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Bible code

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

Bible codes, also known as Torah codes, are words, phrases and clusters of words and phrases that some people believe are meaningful and exist intentionally in coded form in the text of the Bible. These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code, which claims that these codes can predict the future. These claims are strongly doubted by skeptics and by many religious groups.

Overview

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

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

File:BibleCode.png
Arrange the letters from Genesis 26:5–10 in a 33 column grid and you get a word search with "Bible" and "code". Myriad other arrangements can yield other words.

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

History

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

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

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

Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none were published in journals. Another experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places of their births and deaths (rather than the dates), was conducted by Harold Gans, an employee of the United States National Security Agency [1]. Again, the results were interpreted as being meaningful and thus suggestive of a more than chance result. These Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries. Drosnin's most famous success was to predict the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, allegedly using a Bible code technique. Opponents claim that in the political atmosphere of the time, predicting with no additional details the fact that Rabin would be assassinated is not compelling, though dramatic. In 2002, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject, called The Bible Code II. The Jewish outreach group Aish-HaTorah employs the Bible Codes in their Discovery Seminars to persuade secular Jews of the divinity of the Bible and to encourage them to become Orthodox.

Use of Bible code techniques also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, who is a Messianic Jew, and Grant Jeffrey. Another Bible code technique was developed in 1997 by Dean Coombs (also Christian). Various pictograms are claimed to be formed by words and sentences using ELS. By 2000, most books, and most web sites, devoted to the codes were produced by Christians.

Criticism

The primary objection advanced against Bible codes of the Drosnin variety is that information theory does not prohibit noise from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, similar patterns can be found in books other than the Bible. 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 are completely expected to appear.

Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby Dick could not yield ELS, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay found 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.) [2]

Other people, such as US physicist Dave Thomas, found other examples in many texts. In addition, 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 wrench out the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran worked successfully with McKay to look for evidence of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, the known coded references in 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.

Code proponents respond by claiming that the ELS letter arrays appearing in the Bible are better in some way than those appearing in other books. They also investigate alternative types of codes and cyphers to stay ahead of criticism. However, 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.

In 1999, McKay, together with mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in Statistical Science which they claim provides an adequate refutation of the earlier paper of Witztum and Rips. The paper was reviewed anonomously by four professional Statisticians who found their refutation completely conclusive.

Their main points were:

  • 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 by claiming the data was not collected properly. From the 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".
  • There is indirect evidence that the data was not, in fact, collected properly; that is, the choice of names and spellings was somehow biased towards those supporting the codes hypothesis.
  • Attempts at replicating the experiment failed to achieve the same result. From the paper: "A technical problem that gave us some difficulty is that WRR have been unable to provide us with their original computer programs. 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]".

The McKay paper did not go so far as to accuse Witzum and Rips of falsifying their experiment, instead it argues that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations. This fact, when combined with available wiggle room, was exploited by McKay et al. to duplicate the Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace.

There has been a continuing debate on these claims. (See the web pages cited below.)

The experiment of Gans has also received critical attention. Several attempts at replicating it, designed by mathematician Barry Simon, gave negative results. Finally, a committee at the Hebrew University, comprising both code proponents and skeptics, ran two replications using outside experts to compile the data. Both replications failed to find the phenomenon that Gans' original experiment claimed to find.

As of 2003, there are still a few university scientists who see evidence for such hidden messages. The most notable are Eliyahu Rips (see above) and Robert Haralick (an electrical engineer at the City University of New York). However, the overwhelming majority of scientists who have investigated these claims reject them.

ELSs are very sensitive to single-letter insertions. Jeffrey Tigay attacks the notion that there exists a single text in which to search for ELSs by pointing out the long history of scholarship on textual variations in the Hebrew Bible text. The significance of ELSs would seem to diminish in the face of hundreds or perhaps thousands of spelling drifts (often taking the form of letter insertions) in the text over time. There are similar variant readings and scribal distortions in the New Testament.

Software

See also

Relevant mathematial topics:

  • Ergodic theory, which forms the foundation for modern information theory
  • Information theory, which involves various statistical properties of long sequences of text
  • Ramsey theory, for an interesting and important notion of "unavoidable coincidences"
  • Symbolic dynamics, a subfield of ergodic theory which deals with (possibly multidimensional) symbolic sequences

References

  • Drosnin, Michael (1997). The Bible Code. USA: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-81079-4.
  • Drosnin, Michael (1997). The Bible Code. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81995-X.
  • Drosnin, Michael (2002). The Bible Code II: The Countdown. USA: Viking Books. ISBN 0-670-03210-7.
  • Drosnin, Michael (2002). The Bible Code II: The Countdown. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84249-8.
  • Drosnin, Michael (Forthcoming 2006). The Bible Code III: The Quest. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84784-8. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  • Satinover, Jeffrey (1997). Cracking the Bible Code. New York: W. Morrow. ISBN 0-688-15463-8.
  • Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg (1994). "Equidistant letter sequences in the Book of Genesis". Statistical Science. 9: 429–438.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, Gil Kalai (1999). "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle". Statistical Science. 14: 150–173.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Stanton, Phil (1998). The Bible Code - Fact or Fake?. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. ISBN 0-89107-925-4.
  • Haralick, Robert M.; Rips, Eliyahu; and Glazerson, Matiyahu (2005). Torah Codes: A Glimpse into the Infinite. Mazal & Bracha Publishing. ISBN 0-9740493-9-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Promoting bible codes:

Against bible codes:

Media coverage:

  • The Bible Code, transcript of a story which aired on BBC Two, Thursday 20 November 2003, featuring comments by Drosnin, Rips, and McKay.
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