in the Bible
In 1997 a book soared to the top of the bestseller
lists. It became the topic of conversation and debate from the
tv talk show circuit to the kitchen table. The book was "The
Bible Code" and its controversial thesis was that secret codes
hidden in the Old Testament predicted historical events that
occured thousands of years after the bible was written.
The book's author, Michael Drosnin, claimed that
he was able to foretell the assassination of former Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzah Rabin before it happened. He also predicted
a cataclysmic earthquake would hit Los Angeles in the year 2010.
So is "The Bible Code" just another crazy idea
that sold a lot of books? Or does this volume rest on more solid
The idea of using codes to extract information
from the bible isn't a new idea. In the 1940's and 50's, Rabbi
H.M.D. Weissmandel attempted to find hidden words in the first
five books of the bible (referred to as the Torah) by using
"skip" codes. A skip code works by looking at the text simply
as a string of letters (usually with the spaces removed) and
picking out a series of letters which are separated by a particular
number of other letters. Codes which use equaldistant letter
sequences (ELSs), that is the same number letters between each
letter of the code, are the most common approach.
ELS messages are codes found in text documents
by skipping an equal number of letters in the text between
each letter in the code. For example, look at this code
discovered by physicist David Thomas in the King James
version of Genesis. The passage reads:
And hast not suffered me to kiss
my sons and my daughters? Thou hast now done foolishly
in so doing.
Now pick out every 4th letter starting with the
R in daughters and counting spaces:
daughteRs? ThOu haSt
noW donE fooLishLy in so...
and then pick out every 12th letter (not counting
spaces) starting with the U in thou:
ThoU hast now done Foolishly
in sO doing..
The message ROSWELL UFO can be found. Is this a
prediction in the Bible that there would be an alleged
UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947? More likely
it is the result of random chance.
Of course any large text will have words or even
phrases that will show up in ELS codes just by accident. Early
in the 1990's, though, three scholars, Doraon Witztum,
Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, decided to see
if they could detect codes in books of the Hebrew version of
the bible using a scientific methodology. The result of their
attempt was published in the journal Statistical Science
in 1994. Statistical Science is a peer-reviewed scientific
magazine of good repute. The study done by Rips (who is a group
theorist), Witztum (who is a physicist) and Rosenberg (who is
a computer programmer) was a sincere attempt to put the question
of bible codes on a scientific footing.
The approach the three chose was to treat ELS
letter sequences found in the books as an unknown foreign language.
They hoped to prove that a small group of related words (like
screw and screwdriver) would show up in close proximity to one
another in the code. If they appeared closer than they should
by chance, that might show that the sequences in the code had
For the test they chose a group of 34 historical
figures in Judaism. The search was made based on the name, the
birth date and the date of death of the figures. The text used
was the first book of the bible, Genesis. The results were surprising.
The authors of the paper claimed that there was a 2 in 10,000
likelihood that the closeness between names, birth dates and
death dates was the result of chance.
Because of the startling nature of the subject,
the paper was put through an especially rigorous review before
being published in Statistical Science. In the article
the authors stated, "We conclude that the proximity of [equidistant
letter sequences] with related meanings in the book of Genesis
is not due to chance."
Given that the book of Genesis was written well
before the historical figures lived, the study seems to suggest
that the names had to be encoded by someone with a knowledge
of the future and was taken by some as proof of the supernatural
origin of the bible.
The paper had many skeptics. One, Harold Gans,
a retired cryptologist from the U.S. government's National Security
Agency (NAS), decided to see if he could reproduce the article's
results. To his own surprise, he was successful. He even tried
new sets of names with a similar outcome.
While the three authors were working on their
paper, Michael Drosnin, a former reporter with the Washington
Post and the Wall Street Journal, became interested
in encrypted messages in the bible. He interviewed and spent
time with Rips, then started using similar methods to search
through the Bible for word sequences that might be used to predict
future events. His most famous find was a "prediction" of the
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin which he located in 1994. Drosnin
warned Israeli officials, but Rabin was assassinated in 1995.
Drosnin took this prediction, plus other coded
messages he found, and wrote The Bible Code. In the book
Drosnin claims he has found predictions of the assassinations
of Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Anwar el-Sadat. In
addition to mayhem, Drosnin found the name Edison encoded
near light bulb and electricity, as well as Newton
near gravity. Drosnin's most chilling message was a prediction
that World War III would start in 1996 with a nuclear attack
on the state of Israel. This didn't pan out, but Drosnin later
reported he found the work "delayed" encoded near the prediction.
Many experts denounced the book. Some of the criticism
came from surprising sources. Eliyahu Rips and Doron Witztum,
authors of the original study, disagreed that the codes could
be used to predict future events. "It is literally impossible
to make future predictions based on codes. Mr. Drosnin's book
does have some examples of codes that are statistically significant,
and some that aren't, and the problem is that any layman reading
that book will have no way of making a distinction."
Rips, Witztum, and also Gans argued that there
would be a number of related words appearing close together
in the codes just due to random chance. It was impossible to
know which were true predictions and which were just accidents.
The Bible codes only worked well in hindsight when the searcher
knew what words he might be looking for. Witztum pointed out
that in addition to assassinations of Kennedy, Sadat and Rabin
that could be found in the code, so could the assassination
of Winston Churchill, who wasn't killed at all but died of natural
Other critics found flaws not just with Drosnin's
book, but with Rips, Witztum and Rosenberg's paper. Some were
unable to duplicate the experiment with the same success as
Harold Gans. Others pointed out that the bible in its current
form is not letter by letter exactly the same as the original
texts that have been lost to history. Even small variations
would destroy codes, especially if those codes employed long
skips between letters ( Drosnin's Rabin prediction employed
a skip of 4,771)
Brendan McKay of the Computer Science Department
of the Australian National University, in conjunction with Dror
Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel and Gil Kalai of
the Jerusalem Hebrew University, wrote an article which appeared
in the September 1999 Statistical Science entitled "Solving
the Bible Code." The article refuted the original 1995 paper
claiming that the method used to establish statistical significance
McKay also demonstrated that any large block of
text will yield ELS codes with seemingly meaningful bunches
of words. In the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea
signed in 1982, he searched for words after making the text
more hebrew-like (removing the vowels). In it he found the code:
Hear all the law of the sea
as well as:
Nato need an agreement on the sea
The probabilities of finding them in the document
he estimated as 95 out of a million and 21 out of a million
respectively. The article asserted the authors of the original
paper made mistakes in the way they designed their experiment
by choosing particular forms of words that "tuned" their method
to their data, thus invalidating the test.
McKay also used the text of Moby Dick
to find "predictions" of the assassinations of famous figures
including Trotsky, Ghandi, Robert Kennedy and others. One prediction
was for the murder of Drosnin himself.
The problem with the codes is that if someone
was looking for a prediction of a particular subject in any
large block of text, it would not take too long before he could
find encoded words that seemed to be related to it. If the searcher
was looking for a prediction about a flying saucer crashing
in New Mexico he would find at least some of these suggestive
ROSWELL, UFO, FLYING SAUCER, COVERUP, ALIENS,
1947, DISC, CRASH, AUTOPSY
and others. While the probability of finding
at least a few of these is pretty high, the probability of finding
any particular one may be very low.
The Bible Code controversy is not over,
though. Neither Eliyahu Rips nor Michael Drosnin have backed
down on their claims. Professor Rips has stated that he believes
that the evidence for the codes was "stronger than ever" and
Drosnin has said the critics have "told a lie."
Krystek 1999. All Rights Reserved.