September 2005 - September 2006 in the modern calendar), the year that is most clearly encoded with both 'World War' and 'Atomic Holocaust'."^[6] These events did not occur, casting serious doubt on the whole paradigm.^[4]

Drosnin, however, refrains from making concrete predictions, saying, "I don't think the code makes predictions. I think it reveals probabilities." Drosnin also said that "I think it might tell us all our possible futures. That appears to include a warning of a possible nuclear war."^[5]