Bible Code: Exposed
“Newsweek,” “Time,” Oprah and numerous other media outlets were abuzz in 1997 over The Bible Code, authored by Michael Drosnin. The thesis is that using a formula of equidistant letter sequence in the Hebrew Bible coded messages could be found related to events transpiring currently.
Bible code enthusiasts said their findings statistically proved the existence of God beyond any doubt. A virtual cult grew up around the work.
To unlock the code 304,805 Hebrew letters from the Hebrew Bible were arrayed without punctuation or spacing. By going forward, backwards, or vertical at varying “step distances” names of current persons and places were decoded.
In defense of his work Drosnin said, “In experiment after experiment, the crossword puzzles were found only in the Bible. Not in War and Peace, not in any other book, and not in ten million computer-generated test cases”.
Oops! As it turns out the same principal was used by David E. Thomas on War and Peace, Moby Dick, the Supreme Courts 1987 ruling of Edwards v. Aguillard, and other works. Using the sequential step distance technique the analysis proved just about any thing one wants to find can be found by varying the sequences. For example, in Moby Dick references were found to the “predictions” of assassinations of Indira Gandhi, Rene Moa, Leon Trotsky, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy.
That should have converted Drosnin for he had said, “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I’ll believe them”.
In just the opening pages of War and Peace there are over six puzzles linking “Hitler” and “Nazi.”
Drosnin claims to have found the date the Gulf War, January 18, 1991, the Waco disaster, April 19, 1993, and the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995, in the Hebrew Bible. It seems strange that the date for the Gulf War was found in the words “3rd Shevat,” not in the Gregorian calendar as the other dates were found using the Gregorian calendar.
Extensive research has proven codes can be engineered and made to happen. One simply needs to know how to sequence the numerous possibilities. Scientists have enjoyed employing the principle on other works since the publishing of Drosnin’s book.
Dr.Eliyahu Rips, one of the authors of the study that started the Bible Code craze, has made the following statement regarding the work of Drosnin: “All attempts to extract messages from Torah codes, or to make predictions based on them, are futile and are of no value. This is not only my opinion, but the opinion of every scientist who has ever been involved in serious Codes research.”
An Equidistant Letter Sequence study has been made of Genesis in which there were 60 links between “code” and “bogus”. Could it be that God has encoded a message to let it be known the idea is unreliable?
Our Lord has given us more truth than we are using without having to look for some hidden meaning. To try to add to the Bible is to take away from it. That’s dangerous business.