Talk:Bible code/Archive 1

Archive 1

Doubted claims?

In the first paragraph, it says that "These claims are strongly doubted by skeptics and by many religious groups." Perhaps "skeptic" has a negative connotation and should be avoided? Given the extremely dubious nature of the claim, one need not have hightened incredulity in order to disbelieve in the Code. 128.135.223.196 16:00, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Before anyone says anything, a quick web search I just did suggests that Brendan McKay (the original author of this article) is indeed the most important sceptical mathematician working on Bible codes. His website on the subject [1] is ranked first in the relevant Google Directory category [2]. The third webpage in the category http://torahcodes.co.il/ has a section on "The Refutation of the Attempts to Invalidate the Torah Codes" [3], where they spend many pages arguing against the work of McKay et. al. -- Tim Starling 09:23, Aug 17, 2003 (UTC)

(See also my talk on The Bible Code page)

88.111.225.212 09:43, 11 January 2007 (UTC)==Questions==

Couple of questions:

• In the paragraph beginning "In 1999, McKay", what were the compilation errors? Were these mathematical errors, errors in the computer program, procedural errors in the experiment (like deciding after the fact what was to be tested)?
• There's a lot of discussion in this article about not being able to replicate the experiments of people who claim the validity of bible codes. I find this surprising, because it seems like the messages are either there or not; i.e. the existence of the message is not in question, just the statistical significance of those messages. (By contrast, it'd make more sense to me someone had claimed that they had perfected cold fusion, but other physicists following the same protocol had failed to demonstrate cold fusion -- they had failed to replicate cold fusion.)

In what way could the experiments not be replicated? For example, were the messages in fact not there? Was there some trickiness with the statistics of "closeness" for which the would-be replicators calculated a different p-value? Did the experiments belong to some class of tests that the replicators could continue with, e.g. maybe there were other great rabbis whose name/dates hadn't been tested the first time?

• Possible minor NPOV issue. Do the proponents of bible codes claim specific ways in which the biblical occurrences are "better" than those in secular works? The wording in the article sounds like they have make vague pronouncements about the bible being better, without really making any argument, which makes them seem kind of pathetic. If they do advance specific claims, the article should at least say what kind of claims, e.g. they claim that the ELS rectangles are smaller or the p-values are lower.

Zashaw 01:45, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)

---

Ok, good questions. Let me reply to them here first. I won't edit the article until there is some consensus (but of course someone else might edit it). Let's be good Wikipedians and restrict ourselves to discussing the quality of the article rather than debating the codes themselves.

In the paragraph beginning "In 1999, McKay", what were the compilation errors? Were these mathematical errors, errors in the computer program, procedural errors in the experiment (like deciding after the fact what was to be tested)? -- The word "compiled" is maybe misleading. "collected" would be better. The experiment relied on the appellations (names and nicknames) of the great rabbis, but only used a fraction of the appellations that exist in the literature. The issue is of how the appellations they used were chosen from out of the full set of available appellations. This is important because it is possible to bias the experimental results one way or the other if the selection process is not done objectively.

There's a lot of discussion in this article about not being able to replicate the experiments of people who claim the validity of bible codes. I find this surprising, because it seems like the messages are either there or not; i.e. the existence of the message is not in question, just the statistical significance of those messages. -- None of the experiments involve looking for messages. The experiments involve a definition of the data (for example, names of famous rabbis and their dates of death), plus a mathematical procedure (implemented as a computer program) that takes the data, searches for it coded in the Bible, then finally spits out a single number. The number is supposed to measure the average closeness between the names and the dates. A very small value, for example 0.00001, indicates that the average closeness is much better than one would expect if the codes were just the result of random chance, while a large value, for example 0.3, indicates that nothing beyond chance levels was detected. Witztum and co. obtained very small numbers (suggesting the codes are real), but the replications obtained large numbers (suggesting they are not real). The reason for the difference is that the data is not exactly the same in the original and the replications. The experiment protocol only gives a definition of the data, not the data itself, and different people collecting the data will not get exactly the same result. There are always places were subjective judgements need to be made (for example, whether an unusual spelling should be permitted or not).

Do the proponents of bible codes claim specific ways in which the biblical occurrences are "better" than those in secular works? -- The formal experiments only have one definition of "better", namely the number output by the computer program (see my previous answer). The codes proponents who don't do formal experiments don't usually give a precise definition of "better" but nevertheless claim their examples are better. This includes Michael Drosnin, and also includes almost all the Christian codes proponents. Usually it is a matter of presenting examples and arguing how amazing they are. Or, they show a new style of letter array (for example, one where the ELSs form a geometric pattern) and claim that such things only occur in the Bible. There are many examples of such claims. The problem with this type of thing is that they are too imprecise to investigate scientifically. To make any scientific sense out of it you first have to write a mathematically exact definition of what "better" means, and then you have to test it on data that was not on hand when the definition was written. Incidentally, people like Witztum and Rips agree with me on everything in this paragraph. That is, there is little disagreement over the correct way to run experiments, but there is lots of disagreement over whether particular experiments were in fact run correctly.

-- McKay 04:04, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I mostly agree with your conclusions, but one statement seems to go too far:

"To make any scientific sense out of it you first have to write a mathematically exact definition of what "better" means, and then you have to test it on data that was not on hand when the definition was written." -- Does this mean "whenever I can't get new data on something, I can't ever make scientific sense out of it." ? So, anything I could possibly say about Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 doesn't make any scientific sense, either? Spending a lot of time discussing various ways Drosnin et. al. could have cheated occasionally sounds like discussing the various ways Neil Armstrong et. al. could have faked the Apollo moon landing -- Apollo moon landing hoax accusations. If at all possible, I'd like to apply Hanlon's razor Wikipedia:Assume good faith -- assume Drosnin accurately reported his experiments, and show how he was mistaken in his results, rather than discuss how he could have deliberately lied about his experiments. --DavidCary 30 June 2005 17:58 (UTC)

• "Assume good faith" applies to other Wikipedia editors, not everyone in general. I really doubt that these researchers were completely honest and just stupid. It appears that they found a couple interesting coincidences, then decided to find, or if that fails, make, as many more as they could. --brian0918™ 30 June 2005 19:29 (UTC)

things kind of like Bible Codes, but not exactly the same

theomatics

The Bible Code(s) remind me of another bit of pseudoscience from the 1970's, a book titled "Theomatics" by Del Washburn. An acquaintance urged me to read it at the time. I browsed it and it basically seemed like a form of (new age) numerology applied to the Bible. Apparently Washburn has continued his "research" to recent times.

I know that Theomatics has a completely different geneology than the more recent Bible Code as reported by Drosnin, the two are not directly related, but should some mention of theomatics perhaps be added to the article as another example of a mystical Bible-related psuedoscience?

Grizzly 04:37, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, it could be mentioned but others too. There is also "Bible Numerics" that has a longer history than Theomatics. I guess various kabbalistic practices are even older. Also slightly similar are some numerical patterns in the Quran and some other books (eg. Tamil sacred texts). --McKay 05:48, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Codes in Qur'an

This article should mention or at least provide a link to codes some believe exist in the Qur'an. This site has a number of links for both Bible and Qur'an: [4] — Hippietrail 23:24, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

in general

Hello. Why is it that people named this article Bible codes, when in fact it should be named Torah codes. Bible contains both Old and New Tetstament, where old testament is not accurately translated. The only book that has been reported (in Statisitcal Journal) to have the statistically significant codes is the Hebrew Bible (Torah), not new testament and not Quaran. So, why do we always have to "plagiarize" or "close our eyes" on Judaism. There is not reason to be politically correct here, instead this article should convey the fact of the research i.e. so far only TORAH has been show to have this unique quality: torah codes. Also why is this article focuses so much on skeptical arguments against the codes, instead of actually explaining how the codes are derived, and talking about future directions of this research, such as solving multi-dimentional codes.

-- I think that might require a less specific article, such as Scripture Codes. If you want one for Qu'ran codes, make one for Qu'ran codes. -shrugs.- --Thorns Among Our Leaves 19:37, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The problem there is that there is that "scripture code" could be a neologism --Tydaj 21:07, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It seems like the better article title would be something more general, like Equidistant Letter Sequencing, or some variant. The more specific "Scripture Codes" assumes there can't be codes outside of the various scriptures, which has been shown not to be true, as other large texts (Moby-Dick being the oft-mentioned example) have turned up similar ELS. --brian0918™ 22:09, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

No no no. The whole world knows this as "Bible Codes" (thank you, Michael Drosnin); only the theorists call it ELS. JFW | T@lk 22:20, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Alright, but the article Bible code should stick only to the Bible. It should have a link to a more general article which would have a collection of info on other codes, such as in other scriptures or in Moby-Dick. --brian0918™ 22:23, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Because I don't like stub articles, I would prefer for you to stick such information in the closest article that already exists. Would any of this information (or information already in the article) be more appropriate in the Steganography article? A couple of semi-unrelated sentences won't hurt. If that section grows *larger* than a few sentences, *then* we can split the article. BigBucketsFirst. --DavidCary 30 June 2005 17:58 (UTC)

schizophrenia

Last edit has schizophrenia under 'See also'... Am I missing something or is someone having a laugh? San de Berg 15:12, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Bible codes are very popular among schizophrenics. Anthony DiPierro 18:29, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I removed the sentence "The belief is especially popular in many mental hospitals where schizophrenia is prevalent." from the opening paragraph. Although I believe the truth in this sentence, it seems to be positioned there in order to ridicule the hypothesis (which, by the way, I don't believe in, it seems to be ridiculuos, but heck, we are writing about it, not judging it).

I think it would be OK to return this sentence, but only in a proper context, explaining, that schizophrenia and paranoia often go together and that this combination often leads to less skepticism towards some strange theories like conspiracy theories, alien mind control beams or the bible code. I'm no expert in that, that's why I don't update it. --denny vrandečić 18:44, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)

I don't see any better place to put it without restructuring the entire article. As for it "ridiculing" the hypothesis, it's a ridiculous "hypothesis" (it's not really a hypothesis at all, as it's not disprovable). Presenting the facts in an NPOV manner is naturally going to bring out the fact that it's ridiculous. I can't help that. The belief that God is sending you messages encoded in texts is one of the defining characteristics of many schizophrenics. NPOV is neutral point of view, not sympathetic point of view. Anthony DiPierro 18:50, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Anthony, please, don't misunderstand me. I agree with you totally, and I think that Bible codes are pretty heavy nonsense, but NPOV does not, in my opinion, include judging or presenting facts, as true as they are, in a way that leads easily to judgement. I have added one more sentence from your comment here to it and put it down to the criticsm section, maybe it's better there. --denny vrandečić 19:11, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)

It's not a criticism, so that's not a good place to put it. Also, your use of my (awkward) sentence is not really appropriate. It's just not phrased carefully enough for an encyclopedia. And the use of "therefore" is completely incorrect. There is no cause and effect relationship between those two sentences.

As for judging, I am not judging, and there's nothing wrong with presenting facts which lead easily to judgement, especially when there's no other reasonable judgement which can be made. For now I'll leave your sentence where it is and how it is, because the only other solution I can come up with right now is a pure revert. Anthony DiPierro 19:20, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Better? I tried to rephrase it further, maybe it's clearer now.

I think presenting facts in a way leading easily to judgment is as bad as judging itself, if not even worse (because the reader thinks of it as his own conlusion, but he was just manipulated to make it himself). The whole idea of bible codes is ridiculous enough by itself.

I mean the sentence discussed could well be put into the articles on aliens and Conspiracy theories, but it isn't there either. Maybe a even more appropriate place would be the schizophrenia article itself. --denny vrandečić 19:38, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)

I agree, however it was objected when I merely put a link to schizophrenia under "See Also." I think presenting facts in a way leading easily to judgemennt is the purpose of an encyclopedia. I'm not talking about manipulating facts. I'm talking about presenting them in a clear manner. I still don't like the phrasing, and "thus" means the same as "therefore." If we're going to phrase it as a cause and effect, then "Belief that God is sending messages encoded in texts is a common delusion among the mentally ill (especially scizophrenics), many of whom have picked up on the concept of bible codes. Abandoning even the small semblance of scientific rigor contained in a formal study of these codes, a mutated version of such theories is commonly encountered in mental hospitals." Anthony DiPierro 20:04, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The schizophrenia sentence is just too bad for words. I've worked with a number of schizophrenics as a doctor, and - believe me - they'll believe anything as long as it's out of the ordinary. I worked with a guy who wouldn't stop listening to music on his headphones, to the point that he developed bilateral otitis externa, because he got these interesting "messages" in his music. For example, he thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers were singing "Under the Bridge" in celebration of his attemped suicide under a bridge. He could not be convinced of the fact that the song was written years before his TS. To pair Bible Codes and schizophrenia is stigmatising on both sides, and I argue in favour of its removal. Jfdwolff 19:57, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps you've only worked with the worst cases. I know a number of schizophrenics who won't "believe anything as long as it's out of the ordinary." Anthony DiPierro 20:10, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sorry Anthony, I was indeed generalising. The point remains the same that exotic theories with a metaphysical bent do occasionally find an audience in people with a chronic delusional psychosis.Jfdwolff 21:33, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, that point is what convinced me to remove the sentence. Who knows, maybe there are sane people who believe in this stuff. I don't know well enough to claim there aren't. Anthony DiPierro

I'm not really sure that the link to 'A Beautiful Mind' is relevant to Bible codes, since there was nothing in the movie whatsoever that dealt with finding codes in the Bible.
Also, I don't like the sentence "A significant number of Christian teachers continue to promulgate the Bible code theory." I have never in my life met a Christian teacher who stated belief in this theory, and there seems to be no evidence to provide backing to this statement. Nondescript

Several of the recent documentaries filmed about the "Bible Codes" phenomenon have been backed by Christian groups. There are many Jews who object to the Bible Codes "research" on religious grounds, too. The fact of the matter is, in either religion there are those who would like to believe in the codes and those who recoil from such belief, on religious as well as skeptical-scientific grounds. I don't think anyone can speak for an entire religion. Either mention the fact that both religions have both supporters and opponents of the Bible Code phenomenon, or don't mention it at all. --Woggly 05:02, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I don't really see the need to mention that most of the supporters are Jews and Christians. I think that fact is pretty self-evident. Most of the believers of the Piltdown man were people who believed in evolution. It's like stating the obvious.

I think I will take out the link to 'A Beautiful Mind'. That link should be left to the schizophrenia article --Nondescript

Rabin's assasination

I have a problem with the following paragraph in the article:

Drosnin's major success was to predict the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, using the Bible code.

Did he really predict the assasination or did he find hints to it later on? That is a major difference and should be expressed properly. Erdal Ronahi 09:07, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, Drosnin actually wrote Rabin a letter warning him that he would be assasinated, so yes, he can be said to have "predicted" it. However, this was at a time when Rabin was getting death threats right and left and arguing with his bodyguards over whether he should wear a bullet-proof vest, so it wasn't all that fantastical a prediction. --Woggly 10:30, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Can we have some proof of what the page claims, namely that he predicted this with the aid of Bible codes? An article explaining how he did it? Something to back up such an extraordinary claim? Gadykozma 15:03, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There is testimony that he did in fact make the prediction. Whether or not the Bible Codes aided him in making this prediction, no one can prove. I can make a cup slide across the table without touching it. Uri Geller would claim this is telekinesis - I say it's elementary physics. Or in other words, Drosnin's prediction, real or not, fails to impress me. I could sit down today and write letters to ten major political figures, warning them that they will be assasinated some time in the future: George Bush, Ariel Sharon, Yassir Arafat... if it never happens, nobody will ever know about these letters. If it does happen to a single one of them, my letter will be called a "prediction". I will also be a able to take credit for "saving" the other leaders, who heeded my warning... So Drosnin's claim is not as extraordinary as it may seem. But in answer to your question, the fact of the warning has been verified by the Israeli press, there was an article in Yediot in which some of Rabin's advisors were interviewed, Chaim Guri (an Israeli author) knew the story in advance and has confirmed it. I feel I should state again, that I'm related to one of the players on the "codebusters'" side of this story. --Woggly 06:48, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Did Drosnin, in fact, make this prediction about any other public figures? And I submit that the idea an Israeli Prime Minister would be assassinated was without precendent; indeed, even after it happened many could not believe it. Jayjg 02:38, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The question is not how many assassinations he predicted, but how many predictions he did in general... if you predict lots of stuff some of it will come true. If you predict a lot of stuff, some of it that is really sensational will come true. Gadykozma 11:54, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

O.K., how many predictions did he make in general? Jayjg 14:40, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Right :-O Gadykozma 02:07, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Actually someone tried to assassinate Ben-Gurion once by throwing a grenade into the Knesset chamber. I forget the details. Concerning Rabin, the possibility of an attack by Arabs was taken very seriously and most of the effort at protecting Rabin was put there. However, Drosnin did not predict that Rabin would be killed by a Jew, so the fact that this possibility was not taken seriously except by a few does not count in his favor. --Zero 11:36, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

"letter frequencies" confusion

I've removed the sentence:

For example, they may have preferred spellings where letter frequencies closely matched that of the Torah overall.

Because it's a bit confusing. The names searched for were limited to a certain number of characters (I think 7). The frequencies found in the Torah are "leaps" (ELS's) of tens of thousands of letters. One couldn't humanly choose names that would in advance be guaranteed to give good results. However, there was enough "wiggle space" in the definitions of their experiment, that with a truly miminal amount of fiddling and trial and error one could conceivably shape a list to meet the requirements. In fact, McKay's team proceeded to create such a list, only very slightly different from the list tested in the Torah, that gave even better results (to a power of ten) when tested in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. (One of the scientists mentioned in this article is my mother). --Woggly 15:14, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

• Given several different spellings of a name, you are correct that one could, by trial and error, eliminate the variants that don't occur and pick (one of) the spelling(s) that do occur. I think we both agree that would be "cheating".
• Given several different spellings of a name, it *is* humanly possible to choose one that would *probably* give better results. For example, in English, since "s" is far more common than "z" (in most English texts), I expect the word "fuse" to occur far more often as an ELS than the word "fuze". That doesn't guarantee that the word "fuse" is actually encoded in a particular English text, and it doesn't rule out the possibility that "fuze" might be encoded in a particular English text. I could pick the spelling that uses fewer of the "rare" letters, and therefore is more likely to exist.

Picking the spelling that is more likely to exist, is not as bad as picking a spelling that we know exists. But that's the sort of cheating that sentence was intended to imply.

How could we make this less confusing?

--DavidCary 30 June 2005 17:58 (UTC)

English translation as example

I love how the example given in the article uses the English translation instead of the original language. Instead of providing evidence for the code, they're unwittingly refuting their own claims. Well done! (This also assumes that there is a correct English translation, even more hilarious). -- BRIAN0918  06:13, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Your additions violate the Wikipedia rule against posting original research or personal opinions. They are also wrong. Letter arrays like that can be found in any text, it has nothing to do with translations. On the other hand, someone believing that codes were put into a particular Bible text by God does not need to believe anything about English, since it could be done by God guiding the hand of the translator. So neither the believer nor the skeptic needs to buy your ideas. --Zero 08:18, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

My original addition did violate the rule and was POV, but I had a lengthy (1 hour) discussion on #wikipedia with User:Silsor and NullC (and others who added their comments for consideration along the way to consensus) and we came to agree on the final version which I submitted. They helped me turn it from an arbitrary opinion into something factual and neutral. One of the main claims of proponents of the Bible code is that the ELS found in the Bible are extremely rare or impossible to come about by accident, and one of the challenges made by the originators of the code research was to find such codes in other texts, such as Moby Dick. Since such codes have since been found in Moby Dick, one has to either admit that it is evidence against the code in the Bible being real, or believe that Moby Dick was also written/influenced by God (which some people actually did do after the Moby Dick researcher published his results). The same goes with other translations of the Bible. The English language has no real similarities to Hebrew, so there's really no way that ELS would be transferred from Hebrew to English. So the fact that such "rare" ELS are found in the English translation means that either Bible code ELS is not rare like proponents want to claim (the simple explanation), or that the English language/translation was also created/influenced by God (or through careful non-supernatural construction). -- BRIAN0918  13:18, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I did work on neutralizing brian's contribution with him. I'd rather comment on specifics right now, though. silsor 00:02, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)

Moved talk from article

[Addendum as of 20 April 2005] As someone who has worked with the Torah, searching for coded patterns and codes that extend into three dimensional space in a given body of text, I have been somewhat apalled by the lack of criticism concerning Dr. Brendan McKay, and his "Moby Dick" and "War and Peace" codes,.. The one main point that seems to not be brought to the fore in most arenas of argument is that in the case of Torah Codes, those codes that have proven to be the most real and proveable have been the codes that interact with the textual body in which they are found!

Dr. McKay, like some stubborn and unruly child spits criticism as though it were fact. And yet his "codes" can in no way claim to pertain to the actual body of text in which they are found. There is another matter that is frequently overlooked: The most original and proveable codes (hidden text within the text) that come forth are from the Five Books of Moses. This is the body of work that is most likely to provide any true proof of Torah Codes. These five books have been keep under the most strict of scribal laws. And it is (in this persons opinion) the only real source of 'Torah Codes' that can be taken seriously.

In conclusion, the fact that ELS (Equal Letter Sequencing) is the ONLY way being investigated is something that begs the question: What of the traditions that speak of 50 gates to the Torah or more? If one permutes the letters contained in the Torah (304,805) and applies the keys given by ancient scholars and modern, then seeks the guidance of the one that the Books are about in the first place, perhaps understanding will show itself in this matter. Until then there is only a bunch of argument and misguided judgements and meandering speeches that only serve to discredit a true marvel. 209.191.206.138 Apr 20, 2005

I don't think McKay is an antisemite. Like other participants at the Internet Infildels, he does have a bias against religion in general.

A marvel without room for doubt does not exist in this world. JFW | T@lk 01:16, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

While I have nothing against Internet Infidels, for the record I can't recall ever having particpated there.--McKay 06:04, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

"ELS (Equal Letter Sequencing) is the ONLY way being investigated is something that begs the question": No. The refutation of that method also shows that Bible Code believers are innumerate and don't know how to tell random patterns from real ones. McKay knows how to do it (look at a random book as well as the Torah, and handle both equally), and they don't. Their other methods are bound to contain the same rookie mistakes. --Hob Gadling 10:38, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

Phrases like "...like some stubborn and unruly child spits..." and "only a bunch of argument and misguided judgements and meandering speeches" automatically generate scepticism/disbelief among the curious and otherwise uninvolved. "Many people" would assume that if you look hard enough at any text you will be able to find numerical and other patterns (look at how analyses of what Nostradamus' writings mean have changed over time).

Has anyone got a cryptography expert of a neutral persuasion (ie not atheist but someone who is not involved in the cultural background of the case) to do an analysis?

An atheist should, in fact, be ideal,, as they [a true atheist] cannot have any vested interest in a particular result; if the result shows that the Bible Code may be genuine, they will retest it, or convert! What is important is that the tester is impartial and fully comprehends the scientific technique and its interpretation.Asteroceras 12:48, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

End all dissimilar views with tests. Find the truth

I Call for extensive independant completely unbiased scientifically verifiable statistical analysis of all major claims independantly with controls. It is irrelavent what the outcome is as to the scientific method employed and the qualification of those conducting the experiments.

As far as I can tell, there are enough basic definitions as well as methods of testing to carry out such results with verifiable factual results. To my knowledge a good control would be another hebrew text, and major claims include occurence of statistically impossible occurences of specific identified words of various types: self-referencing, verifiable facts, and future predictions(not necessarilly all types).

If I am mistaken or if there is no-one qualified to do such testing, then propose an alternative please(or state concerns). I would also like exactly the same procedures to be seriously applied to all desputed verifiable or repeatable claims of any impact.

How is this relevent to the article? --Tydaj 23:16, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Dear anon, when WRR attempted to find the truth their paper was reviewed in a hostile fashion and massacred by skeptics in their blogs. The truth is a matter of opinion here; whatever test you do, there will always be characters who cannot live with the results. JFW | T@lk 23:26, 31 October 2005 (UTC) There can't be a definitive answer as to the truth of a bible code even is there is one until a definite test that allows searches past present and future. When past, present and future information is found and proved to be repeatable and verifiable we will have an answer. At best the current method of skip searches can be classed as little more than random searches. What is needed is a definitive method such as being able to search by time, date, location etc. This may be possible if one could in some way link the bible to astrology/astroomy as the heavens remain consistent over time. User Kaye 11 Jan 2007

In reply to Kaye's suggestion above, there can't be a definitive answer as to the truth of anything, only disproof. Astrology is not a scientific discipline and it has certainly not remained constant or consistent over time! For example, modern "star signs" assigned by date-of-birth did not exist in the mediaeval period or before, though the constellations themselves were mostly named in ancient times. As for astronomy remaining constant, numerous stars are variable over periods from hours to years (that is, they fade from visible to invisible [to the naked eye] and vice-versa) and several stars have literally exploded since the writing of the religious scriptures in question. Additionally, stars move through the galaxy, at a sufficient rate for some of them to have visibly changed over a lifetime (cf Barnard's Star). To link both astrology and astronomy, the defined boundaries and constituent stars of the constellations have also changed through time, with Scorpius being an example of an ancient constellation that has lost stars to a neighbouring constellation. Astrological references from "bible times" certainly do exist, but nothing that could be termed astronomical and of sufficient accuracy for use in a scientific analysis of the Bible Code. To sum up, astrology would be a very poor subject to base a test around for numerous reasons, while astronomy has too short a history as a science to use in this respect.Asteroceras 13:41, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

The truth is that the original research did show tight connection between a list of names and a list of dates and this supports at least the possibility that whoever the parents of those babies consulted before naming their newborn babies did use this "proximty technique" with the Hebrew Torah and not with Tolstoy... Ofer Hadas. Hadaso 08:06, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

The truth is that the original research "cooked" the results. The question whether or not the Torah is a divine text is not a scientific question and cannot be answered using scientific methods. But the question "does the Torah contain famous Rabbi names above what is statistically reasonable?" can be scientifically defined. But, as any basic course in statistics can show you, virtually everything can be proved using bad statistics. You know the saying: "the are lies, there are hideous lies, and there's statistics". Well, go ahead and find out for yourself. The bible text and programs for searching codes are all available in the net. Pick a list of things you expect to find in the text, and search for it. Then compare with what you can find in other texts. See if you get statistically meaningful results. I tried it myself a few years back, and I found that 'The Hobbit' was much better at fortune telling than the bible. mousomer 08:03, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Religioustolerance.org

This article uses the religioustolerance.org website as either a reference or a link. Please see the discussion on Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/Religioustolerance.org and Wikipedia:Verifiability/Religioustolerance.org as to whether Wikipedia should cite the religioustolerance.org website, jguk 14:08, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

My name

I just wantted to know what my name saiys in the bible code or if there is anything at all about me and my future.

The real question is, what does Moby Dick say about your name. --XAlpha 15:15, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Moby Dick says blub blub blub. As for the anon: there are software packages that let you check Bible Codes. I have no access to them at this point, but google is your friend. JFW | T@lk 15:24, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Anonymous

Shouldn't the article state that the proponents said they repeated the succeeded experiment with a few test texts (some of them being just the Torah, with the lines or words randomly exchanged) and the results they got were way worse than the results obtained with the original text?

Yes. But in that case, it should also say what they didn't do: namely start out with the test text, trying to find connections in that, and then repeat the succeeded experiments from that with the Torah. If they had done that, probability says the results they would have gotten would have been way worse than the results obtained with the test text. That they didn't do that second test is proof that they are incompetent as researchers. --Hob Gadling 20:08, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Problems with this article

I have some major problems with this article, especialy it being a FA. In several places the prose doesn't flow well. In ohter places the text doesn't make sense, like here:

"Additionally, since the English translation (of which there are hundreds of versions to choose) is not the original text of the Bible, this would require one to believe in the design of the English language or translation—either through the influence of an omniscient entity, or through careful construction"

Now, what is that supposed to mean. The bible code is in Hebrew, it's not meant to be translated. The Enlgish langaugae wasn't designed to be compatible with ancient Hebrew. It doesn't work traslated. This sentence among others makes no sense.

Also, this article has one picture, just one; And the pic shows the bible code on a traslation. The part of the definition of the code it is in Hebrew. The picture itself is inaccurate.

As for this article being featured; an "overview" section should be the intro. This article has an intro, then an overview. This article has way too many redlinks, unorganized refs, and just looks bad visualy. Also, there are no inline citations.

If these problems are not fixed I will nominate this on WP:FARC Tobyk777 03:29, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

There are several other disqualifying flaws. We simply don't possess the "original Hebrew text" of the writings which were (several centuries later) fashioned into the Hebrew Bible. There's an enormous question as to whether there _ever_ was a unitary, "canonical" text of the Torah before it was written down--but if there was, we don't have it today. Among the oldest, most relied-upon manuscript sources which we do have for the text of the Torah in Hebrew, no two of them agree as to the number of characters which any of the five books ought to contain. And remember, this type of "code" is ruined if even one character is added or taken away.

Hebrew orthography changed considerably over the centuries. Every single verse, in even the oldest manuscripts that we have today, contains a higher letter count than it would have had in the forms of Hebrew spelling which were current when these writings are believed to have emerged. This has mainly to do with the gradual incorporation of letters to indicate long vowels, as is described elsewhere on Wikipedia. Drosnin by his own admission is no Torah scholar, and if I'm not mistaken doesn't even speak or read Hebrew. He doesn't seem to realize how deep the textual problems are. The "Masoretic text" to which he refers, as if it were a fixed and stable thing, isn't unambiguous or uncontroversial--plus it uses the later type of spellings (i.e. all the verses are longer in it than they would have been "originally").

His "find" concerning Yitzhak Rabin is on the cover of the book. It's a real attention-getter, and seems to lend him some credibility, as if the predictive power of a scientific hypothesis had been tested and verified. The Hebrew which he renders as "assassin [who] will assassinate" are in what we know today as Deuteronomy 4:42. I would say that a certain chutzpah factor seems to be involved here, however, since anyone can read this verse and observe that it it's really about cities where people could take refuge _if they killed someone by accident_ (e.g. "[41] Then Moses set aside three cities on the east side of the Jordan, [42] to which a manslayer could escape, one who unwittingly slew a fellow man without having been hostile to him in the past; he could flee to one of these cities and live; ..."). So the big "money shot" of the book misses its mark.

As Wikipedians we must adopt a neutral point of view--we shouldn't specify where this book lies on the spectrum between fraud and self-deception, since we can't really know. But it's surely not on any spectrum that includes "could be valid." DSatz 22:49, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

"Apocalypse" prediction for 2006

I read that The Bible Code predicts 2006 as being the date of the apocalypse, possibly in the form of a nuclear war in the Middle East. Is this actually the case? Can anyone give a cite for this? -- Karada 08:30, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I read that too. But I don't have the book anymore. Sorry Tobyk777 23:36, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

He states such in a BBC interview.

"MICHAEL DROSNIN: The warnings that are most clearly stated in the code are (a) the world will face global economic collapse starting in the Hebrew year 5762. 2002 in the modern calendar. We know that one came true. (b) this will lead to a period of unprecedented danger as nations with nuclear weapons become unstable and terrorists can buy or steal the power to destroy whole cities. After 9/11 no one doubts it. And then of course there's the most terrible of the three predictions, god help us if this one comes true. The danger will peak in the Hebrew year 5766, 2006 in the modern calendar. The year that is most clearly encoded with both world war and atomic holocaust." Patken4 15:58, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, the prediction is proven false. It's already into the year 2007 and nothing apocalyptic has happened.

I believe that it pridictes that WWIII will start as a neucleur war in 2006, looking back, it seems as if this is wrong, however it may be that future historiens may deside that the official date for WWIII is, in fact 2006. --Robin63 19:15, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

There are three interesting points to draw from this section (""Apocalypse" prediction for 2006"). Firstly, as it is now 2007, it did not happen. Second to this, as Robin 63 says, maybe in the future, our date system will be revised, just as the date of zero AD has migrated over time (I think it is currently at 12 BC in the current system). Hovever... if it is really a prediction it will be of little use if we cannot determine the date in out current system!

Third, in response to Patken4: (a) the world will face global economic collapse starting in the Hebrew year 5762. 2002 in the modern calendar. We know that one came true. (b) this will lead to a period of unprecedented danger as nations with nuclear weapons become unstable and terrorists can buy or steal the power to destroy whole cities. After 9/11 no one doubts it. In reality, there was an economic slump in 2001 and by 2002 we were in the recovery period. So,there was no "global economic collapse" in Hebrew year 5762. As yet, no nations with nuclear weapons have become unstable; if anything, nuclear powers are moving toward ever greater stability. For example, North Korea is actually discussing disarmament with the US. The phrase "After 9/11 no one doubts it" is somewhat meaningless, and does not belong on what is supposed to be a factual website. EDIT 1a: My username was not appended. EDIT 1b: North Korea have since agreed to disarm, so there is one less nuclear weapon state to worry about.Asteroceras 15:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

• I was merely quoting Michael Drosnin, so those statements attributed to me aren't mine. Also, there's no point in adjusting 2006 to whatever calendar comes in the future. Drosnin clearly states the "modern calendar" and equates 2002 to 5762 in the Hebrew calendar. There really can be no adjustment on that. Even if a future modern calendar is 2006, the Hebrew calendar won't be 5766. It should also be noted that the 2006 Drosnin uses ended in September 2006, when the Hebrew calendar changed from 5766 to 5767. Patken4 22:21, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

2008 and we haven't been nuked' yet....--72.131.57.148 (talk) 19:52, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

No, but we're in deep trouble right now with economic crisis and natural disasters. There's also information that al Qaeda is seeking nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction -68.229.250.165 (talk) 14:27, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Please help me keep the external links organized!

Hi all, I reorganized the links and added some context for each link. I think this is important since it helps readers who are not familiar with ergodic theory or whatever to judge the relative reliability of the sources. No doubt subsequent editors will (unintentionally) mess this up; I hope some kind editor will try to maintain order and to continue to provide some salient facts giving a bit of context for each website which might be cited.

I also added a few internal links. Right now the relevance of ergodic theory, combinatorics, symbolic dynamics, Ramsey theory might not be relevant; hence the todo list.---CH 09:45, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Crank magnet articles

I am looking for information from experienced WP editors on the problem of keeping good editors on Wiki. See the page here User:Dbuckner/Expert rebellion

This is no more than a list of people who have left Wikipedia, or thinking of leaving, or generally cheesed off, for the reason (1) what I will unpolitely call 'cranks', i.e. people engaged in a persistenta and determined campaign to portray their highly idiosyncratic (and dubious) personal opinion as well-established mainstream scientific or historical fact, or 'crank subculture' i.e. fairly sizeable subcultures which adhere strongly to various anti-scientific conspiracy theories (e.g. Free energy suppression) or anti-scientific political movements (e.g. Intelligent design) masquerading as "scholarship". (2) the problem of edit creep, i.e. the tendency of piecemeal editing to make articles worse over time, rather than better.

If you are in this category, leave a link to your user page there. If you can, put something on your user page that indicates reason for discontent. I particularly like war stories, so let me have any of those (links please, not on the page).

There is a more general discussion of this issue on Lina Mishima's page. User:LinaMishima/Experts Problem Note I am not in agreement with her title as it is not in my view a problem about experts, but more of adherence to scholarly standards, ability to put polished and balanced articles together. But her idea is good.

I don’t know much about this subject except that it's a possible crank magnet. If you know of any other, let me know, or even better, cut and paste this message on those pages. I'm going round the obvious places like intelligent design, Goedel, Cantor and so forth, but there must be many such. Dbuckner 15:00, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

November 8th article hijacking

I have already reverted the twice, citing the extensive, biased, and, "copy and paste" editing of an anonymous users User:87.103.49.4 and User:87.103.46.0 who seems to making similiar edits to bible code related articles. I hereby request that this article be locked from editing from anonymous and newly registered users.--Kenn Caesius 23:22, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

The additions are in fact a copyright violation of material from here. McKay 03:25, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

pov

I would love to note on the article that it is subject to biases.

While I am not here to doubt Brendan McKay's professionality, there is no doubt that he is the biggest and most outspoken critic of the Codes.

This article is in a sense written by him. You can see that he initiated it, and continues to maintain it regularly.

Does it make any sense to consider "neutral" someone with such a vested interested in the debate? That does not make any sense to me.

What Wikipedia policy requires that an author or editor must have a neutral point of view? The Wikipedia:Neutral point of view policy requires that an article must be written from a neutral point of view, but not that an article's authors or editors must have a neutral point of view.

AviN1 04:03, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Realistically, I would hardly expect from someone being the sharpest critic of the "torah codes" to be able to present a neutral representation of the controversy. Do you think he can? ~~ —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 85.130.133.221 (talk) 03:11, 2 January 2007 (UTC).

It is irrelevant whether either of us believes McKay can present a neutral representation of the controversy. The relevant question is whether there are contributions made by McKay that violate the NPOV policy. If there are, then these contributions should be corrected. Can you point me to a contribution made by McKay that violates the NPOV policy?

AviN1 20:49, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Brendan McKay is the most important critic of the codes and whether one agrees with his POV or not, he has made a monumental contribution to the topic, not the least of which is in terms of his leadership in demonstrating how ELS experiments can be so easily tuned. We are lucky to heve him. IMO, McKay got off to a rocky start in this with his original 1990's critiques of the WRR work, (and I do wish that he or another author would go back and close that acrimonious loop), but McKay's more recent focus has been on Drosnin's stuff -- which is greatly in need of his "help". riverguy42 (talk) 15:51, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Could someone please add some examples?

I am interested in this "Bible Code" ideas, and would like to see some more examples of things that the Bible code has "predicted." Could someone please add a section to this article giving examples of things that the Bible Code has predicted? I think that would be very helpful. Thank you --Robin63 19:19, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

The place to look is Google.com. The idea of Wikipedia.com is to give information about subjects, not comprehensive examples.Asteroceras 14:59, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, we are not limited by space requirements, so more examples would always be better, as long as they're useful to the article. Λυδαcιτγ 04:12, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Subtle change

The article previously said:

"These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code, that mistakingly claims that these codes can predict the future. Drosnin, using Bible Codes, predicted nuclear holocausts and the destruction of major cities by earthquakes in 2006. These predictions did not come true, casting serious doubt on the whole paradigm."

The author of the books in question makes the following observation:

Bible Code II --

"The Bible code is not a prediction that we will all die in 2006. It is a

warning that we might all die in 2006, if we do not change our future. What

we do here and now, here on Earth, will determine our fate."

The Bible Code --

"'Code will save' appears right above 'atomic holocaust,' just below 'the

End of Days.'

"It is not a promise of divine salvation. It is not a threat of inevitable

doom. It is just information. The message of the Bible code is that we can

save ourselves. In the end, what we do determines the outcome."

I am not an expert in this area, not even close. But it does seem a bit much to say that he predicted things when he specifically disclaims it. At the same time, even what appears in the book is sufficient that the repeated empirical failures do case doubt on the entire paradigm. (To say the least.) So I changed the sentences to attempt to reflect that.

I am editing as an ordinary editor in this case, trying to help get us to accuracy and NPOV.--Jimbo Wales 04:50, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Torah written by aliens?

That was a really biased way of putting it. An anon ip number added that. As this article is the subject of an ongoing WP:BLP situation, and still needs a fair amount of work, I am going to semiprotect it for now.--Jimbo Wales 03:57, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

This claim was (I think) made in The Bible Code II. It's discussed here, but I think that Ingermanson's review may not illustrate Drosnin's full position on the subject. I don't have the book, but using Amazon Reader, I found this sentence on page 176: "And there was much more in the code that appeared to confirm that the code key really did arrive from another planet." But Drosnin seems to be uncertain, saying on page 213, "I didn't want a metaphysical concept. I wanted hard evidence. Did the Bible code come from a man, a god, or an alien?" Maddeningly, I can't see what he concludes in the following pages. If anyone has a copy of the book, please share Drosnin's conclusion. Λυδαcιτγ 01:52, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

I have the book. (It was a gift from a well-meaning friend who didn't know any better.) The page numbers are off from what you found on Amazon (maybe hard back vs paperback?) In chapter 10, pg 173-4, he talks about the improbability of contact with aliens, then says, "what if the long-awaited contact with another intelligence actually took place long ago? What if the Bible code is, in fact, the contact? From the outset of my quest, I had known that there was something otherworldly about the Bible code. No human being could have looked 3000 years ahead and encoded the details of today's world into the Bible." (Fortunately, the space aliens have time travel. I think I saw this episode of Star Trek. Anyway, moving on ...) He goes on to speculate that both the Bible code and human life were planted by aliens. He cites Francis Crick as confirming "DNA was brought in a vehicle", which is found in the code. Your quote from 213 is on page 181 in my book. After he says, "I want hard evidence", he says that he found "in steel" and "obelisks" near Genesis 5:1 [5], which he badly misquotes as "in the image of God He made him, male and female He made them". Later, he finds "Lord, owner, will be recognized in steel, obelisks". (Star Trek called them warp nacelles.) He ends the chapter with, "I am forced to conclude that in addition to an 'obelisk' that is the 'code key,' I am also searching for the 'alien' who created it, or at least brought it here, and the 'vehicle' that he came in." There is no further conclusion. He says in a later chapter that he never found the physical obelisk that he was looking for. On page 216, he says, "The existence of the Bible code is the first scientific evidence we've ever had that we are not alone since no man can see across time." Page 155 has probably the strongest statement - "it also seemed a very clear statement that the Bible code and the genetic code must therefore have a common source - that the same alien brought both to Earth." I hope that helps. I think the statement that Jimbo removed was an accurate statement of what the book says. --Born2x 05:48, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

The aliens possibility appears on pages 94-98 of the first book. He finds the word "computer" in the codes, then suggests the Bible was written by a computer, specifically "a device far beyond anything we have yet developed". Then he quotes Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke about the nature of alien civilizations and how they would appear to us. Then "the long-awaited contact from another intelligence actually took place long ago". It is possible to argue whether he is putting this forward as a definitive conclusion, but at a minimum he is stating it as a strong possibility. As Born2x says, the second book describes how he went searching for an ancient alien artifact buried somewhere near the Dead Sea. The aliens who put it there could foresee the future but couldn't make steel that doesn't rust (but now I'm getting off the topic). McKay 06:19, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, BornAgain (yes?) and McKay. Since this argument seems to be peculiar to Drosnin's books, and not important to the code in general, I put a short description of Drosnin's claims in The Bible Code (book). Λυδαcιτγ 21:46, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Just going back through the old talk trying to get more context on the current discussion. Comment...it seems clear to me that Drosnin's invocation of otherworldly super-beings has the effect of titilating, and of course that's why Drosnin's books are best sellers. The far superior Jeffrey Satinover book utterly avoids this kind of titillation, with predictable results in terms of comparative sales. WNDL42 (talk) 22:29, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

The film 'Pi'

Can someone who can edit this page please put a link to this film in:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

Mthastings25 23:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

I linked to the article at π (film). Λυδαcιτγ 00:55, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Worst bible code article ever

This article on the torah code is far to short and has no details about the extraordinary codes that scientists have found within the torah. Scientists have found codes that statistically show that they can't just be mere chance. This article doesn't say anything about these statistics. Also this article is biased about the jewish veiw of the torah code.

Thank you for your suggestion. When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes — they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). Λυδαcιτγ 05:10, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Simple math will tell you that there is nothing special in the bible code. There are 26 chars+10 numbers in English. Suppose you are looking for a word with 5 characters in the way bible code does in a ny 3x10^6 ish character text. Allowing negative stepping, there are like 1000 pattern ways to find the word you are looking for (allowing -500 to +500 chars). So the number of occurence of the word you are looking for is about 3x10^6 / 36^5 * 1000 ~ 50 occurence (~1500 occurence for 4 words letter). Now, if you trying playing big event game. Each event probably have about 100 names (and each with like 10 synnonyms) associate with it and taking into account that the common words are already intact in grammatically correct sentence. And in grammatically correct sentence the distribution of characters in sensible words will make it more likely to find the dictionary word youare looking for. So, you will definitely found whatever you are looking for. Take Moby Dick as an example. http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html . Regards

198.129.217.68 (talk) 05:55, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

There is no "simple math" at the level of this research, and the "simple math" you describe is based on the work of Brendan McKay. It's anything but simple. I was following this story until McKay announced his decision to "retire" from the debate and from the topic. This happened shortly after McKay's final refutation was challenged by the authors of the original paper (WRR). It appears that McKay did not wish to, or refused to respond to the WRR author's presentation demonstrating how McKay "cooked" his math in his refutation. BTW...WRR did not "look for words". You might want to get a copy of the original paper to understand the argument that WRR actually made. I think this gives the last word to WRR. riverguy42 (talk) 20:32, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

A further contention I have with the article (which I will work on adding as soon as my schedule permits it) is that it is horrendously out of date. We are no longer dealing with 4-letter words. We're dealing with sentences and paragraphs which sometimes exceed 100 letters in length (to date, the longest extension is 296 letters). These are not statistically improbable; they're statistically impossible. The most recent development in Bible Code research is the phenomonenon of code extension; researchers have been discovering that many of the two-word els's they had found previously actually extend for dozens of letters on either side. This needs to be placed in the article. (see Bible Code digest--they always seem to be at the forefront of the research). It's true that the sort of "codes" Michael Drosnin thinks he's discovered occur naturally (by chance) in any monkey text--that is, you can make short words and phrases appear in any text. But the kinds of things they've been finding recently (see Isaiah 53 cluster)--whole paragraphs of encoded text germane to the passages they're found in--are (as I've said) statistically improbable/impossible. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sunshine20716 (talk • contribs) 22:37, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Statistically impossible? Almost surely it is not impossible. Also reading the article there's a few places where it seems that wikipedia needs a quick sanity check. Anyway, I don't have time for this. Themania (talk) 05:10, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

How it works?

I want to test this code out. Does anyone know how this stuff works. What texts do you look in the bible? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eldorado91 (talk • contribs) 00:29, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

re: "What texts do you look in the bible?"...

Well now, that's the BIG question. To get an idea of just how big the question is, you might want to review (for starters) this paper from some Codes scholars who refute the codes. Cohen Codes. Not that I agree or disagree with them, but this document paints a good picture of just how deep this particular rabbit hole really is.

Then, if you STILL have the desire to go down the hole, I recommend Dr. Satinover's book (Drosnin's stuff is for entertainment mostly), after which you will have just enough background to start asking some questions. If you're like me, you'll spend a few years on your new hobby and come up with a beautiful mystery...one with no definitive, black and white answers. Enjoy!!! riverguy42 (talk) 21:26, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Status of this field

At the risk of being roundly lambasted, I just wanted to ask why we have nothing in the lead for this article to articulate how the subject of this article is viewed by professional statisticians? For a subject that is, ostensibly, quite profound, it seems remiss not to note the view of the scientific community. Perhaps, given the subject matter, we don't need to draw attention to this view as it's obvious, but a single sentence noting this seems like a good idea to me. How about:

"The existence of Bible codes has attracted some attention within the scientific literature<ref>the WWR paper</ref>, although they have been demonstrated to be strongly dependent on search criteria, and seemingly meaningful codes have been shown to occur in secular texts or even works of fiction<ref>the McKay et al. paper</ref>."

Cheers, --Plumbago (talk) 09:07, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• It seems to me that this viewpoint is quite strongly represented here by the primary contributor to the research that you describe, Brendan McKay, who wrote most of this original article. Do you suggest that the McKay viewpoint is understated? riverguy42 (talk) 18:28, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi again. No, only in the lead to the article. I think it just needs a sentence for balance. The claims of Bible code numerologists are extraordinary, so it's important to make clear what the scientific community's view of them is (well, as best as we can - there's very little published about them there). How's that sound? Cheers, --Plumbago (talk) 18:31, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

I understand your perspective - no lambasting!!! The WRR paper made a profoundly disturbing and extraordinary claim, and as such it deserves the most intense scrutiny possible, in proportion to the controversy generated. The problem I have with pointing out (right up front) the view that "they" (statistically improbable "information patterns" in the text) have been "demonstrated" to be strongly dependent is wrong. What HAS been demonstrated by Brendan McKay in MBBK is a means by which the WRR authors could have "cooked" the experiment. This was the primary contribution of MBBK. What was demonstrated by MBBK is the possibility that WRR could have "pre-selected" the names/dates/places of birth in the "Great Rabbis" experiment, but MBBK provided no evidence whatsoever that this happened, MBBK merely inferred that this MUST have been the case because MBBK's premise from the beginning was that the WRR results simply had to be wrong. As no errors were found in the WRR math, then MBBK's POV was that there must have been a 'trick'. MBBK succeeded in presenting a valid hypothesis on what that trick might have been. Several years ago (after reading the Satinover work), I took the time to print out and do a mark up of all of the correspondence from both sides. My conclusion was that WRR authors had presented an very strong evidence for a complete refutation of MBBKs accusation of "tuning". In response, MBBK's authors either "retired" from the debate immediately or failed to address the evidence provided by WRR that no such "tuning" of the experiment happened. Indeed, WRR even went so far as to test the "wiggle room" that MBBK accused WRR of exploiting. In re-running experiments on data that MBBK suggested would have yielded a negative result, WRR presented results that showed stronger, not weaker results. The authors of WRR do not (to my knowledge) speak english, and they are not here to defend their position. When I arrived here what I found was an article (created by Brendan McKay) which was narrowly focused on the refutation of WRR by MBBK, and overly representative of the popularly sensationalized "Drosnin" perspective, woefully lacking the broader context of this very old and profound "puzzle". Suggest you might want to check out the WRR vs. MBBK paper trail. If you have the time to do so I'd welcome input on whether or not the MBBK position was as weak as I found it to be. riverguy42 (talk) 01:56, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Cool. If I have the time, I'll try to look over the assorted papers during the Christmas break. My rather limited skim read of them suggested that although WRR was published in a reputable journal, it wasn't published entirely seriously (c.f. the note from the editor). Further, I didn't get that MBBK's main finding was that WRR had "cooked the books" per se, rather that WRR hadn't framed the problem quite as tightly as first thought. MBBK's further points about finding similar codes within secular texts is important too (and rather damning to my mind), as is the issue of translation of biblical texts and its likely effects on hidden codes. Anyway, I'm no statistician and I really need to read some more first. Cheers, --Plumbago (talk) 09:09, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

• Hi Plumbago! Yes, WRR was published by an admittedly and understandably skeptical (and I daresay, very uncomfortable) editor, as a "puzzle". Then, MBBK's paper was published by the same editor, (and, greeted enthusiastically with "Eureka!" and a big sigh of relief). Now, it is absolutely true that MBBK's refutations all rest solely on the hypothesis that WRR authors and contributors conspired to "cook the books", you will see this as soon as you read the MBBK paper. If there is ANY remaining doubt about this whatsoever, read the explicit allegation directly from MBBK co-author Maya Bar-Hillel, also in the links I just added. As you dig in, you will find that every subsequent refutation...(really, EVERY refutation) rests solely on the MBBK hypothesis of cheating, and that every instance of "similar codes within secular texts" that has been 'discovered' is based on using the "cheating" techniques that MBBK demonstrated. In other words, it is true that you can always find codes, in ANY text....IF you "cheat".riverguy42 (talk) 18:29, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
• Also...you asked earlier about recent views of professional statisticians. FYI, there was a new paper published by Harold Gans in 2006. Gans was Senior Cryptologic Mathematician (expert codebreaker) for US DOD, was the first "professional statistician" to review WRR. According to Gans he was vehemently skeptical and was a "non-believing" Jew when he began his attempt to refute WRR. Gans designed his own experiments from the ground up, and (to his shocked disbelief) his independent tests wound up confirming WRR. Gans subsequently retired from DOD and converted to Orthodox Judaism. Now, as of today, I have not added Gans' recent paper to the article because I have yet to locate any refutation of it. Critics seem to have focused their efforts exclusively on (a) soothsayer journalist Drosnin, and (b) on the "New Testament codies" which is too bad -- those "easy" targets are not serious ELS reseachers. The latest work from Gans (and Robert Harelick) appears to be quite serious, Gans is probably among a small handful of guys who can claim to be truly and professionally qualified, both in subject matter and long years of relevant professional work (at DOD) in the area, and Gans' paper needs serious scrutiny! From what I can tell, Gans' three page paper and his research protocol appear to have been carefully and meticulously designed to rule out any MBBK-style cheating. Yet I now marvel at the fact that Gans' paper wasn't put in the article last year when it was presented (hmmm...), and the silence (of the critics) is deafening. riverguy42 (talk) 18:29, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

There's no mention in the article of the status of the subject of the code, i.e. the bible itself. The problem is, there's n0o single text that can be called the bible, not even in Hebrew - the Masoretic text was written in the last centuries of the fist millennium AD, by good and sincere sJewish scholars, using the best texts and techniques available to them, but when we look at earlier texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are variations. Not large, but they're present. And sometimes it's quite clear that the Dead Sea Scrolls version is better than the Masoretic version (for example, in the Genesis story of Cain and Able, the MT has: "Cain said to his brother...", and that's it, nothing about what Cain said; but the DSS has: "...Let us go into the fields." The DSS reading is accepted in modern bibles). So if you don't have a stable text of the bible, how can you apply the technique? PiCo (talk) 06:26, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

everyones name on the bible code

I'm not trying to sound like an idoit. But I saw some History Channel special on the Bible Code , I think it was Bible Code II where this researcher guy used the Bible Code to find his family (aka ancestors) and he found their acutal names, and their dates of births and deaths. Can the bible code actually do that was that just dramatic crap.Iron Valley (talk) 21:37, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

There have been a few articles in skeptical inquirer about the bible codes that are well worth reading. In short you can find anything you want. One "hidden" message in the bible was something like "bible code is bunk" they also used the same method on modern books and found some hilarious stuff. I'm amazed people fall for this bible code nonsense. I guess I shouldn't be amazed since one is born every minute. You can download the software to find all sorts of "coded" messages in the bible. Also, it might be worth noting intelligent design huckster William Dembski is a bible code advocate. He actually believes the Bible Codes would have converted Bertrand Russell into a believer. And why isn't this article tagged as pseudoscience? Angry Christian (talk) 17:31, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Here is William Dembski on the Bible Code http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3549 Angry Christian (talk) 17:35, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

You can indeed find anything you want if-and-only-if you (a) "tune" the experiment or (b) fail to correctly interpret the "improbability" of finding what you found by mere accident, or (c) both. I have not seen the History Channel special, but caveat emptor --there is very little, if any, treatment of the topic in mainstream media or journalism (either pro-codes or anti-codes) that is serious and rigorous enough to be given any creedence whatsoever. It's (mostly) a war between theists and atheists.

IMO, the Jeffrey Satinover book comes closest to a rigorous academic treatment...impressive in it's depth (history and background especially) and balance (he gives extensive and respectful voice to the critics that Drosnin does not, but in spite of his rigor, Satinover freely admitted that he "wants to believe". I think the Satinover book is unfortunately the only credible book that is accessable to the serious layman, so while I recommend that interested readers read Satinover first (and only), be aware of his bias as much as his impressive technical and scientific understanding. The latter is very obvious, the former not as much so. WNDL42 (talk) 14:25, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Primary source McKay's complaint about bias

The section "Criticism of the original paper" is unacceptable. It presents only the Witztum point of view and ignores almost everything contrary. For example, Witztum's articles response, havlin, eman_hb, dat2_hb are cited but the extensive replies made to them are not mentioned. See for example: 83 page PDF, further reply, Zacut, dates, appelations, and so forth. This is unacceptable article writing. McKay (talk) 12:12, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Reserved workspace

• All, please treat this area as a more or less "reserved" edit space for the convenience of our guest celebrity expert, Brendan McKay, to perform his markup and comments on the present criticism section. Thanks WNDL42 (talk) 17:27, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

---

-- Criticism --

The primary objection advanced against Bible codes is that information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, if data chosen for ELS experiments are intentionally or unintentionally "cooked" before the experiment is defined, similar patterns can be found in texts other than the Torah. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words can be expected to appear, depending on the details chosen for the experiment, and that it is possible to "tune" an ELS experiment to achieve a result which appears to exhibit patterns that overcome the level of noise.

--- Criticism of the original paper ---

In 1999, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay, together with mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in Statistical Science (known as 'MBBK') as a refutation of the original paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR). The MBBK paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians prior to publication.

Observations of MBBK included:

• The data used by Witztum and Rips was a list of rabbi names in Hebrew. The Hebrew language is somewhat flexible as far as name spelling goes, and each rabbi has several different appellations (aliases and nicknames), so special care should be taken as to how to choose the particular names searched for. So their result could be explained if the data was not collected properly. From the MBBK paper: "...the data was very far from [being] tightly defined by the rules of their experiment. Rather, there was enormous "wiggle room" available, especially in the choice of names for the famous rabbis".
• Indirect evidence exists to support an allegation that the data were not, in fact, collected properly; that is, the choice of names and spellings was somehow biased, either intentionally or unintentionally, towards those supporting the codes hypothesis.
• Attempts at replicating the experiment, while being similar in the large, failed to achieve the exactly same results to the last digit. From the paper: "A technical problem that gave us some difficulty is that WRR have been unable to provide us with their original computer program. Neither the two programs distributed by WRR, nor our own independent implementations of the algorithm as described in WRR's papers, consistently produce the exact distances listed [by WRR]".

From these observations, MBBK created hypothesis to explain the "puzzle" of how the codes were discovered. MBBK's claim, in essence, was that the WRR authors had "cheated". On further examination of this hypothesis, MBBK reviewers looked at the chronology of WRR's experiment with respect to the selection of the data and the design of the experiment, and it became apparent that MBBK's hypothesis required the presumption of a conspiracy between WRR authors and their group of expert contributors, to tune the data and experiment in advance. MBBK went on to describe the means by which the "cheating" might have occurred, and demonstrate the tactic as presumed.

The central allegation made in MBBK is that the WRR authors and contributors had, for almost ten years, conspired to choose a selection of names and/or dates in advance, and intentionally designed their experiments to match their selection and thereby achieve their desired result. The McKay paper argues that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations, and that "their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it.". The MBBK paper demonstrated that this "tuning" tactic, when combined with what MBBK asserted was available "wiggle" room, was capable of generating a result similar to WRR's Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. Psychologist and MBBK co-author Maya Bar-Hillel subsequently summarized the MBBK view that the WRR paper was a hoax, an intentionally and a carefully designed "magic trick".

In response to the accusations of MBBK, the WRR authors issued a lengthy and detailed refutation of each of the claims of the McKay paper,

(1) It wasn't the WRR authors, it was Doron Witztum.

(2) Who says it was a refutation? At most it was claimed to be a refutation.

(3) "lengthy and detailed" is unwarranted hype. In fact, MBBK's reply to Witzum was longer and more detailed.

(4) It is simply false that "each" of the claims was responded to. McKay (talk) 11:39, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

including third-party evidence that no such tuning did or even could have taken place.

This document was not produced in response to MBBK but much earlier, and it is cited in our paper (Havlin, 1996). Also WRR claim Havlin was a key part of their experiment, not a "third-party". The adjective "third-party" is here to give an impression of independence, but that independence is a contentious claim. McKay (talk) 11:39, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

WRR's refutation also presented results of additional experiments that used the specific "alternate" name and date formats that MBBK had accused the WRR authors of intentionally avoiding, and in most cases these results provided equivalent or better support for the existence of the codes.

This claim is simply false. McKay (talk) 11:39, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

In the wake of the WRR response, author Bar-Natan issued a formal statement of non-response, citing "damage to my career".

This invites readers to infer that Bar-Natan's career was damaged by WRR's response, but this is false. His career was damaged by all the time he wasted investigating the codes when he could have been doing real mathematics. Mine too. McKay (talk) 11:39, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

• (fixed) WNDL42 (talk) 19:25, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

After a series of exchanges with McKay and Bar-Hillel, WRR author Witztum responded in a new paper claiming that McKay had used smoke screen tactics in creating several Straw Man arguments, and thereby avoided the points made by WRR authors refuting MBBK.

Witztum also claimed that, upon interviewing a key independent expert contracted by McKay for the MBBK paper, that some experiments performed for MBBK had validated, rather than refuted the original WRR findings, and questioned why MBBK had expunged these results from their paper.

At least this sentence says "claimed that", unlike most of this section. But balance would suggest citing the refutation of this claim (if I understand exactly which claim it is). McKay (talk) 11:39, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

By 1999, full scale war had erupted, and meaningful debate mostly disappeared into the noise of rancorous diatribes among the participants as they accused one another of all manner of madness, deceptions and ill intent.

This is an opinion expressed without a reliable source, clearly in breach of WP guidelines. McKay (talk) 11:39, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

--- Criticism of Michael Drosnin ---

Journalist Drosnin's books have been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future. Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community, mistranslating Hebrew words to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes.

Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby Dick would not yield ELS results comparable to the Torah, McKay created a new experiment that was tuned to find many ELS letter arrays in Moby Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive ("Oslo", relating to the Oslo accords). Drosnin and others have responded to these claims, saying the tuning tactics employed by McKay were simply "nonsense", and providing analyses to support their argument that the tables, data and methodologies McKay used to produce the Moby Dick results "simply do not qualify as code tables".

Noted skeptic Dave Thomas claimed to find other examples in many texts, though Thomas' methodology was refuted by Robert Haralick and others. In addition, McKay claimed that Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran and McKay again demonstrated the 'tuning' technique, demonstrating that these techniques could produce "evidence" of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, 'coded' references in non-Torah Bible texts, as for instance the famous Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (eg, misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text. McKay and others claim that in the absence of an objective measure of quality and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.

---

discussion area

Thank you for your suggestion. When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes — they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). Λυδαcιτγ 06:20, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that I am a protagonist in the debate and so it would better if some uninvolved person examined the sources and wrote an unbiased account of them. I'm willing to do it myself if necessary. McKay (talk) 09:14, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Brendan, I am pleased to meet you (so to speak) and happy to help. As you are a primary source, yes...your editing here could again be problematic in the context of WP:COI. Also in the context of WP:BLP as the POV from which (MBBK) "solved" the puzzle involved pubilcly calling the WRR authors every name in the book that can be associated with "cheater" (Bar Hillel's piece is just one example), and WRR are not here to defend themselves. When I got here it was clear that you had created and written the entire article even before I confirmed that. Another issue I found was that the entire presentation focused too heavily on the "Drosnin" stuff (in what appeared to be an attempt to use Drosnin as an all-too-easy-to-discredit Straw Man) and gave virtually no voice whatever to WRR's answers to MBBK - which is totally unacceptable (again) as MBBK explicitly called WRR an intentional deception. While I do find it ironic that you are now complaining about the bias found in a biased article you yourself created, I do agree that the article needs balancing info that must be somehow presented from a neutral POV. It also needs updating, as I am anxiously awaiting some critique of Gan's 2006 work. I am happy to work with you in this context above, and I think you will find me to be a respectful and civil collaborator. WNDL42 (talk) 13:04, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Talking about straw-men, MBBK never claimed there was a conspiracy between many people. There is also a problem in that the opinions of individuals are being quoted as the opinion of a group of people. As for Gans, see [6] and [7] (a bit out of date). McKay (talk) 11:01, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the misunderstanding, Brendan. I've done some initial cleaning and de-POVing of the section in question. Λυδαcιτγ 21:41, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Brendan,

(1) wrt Gans, I was referring to any refutation or other comment on his recent (2006 and later) papers on the topics - any comments? WNDL42 (talk) 19:20, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

(2) My analysis, and that of other reliable sources is that the original MBBK paper (a) began with the alternative hypothesis that "tuning" of either or both the data or the experiment had happened, (b) demonstrated how tuning could have taken place, (c) presented some observed weaknesses in WRR that could have provided "cover" for such tuning, and (d) concluded that tuning (intentional or not) did take place. Would you recharacterize this? WNDL42 (talk) 19:20, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

(3) I believe that the sum total of MBBK's and Bar Hillel's post-publication commentary was pretty much universally accepted as a straight up allegation of "cheating", and specifically a form of cheating which would have required all WRR authors and at least most of their supporting contributors to have collaborated in the design of the "magic trick" that Bar Hillel described. These critiques are sourced, would you characterize their critiques as unfair? If so, how would you recharacterize? WNDL42 (talk) 19:20, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to respond (indented) point by point. Thanks. WNDL42 (talk) 19:20, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Consider:
"Since 2000, physicist Nathan Jacobi, an agnostic Jew, and engineer Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew, have discovered hundreds of examples of extended ELSs in acceptable Hebrew. The number of extended ELSs at different lengths is compared with those expected from a non-encoded text, as determined by a formula from Markov Chain theory."
This is just a repeat of wild claims made in a junk source. Who says the Hebrew is "acceptable"? Answer: only the finders; try showing some examples to an uninvolved Hebrew speaker. Who says the "Markov Chain theory" is anything but mathematical nonsense from unqualified people? Answer: nobody qualified. McKay (talk) 11:01, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Brendan, I agree this needs to be addressed. The biblecodedigest source is probably not a WP:RS, so we need to look at it, see if it can be resourced if the source is bad, and fact-tag it in the meantime. Also, I am in the process of contacting some closely connected reliable sources to discuss your complaints further. For now, due to your WP:COI and the fact that the balancing POV is not similarly represented here yet, I am POV tagging the entire article and ask you to be patient...Audacity overreacted to your complaint and I have restored the original criticism section so we can carefully work through your issues on a case by case basis, but please be patient. There are WP:BLP issues raised for Wikipedia...most notably due to the MBBK team's pejorative comments directed at the WRR authors and unfortunately Wikipedia must reflect the character and tone of MBBK's criticisms of the WRR authors and associates in an utterly neutral and unmitigated tone, as reflected by reliable Secondary sources see them. Unfortunately we cannot give WP:UNDUE weight to the MBBK views, nor mitigate the tone or character of MBBK's refutations, and unfortunately you are the Primary Source for those views. You are obviously more an expert on the topic than anyone who is currently involved, unfortunately your expertise in the topic is not an allowable basis for giving your views additional weight, as you have (a) the aforementioned conflict of interest, (b) a history of having created the article in an obviously biased state, and (c) represent MBBK's history of antagonism toward the other living persons mentioned herein.

Please be patient with the process. Thanks. WNDL42 (talk) 16:34, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

WNDL, I don't see why you restored the original criticism section. I'll admit that I'm a skeptic on bible codes, but my revisions were intended to cut the bias on both sides. I think that we should work from here instead of from the POV-laced old version. Λυδαcιτγ 21:25, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Audacity, I would respectfully disagree. The version you suggest (a) gives too much weight to Drosnin, (b) focuses on the MBBK "cheating" allegation, (c) fails to accurately characterize (by mitigation) the rancorous tone of MBBK's allegations, presenting the MBBK "critique" as far more reasonable tone than it actually used, particularly WRT the post publication comments of MBBK authors (d) utterly fails to give the maligned parties (WRR) sufficient "voice", which needs strong consideration from a WP:BLP perspective. Our goal on Wikipedia is not to "re-voice" the opposing parties (especially MBBK) to give the appearance of a more "civilized" MBBK discourse than what actually occurred. I'm sure Mr. McKay is a very busy man, let's give him time (a week or so) to speak for himself in addressing these points, I've raised the specifics above in my initial request for his clarifications. For now, I've tagged the article as NPOV, and I think that should lessen the need to act before we get Brendan's specific objections and responses. WNDL42 (talk) 15:45, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm more than busy, I'm about to go overseas. As for this "article", it is hard to know where to start since it is essentially a basket case. Once upon a time it was quite balanced except that some modern stuff was missing. Now it is nothing more than a Aish-like whitewash on behalf of the codes. This starts right from the beginning of the article:

• "The existence of these codes has been a topic of research by Old Testament scholars and students of Kabbalah for over a thousand years" - in fact there are only a tiny number (two definite and one or two arguable) of known examples from before Weissmandl in all of the vast kaballistic literature, so this sentence is false advertising. McKay (talk) 10:40, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

The reference is Jeffrey Satinover ("Cracking the Bible Code"; 1997), I have cross-checked it and found many others (Leonora Leet, etc). I will make sure the cites include page numbers. WNDL42 (talk) 17:26, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Satinover is a psychiatrist who is supposedly a specialist in "curing homosexuality". His book is a piece of polemic junk and not a reliable source. His history is wrong, his mathematics is wrong, and his astronomy is wrong. None of this is surprising, since Satinover is not qualified in any of those fields. Actually Drosnin's books are more reliable. McKay (talk) 07:44, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

• I have not seen Satinover's work so characterized, I am intimately familiar with the work and have cross-checked extensively since 1998. Please provide references to reliable (un-conflicted) third party refutations citing specific failures in Satinover and I will add those that are appropriate to the context in which the work is cited here. WNDL42 (talk) 19:48, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

• Satinover is a partisan. It would be blindingly obvious even if it wasn't known that he wrote the book at the behest of Aish Hatorah. You simply do not have a source that stands up as independent and reliable. As for errors in Satinover's book, it is easy to find reliable sources that contradict him. For one example of many, the passage about BaHaRaD is complete rubbish: the length of the synodic month used by the Jewish calendar is exactly the same as the value determined by the Babylonians and verified by the Greeks long before the Jews adopted it. Not approximately, but mathematically exactly. I can cite this to multiple scientific sources. Satinover got this completely wrong, and that is typical of his book. McKay (talk) 08:21, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

• I've reviewed Satinover's data (pg. 82) and from what I can and confirm via Google Scholar, his numbers are right. Satinover cites the RaMBaM as 29.53059 and the Kidinnu (Babylon) at 29.53061, a significant improvement on Meton (Greece) from 100yrs earlier at 29.52969. Satinover cites (chronologically) Meton (Greece), Kidinnu (Babylon), Hipparchus (Greece), Al-buruni (Arabia), RaMBaM (jewish) and Copernicus...in that order. Now, we're not using this in the article but I would be interested in seeing the sources you refer to that refute Satinover. Where exactly do you think Satinover got this "completely wrong"? WNDL42 (talk) 15:38, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

• To start with, none of the people you mention used the decimal system to express times. They either used the Jewish system (multiples of 1/1080 hours) or the Babylonian system (base 60 arithmetic). So to compare them properly you to need to use the values actually given rather than the approximate decimal equivalents given by someone's calculator. Because 1/1080 is a multiple of 1/(60x60x60), the synodic month used by the Jewish calendar can be written exactly in the Babylonian system. You can now look in Neugebauer, Astronomical cuneiform texts, Vol 1, pp 271-273, to see this exact value on cuneiform clay tablets by 250 BCE at the latest (it is traditionally ascribed to Kidinnu (ca 383 BCE) but it seems there is no solid proof). The same value (exactly!) was confirmed by Hipparchus using Babylonian eclipse records; see G. J. Toomer, Hipparcus' Empirical Basis for his Lunar Mean Motions, Centaurus, Vol 24, 1980, pp. 97-109. Later (ca 150 CE) the same value (exactly!) was published in Ptolemy's Almagest, which was distributed widely through the western world. The adoption of the same value (exactly!) into the Jewish calendar is traditionally dated to Hillel II (ca. 359 CE) but there is no contemporary mention of it until later. You can verify some of this without leaving your seat by clicking here. McKay (talk) 07:52, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

• "in more recent times have been a topic of study by modern mathematicians" - but there are hardly any such mathematicians (Rips, Michelson, who else?) so this is a false attempt to give respectability to a topic that in fact has hardly any respectability amongst mathematicians. McKay (talk) 10:40, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I will add more refs, including Gans, et al. (see above). I commented here previously that I was holding off on adding the more recent works on the hopes of finding refutations. In the meantime, Harelick and others are referenced and support the use of the plural. WNDL42 (talk) 17:26, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

• "influential mathematician Blaise Pascal, widely regarded as the 'father of probability science' and 'father of the modern computer' summarized his view in a one sentence assertion in his philosophical Pensées, concluding that 'The Old Testament is a cipher'." - but there is hardly any similarity between Pascal's opinions and the codes. Both Pascal and Newton believed the Bible's secrets could be extracted by properly interpretting the text, not by playing games with the letters of the text. So this is also false advertising. It is also irrelevant what a mathematician's opinion was outside his area of expertise. McKay (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 10:40, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

The Pascal reference was also provided by Satinover in 1997, and Pascal has been cited frequently since. I have cross-checked Satinover on his invocation of "The Old Testament is a cipher" for proper context by examining Pensees myself, and the "cipher" conclusion was in fact made in the explicit context of Kabbalah and the RaMBaM...so it's (a) notable, and (b) relevant, and (c) properly characterized in the article as a "philosophical" work. See Pensees#On_the_Bible. Excerpted for convenience here (emphasis mine) as follows:

WNDL42 (talk) 17:26, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Just your opinion placed into the acticle as fact. McKay (talk) 07:44, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Sir, the Pascal reference is made via Jeffrey Satinover's expert analysis, was sourced to him per WP:V, is notable as such, and cross-checked by me. I have provided the results of my cross check as a courtesy to you, rather than of necessity. Please keep your comments to the argument and it's supporting evidence rather than attributing to an editor's "opinion". WNDL42 (talk) 19:48, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

---

On the Bible

In Pensees' Section X "Typography", Pascal presents an unusual proof for a "double meaning" interpretation of The Bible.

642. Proof of the two Testaments at once.--To prove the two at one stroke, we need only see if the prophecies in one are fulfilled in the other. To examine the prophecies, we must understand them. For if we believe they have only one meaning, it is certain that the Messiah has not come; but if they have two meanings, it is certain that He has come in Jesus Christ.

The whole problem then is to know if they have two meanings.

That the Scripture has two meanings, which Jesus Christ and the Apostles have given, is shown by the following proofs:

1. Proof by Scripture itself.

2. Proof by the Rabbis. Moses Maimonides says that it has two aspects and that the prophets have prophesied Jesus Christ only.

3. Proof by the Kabbala.

4. Proof by the mystical interpretation which the Rabbis themselves give to Scripture.

5. Proof by the principles of the Rabbis, that there are two meanings; that there are two advents of the Messiah, a glorious and an humiliating one, according to their desert; that the prophets have prophesied of the Messiah only--the Law is not eternal, but must change at the coming of the Messiah--that then they shall no more remember the Red Sea; that the Jews and the Gentiles shall be mingled.

6. Proof by the key which Jesus Christ and the Apostles give us.

Pascal subsequently identifies the major problem of a "double meaning" reconciliation.

648. Two errors: 1. To take everything literally. 2. To take everything spiritually.

In the fields of Mathematics, Computer science and Information theory Pascal is widely regarded to be the "father of modern probability theory", the branch of science that underpins Cryptography. Pascal's strangely disembodied conclusion to his closing argument for the "double meaning" divinity of the Bible, and his choice of the word "cipher", which was the technical word for "cryptogram" in its day, has been cited frequently in the context of "Bible codes", referring to information that is purported to be encrypted in the Torah of the Old Testament.

691. If one of two persons, who are telling silly stories, uses language with a double meaning, understood in his own circle, while the other uses it with only one meaning, any one not in the secret, who hears them both talk in this manner, will pass upon them the same judgment. But, if, afterwards, in the rest of their conversation one says angelic things, and the other always dull commonplaces, he will judge that the one spoke in mysteries, and not the other; the one having sufficiently shown that he is incapable of such foolishness and capable of being mysterious; and the other that he is incapable of mystery and capable of foolishness.

The Old Testament is a cipher.

None of these references to Pascal establish a relationship between anything he said and the codes. McKay (talk) 07:44, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

This is the context in which Satinover's work placed the Pascal quote, sourced accordingly. I have provided the cross check here only as a courtesy. Please recall that "The threshold for inclusion on Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth". WNDL42 (talk) 20:03, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Verification has to be to a Reliable Source, not to nonsense written by a biased writer. SInce Satinover is obviously a partisan in the codes debate, everything you take from there should be presented as the opinion of a partisan, not as objective fact. McKay (talk) 08:11, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Feb 16 Edit summary

Brendan, I've attempted to address those of your concerns I could, after doing further research. I would offer that, to the extent that the additional research I did today in an attempt to verify and address your concerns, I found that the overall tone of the article was, on balance and with a couple of exceptions, a fair characterization. I hope you'll agree that the "toning down" in certain areas addressed these and helps further. I do need to note in passing however that both WRR and MBBK made exceptional claims, and a general guideline on Wikipedia is "Exceptional claims require exceptional proof", and specifically in the context of BLPs, see here.

This is a false statement. WRR claimed to find scientific proof of a miracle. That is certainly an exceptional claim. MBBK claimed the explanation is not miraculous but human. That is not an exceptional claim but matches what merely should be the assumption of every rational person. Equating the two sides is this debate is like equating astronomers and flat-earthers. McKay (talk) 07:52, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

The point I make here is that WRR indeed made exceptional claims wrt Torah codes, but those claims "did no harm" to specific living persons per se. MBBK's exceptional claims have a different character, and in the context (especially Bar Hillel's "Maddness in the Method") of WP:BLP, extensive voice must be given here to those who may have been harmed by the claims. If you know of any secondary sources (outside of the MBBK team) or additional evidence that speaks to explicitly verify what can only be called the "allegations" of MBBK, I will happily support adding them to the section now entirely devoted to MBBK's refutation.

You might have a point if you weren't ignoring the allegations of Doron Witztum. You cannot find anything in MBBK's writings that compares to Witztum's rants. To quote myself quoting Witztum: "... their philosophy to mislead and distort ... falsehoods and deceptions ... worthless parody ... a double deception ... incorrect and misleading ... unscientific ... designed to facilitate deceit ... the false data they rely on ... lies and ignorance ... a lie, calculated to mislead the public ... selective quote misleadingly conceals ... absurd mistakes ... deliberate deception ... obvious deception ... lies and deceptions ... perversity ... false data ... mistakes and deceptions ... fabricated confirmation ... feigned innocence and gross falsehood ... laden with deceit and feigned innocence ... repeat this lie while rewriting history ... one lie leads to another ... a tangle of lies ... propaganda ... lies ... deceptive figures ... foolish deceptions ... transparent deceptions ...". Kindly start showing some balance. McKay (talk) 07:52, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

(inline reply) Brendan, the article says:

"By 1999, meaningful debate mostly disappeared into the noise of rancorous diatribes among the participants as they accused one another of all manner of madness, deceptions and ill intent."

I'd suggest that there is only one reasonable interpretation of a dialog that began with "their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it.", and continued to decend from there, with all of the following cross-characterizatons of people and their intentions. So, in light of the fact that the statement, while historically accurate also (quite graciously, IMO) fails to underscore that MBBK "cast the first shots", and that Witztum statements were in WRR's defense, how would you further balance that statement? Please suggest an alternative that accurately characterizes the "noise", without mitigating. WNDL42 (talk) 19:25, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

First, the description "rancorous diatribes" is an uncited opinion and therefore violates the rules against Original Research. Second, the statement "their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it" is not at all an accusation of deliberate cheating and was carefully worded so as not to be such. There are countless examples of scientific experiments which were invalid due to methodological errors in the collection of the data without any intention of wrong-doing on the part of the experimenters. There is also a difference between intentional misbehaviour and scientific naiveté. McKay (talk) 08:09, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

• (inline reply) Hi Brendan...the "rancorous" term was used frequently in this explicit context, without more time to sift through these hits, I will (for now) provide this from 1997. By the time Bar-Hillel published "madness in the method", the participatants were talking past one another (diatribes), and a brief review of Maddness in the Method leaves me unwilling to cite it directly for purposes of Wikipedia decorum, so I hope you will take my point by examining the following explicit query. If you have a better word than rancorous, please suggest it, and provide a source similar to the one I cited. WNDL42 (talk) 21:56, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

• The source you cite (this) only uses the word rancorous to describe the argument between Jewish and Christian codes people. Incidentally, it is quite clear that you are a partisan yourself and your attempt to control the content of this article is inappropriate. When I have more time I will edit the article directly. McKay (talk) 10:00, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Mr. McKay, you have been provided this "workspace" and repeatedly been invited to suggest (explicitly) an alternative characterization of the post MBBK debate, and have declined. As an involved party, editing the article yourself would be inadvisable. Again, a more proper course of action would be to either (a) list the article at the WP:BLP noticeboard or (b) contact the WP:OFFICE, as has been done previously by other living persons mentioned in the article. WNDL42 (talk) 23:04, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Of course, further comments on content are welcome. However, if you have any further concerns about WP:BLP, you may wish to place the article for review at the BLP noticeboard, or perhaps contact the WP:OFFICE. WNDL42 (talk) 23:00, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

McKay's recent edits and criticism of "partisanship"

Brendan, there are no "non-partisans" in this debate. We don't "call out" the avowed athiests among the anti-codes researchers, and we don't "explore an expound" on the motivations of the participants (as we could with Bar-Hillel). Continuing to attempt to "spin" this will not work. You have a conflict of interest and (given the history of this article) should not edit it further. You have been invited to propose specific changes here, where you have done so they have been adderessed. User Audacity is a skeptic and can proxy for you. WNDL42 (talk) 12:23, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Harold Gans recent work...

Gans has stayed busy, anybody else following his stuff? WNDL42 (talk) 13:43, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

MBBK psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel

The selection of a psychologist with no mathmatical experience for inclusion on the MBBK team, in particular a psychologist who has been quoted several times as saying "there is no standard. I will not believe it regardless" -- in response to requests from codes proponents is something "interesting". recently I found this observation:

And this, in a nutshell, is why you should not be editing this article. In fact Maya Bar-Hillel has a masters degree in mathematics and a PhD under the supervision of the Nobel Prize winning mathematical pschologist Amos Tversky. She specialises in (amongst other things) the psychology of running statistical experiments. Obviously she is highly qualified for this task. (Compare this to your beloved Jeffrey Satinover who is a psychiatrist specialising in homosexuality.) Moreover, she did not ever say "there is no standard. I will not believe it regardless" and that is not her position on the subject. Like all good scientists, including me, she would be willing to believe in the miracle of the codes if the evidence was incontrovertible and overwhelming. She doesn't believe in them because she has studied the evidence for years (including running her own experiments). Btw, another proof of Satinover's ignorance is that he claims I am a statistician. McKay (talk) 08:49, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

McKay, can you explain what you meant by "Compare this to your beloved Jeffrey Satinover who is a psychiatrist specialising in homosexuality" ? Zeq (talk) 14:41, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

---

There seems to be a strange irony in the idea that the search for truth should first have to pass the test of philosophical bias, before the evidence is fairly considered.

In all candor there is no question as to the human elements involved on both side of this debate, and the issue of bias is indeed a two edged sword. According to Rips the majority of people that are introduced to the Bible-codes are prone to either immediate acceptance, or precipitous rejection of the codes, aptly illustrating the problem of bias as an all too human weakness (qtd. in Satinover, 207).

---

Brendan, in the context of "partisanship", would you care to comment? WNDL42 (talk) 13:05, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Isaiah 53

Should the article make at least some mention of the Isaish 53 megacluster? Over 1400 ELS's were discovered (beginning) in or around this passage, many over 20 letters long (I believe the longest to-date is 176 letters long). The probability (so I have heard) of these els's existing there by chance are staggering. And yet it goes without mention.

Two links containing information on this: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/310 and http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/488.

Examples of els's in this cluster: "Gushing from above was Yeshua my mighty name, and the clouds rejoiced." That was ONE els, not a cluster. Recently, it was extended to a 40 letter els: "Gushing from above was Yeshua my mighty name, my clouds rejoiced. Where? At the mountain, said Levi [This was probably another name for Matthew the evangelist]. Their light came. God is in it." Sounds very much like the transfiguration. And yet it's an els found in Isaish 53:5, word 2, letter 1. (see also: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/320). The relevant work is "Bible Code Bombshell, availabe on google books.

Just my opinion--but I think someone should research this in more depth and add it to the article. It certainly marks a new stage in Bible Cold research--now researchers are revisiting old two-word finds and finding that they extend (on either side) to whole phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. And with these extensions the odds grow increasingly slim that they appear by chance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sunshine20716 (talk) 22:30, 22 March 2008 (UTC) (talk) 22:28, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Rabbi Adlerstein misquoted

I am also a well known codes critic and so should not be editing this article but I would raise an issue that was raised to me by Rabbi Adlerstein. The neutral editor should address this issue. Thank you.

The paragraph that begins "Yitzchok Adlerstein, self described as "one of the most vocal skeptics" about the Bible Codes..." makes it sound like he has now become neutral. This is a misrepresentation of the original Rabbi Adlerstein post (see footnote 17) where his punch line is "If you want to believe in the phenomenon, you can as a matter of faith. But you really can’t call it science." Rabbi A's point is that Aumann has now become as skeptical of the subject as Rabbi A has long been. That's not the impression left by the skewed writing.

This paragraph needs to be changed.

Barry Simon IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Caltech —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.94.192.207 (talk) 02:00, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

"The great rabbi"

Who is this phrase referring to? And why are we using this wording? WP:PEACOCK? Moreschi (talk) (debate) 10:37, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

It refers to a selection of famous rabbis of the Middle Ages whose personal details were the subject of an experiment. This is explained in the paragraph "Rips and Witztum designed...". McKay (talk) 10:49, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

"Religious Belief Foundations" section

I propose that the section "Religious Belief Foundations" be deleted until replaced by a reasonable account based on scholarly sources. What is there now is a mishmash of crackpottery with scarcely any source that meets Wikipedia requirements. Some of it is supposedly based on a study of Dogon traditions!! Even from the viewpoint of the mainstream of Bible Code believers, both Jewish and Christian, little of this section makes sense. McKay (talk) 05:49, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

can you please tell me what claims you believe to be unsourced, i would be more than happy to try and find sources for you or explain why the current sources are valid (p.s. i know that the sentance in the first paragraph about how it no longer has any credibility in old testament studies is probabely true for secular bible studies but the wikipedia article on old testament studies also includes old testemant studies done theologically, bible codes are far from uncommon amongst jewish and christian sources, if you want i can bring sources to back this up, i know that i shouldve probabely started this in a new section but im new to wikipedia and still havent quited gotten the hang of it yet) :-) g.j.g (talk) 15:18, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Ok. Here it is in blue with my comments in red.

Hebrew religious, Kabbalaistic and 'Hebraic Sacred Science' what on earth is that?? traditions hold that the text of the Torah was originally given to mankind in a single long string of 304,805 This link goes to the personal jottings of some guy who wears a cowboy hat. Wikipedia only uses reliable sources.Hebrew characters. According to this tradition, the spaces, punctuation, sentence, chapter and five-book structures were all added later to form the modern Pentateuch. This needs (1) a clue as to what it has to do with the codes, (2) the scholarly take on the tradition.

For this reason, Hebrew tradition dictates that Torah scribes must complete many years of training, much of which has to do with learning the proper meditative techniques, before being allowed to copy Torah scrolls. [8] The tradition holds that not a single "jot or tittle", nor one iota of the Torah must be added, changed or omitted from "The Word".What does it have to do with the codes? The problem of the textual history of the Bible text is certainly relevant, but that needs a balanced presentation not a one-side recount of traditions.

Believers in this tradition sometimes point to a purely literal interpretation of the first seventeen words of the Gospel of John from the New Testament as evidence for their belief:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God".Which believers? What does it have to do with the codes?

In summary, the exclusive application of Bible Codes techniques to the Torah "string" is based in the belief that at the most fundamental level, God is a "Living Word", essentially, an almost infinitely complex information structure that begets all that exists, that the Torah is an information structure analogous to the DNA structure of all creation.[9][10] Some more recent beliefs among various groups suggest that "the Word was made flesh" in a literal sense; that the physical body of Jesus Christ was manifested divinely, that his DNA was somehow perfectly derived from "The Word".[11]. Researcher-spiritualist Gregg Braden and others have been exploring the human DNA string and claim to have discovered evidence of "The Word" in human DNA. Note the complete lack of mention of the codes in this paragraph. And who on earth is "Researcher-spiritualist Gregg Braden"?? The links here go to someone's self-published ramblings (not allowed by Wikipedia) and a blog (also not allowed). And notice the reference to "Dogon Traditions"; what on Earth do the Dogon have to do with it?

Since 1994, more recent (post WRR) views extend the analysis of biblical texts to include Old Testament texts outside the Torah and also to the New Testament, but these are rejected by Kabbalaistic tradition.Even with the right spelling, Kabbalistic tradition does NOT reject analysis of texts outside the Torah. In fact there are many examples amongst the writings of the great Kabbalists.

The traditional view of the codes further asserts that the "information" encoded in the Torah cannot be used to predict the future, and that at best the codes provide evidence of an all-knowing creator whose knowledge of the Universe and all of its possibilities spans both space and time.(1) no source given, (2) sermonising tone In this view, (from an information theoretical viewpoint)Give me a break! the letter-sequence of the Torah is to the Universe as the DNA sequence is to the human body, useful for understanding how the universe works on a macro scale, and illustrative of the "Grand Design" which encompasses all possible events, but nonetheless utterly unreliable for prediction of what specific combinations of micro-scale events will occur to create the 'reality' of human history.unsourced mumbo-jumbo with broken link

The traditional view conflicts with the more recent and highly sensationalized views suggesting that the Codes may be valuable as tools of prediction. These views of the codes first emerged in popular culture with the book The Bible Code by journalist Michael Drosnin, which suggests that the codes can be analyzed by computer to provide warnings for the future.This sentence is true, but no non-useless justification or source or background has been presented for it.

A more nuanced and academic view of the Codes was presented in 1997 by Jeffrey Satinover in Cracking the Bible Code. Satinover attempted to present the 'puzzle' in broader historical, mathematical and theological contexts, but this work was overshadowed by the more sensational Drosnin works that fueled the controversy.Calling it "academic" is an opinion and so needs a source.

And now that I have studied it properly, it is obvious that it is well below Wikipedia standards and I'm getting out my chainsaw.... McKay (talk) 11:28, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

in the future please give me time to respond before editing (which you really shouldnt be doing at all since your an involved party) i was reading your analysis and you made some good points (as well as some incorrect ones, kabbalists dod not anylise nonsacred texts) and i admit that the article as it is right now is rather flawed, i do not however think that we should ignore the religious background of a heavilly religious issue, i think that the section needs fixing up but must remain in some form.g.j.g (talk) 12:10, 23 June 2008 (UTC) o and one more thing, you eep referencing to mainstream jews and christians, what exactly is mainstream againg.j.g (talk) 12:12, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Books of the Tanach (OT) other than the Torah were used by all the great Kabbalists. Of course the Torah has a status higher than the other books, but all the books were used. Some even recommended looking beyond the Tanach:

This is the method that you are obliged to use for all the twenty-four books of Scripture that we have today, and after them, for all the words of the sages of blessed memory, and after that you apply it to all books of wisdom, for thereby you will ascend and perceive properly what is worthy of being perceived, regarding every matter. -- Avraham Abulafia, Otsar 'Eden Ganuz, Ms. Oxford 1580, fol. 171a; quoted from Moshe Idel, Language, Torah and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p100.

Idel explains that Abulafia is referring here to the serious business of transforming a text to discover names of God.

Mainstream Jews and Christians are other than those who think the Dogon have the answers. If you know how to write a section which is neutral, based on reliable respected sources and doesn't sound like crackpottery, feel free. And, finally, as a subject expert I am permitted to edit this article. McKay (talk) 13:09, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

while they viewed the works of kabbala as holy and studied them extensively as a way to connect to god they never viewed them as being spoken word for word by god and as such they never would have used them for bible codes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gavrielyosef (talk • contribs) 16:13, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

They did things like writing the text in a grid then reading it in a different order to discover names of God. It is not much different from reading in skips. McKay (talk) 14:07, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

thats the mystcal names of god which is unseperably intertwined with kabballah, find me en example of where a great and (currently) respected kabbalist tried to find world history in the zohar pardes rimonim or sefer yetzira —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gavrielyosef (talk • contribs) 16:11, 24 June 2008 (UTC)