Customer Reviews

The Bible Code

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A christian friend of mine challenged me to read this book. Apparently, he thought I would run straight to church upon completing it. Well, I skipped over the boring parts (which was most of it) and went straight to Drosnin's amazing discovery. I knew there was something wrong with Drosnin's code, but not being a mathematician or statistician, I was unable to quite put my finger on it. It seemed to me as if the people using the code were manipulating it to yield the results they wanted. Like a street hustler would in a shell game.

So, I used the same computer technology that "enabled" Drosnin to discover the extant of the "prophetic" powers of his code to find rational antidotes to this obvious hogwash. I got on the world wide web and found several good and rational refutations of Drosnin. Keith Devlin, Dean of Science at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California was the nicest and most generous of Drosnin's opponents.

Despite the fact that Drosnin has claimed that mathematicians have verified that he is onto something he cannot name one. I then tried to prove his point for him and found nothing to support this claim. To the contrary, what I found was mathematicians who said that it is no surprise that the Hebrew Bible spells words when you use a rather rudimentary and common encryption technique known as the "equal letter skip" It works like so: you start at the letter skip a fixed number of letters until you spell a word. Start with the first occurance of the letter "t" (rather the hebrew equivilant) in genesis, skip 49 letters and you come to an "o", skip another 49 letters and you come up with the letter t another 49 and you get h. Marvel of marvels you have the Hebrew word for Torah spelled out in the Hebrew bible. Suprising? Not really. In fact, it is to be expected. Just as mathematical probability says that if you flip a coin enough times, you are going to get 3 heads in a row, or 4 tails in a row. It just isn't surprising or even interesting: when you are allowed to pick the number of letters you can skip and you search through all of the thousands of verses of the Bible for pronouncable words, you are far MORE likely to find words, by several orders of magnitude, than you are to NOT find words.

The paragraph above is paraphrased from Devlin's interview on NPR the year after The Bible Code came out. According to Devlin, the odds are "extremely high" that Drosnin would find apparent messages in the OT, just as he and other mathematicians found the exact same messages imbedded in Moby Dick and War and Peace. An engineer friend of mine (you may be aware that engineers have to take math and stats classes ad nauseum) said that the only way that this would be a newsworthy event is if they DIDN'T find pronouncable words and phrases in the Torah. In that case, they would have beaten astronomical odds.

Drosnin wrecked his credibility by challenging skeptics to find seemingly prophetic words in other works of literature, and they did. Moby Dick revealed all of the same things, and other things that the Bible did not. They used Drosnin's software on an issue of the Wall Street Journal in which the word "Torah" appeared over 15,000 times. They also ran the Old Testament through Drosnin's software and found that the Bible states that the "CODE IS BUNK" and "DROSNIN FRAUD". The Hebrew Torah also yeilded "DARWIN WAS RIGHT" (my personal favorite).

The final nail was hammered into the coffin of Drosnin's credibilty when he appeared on NPR saying that he didn't even believe in God, but rather believed that extraterrestrial aliens put the encoded predictions and prophecies in the Hebrew Bible.

Please.

Nothing but BUNK.... Back in 1995, five writers from Israel claimed that by performing statistical analyses of the Bible, they were able to uncover secret prophecies that predicted events in modern times, such as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. These writers claimed to use scientific statistical techniques, but all they really did was play the childish game of taking the Bible and taking letters out every so often, seeing what kinds of words might come out of the mix. They claimed that they found their prophecies as a result, and this book was written to explain them. How well do the claims of this book hold up to scrutiny? Not surprisingly, they're easily shown to be completely false. Don't take my word for it, though. Listen instead to the experts in statistics who exposed the Bible Code hoax. Researchers Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, Gil Kalai and Brendan McKay published an article in the journal Statistical Science, edited by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in which they proved the Bible Code to be non-existent. There is no single, agreed-upon original Bible. Even the oldest version of the Bible varies from one another. Therefore, any attempt to pick out, for example, every 5th word would be different for each Bible. Besides, even these versions of the Bible are not the original texts, but highly edited versions of more ancient works. - The procedures followed by the Bible Code team were not in compliance with scientific standards because they were repeatedly changed with the goal of finding a code. Such statistical tuning can eventually find a few apparently meaningful codes in any long book, but for every such coherent fragment there is a huge amount of gibberish. The focus on the tiny bit of apparent coherence to the detriment of the huge amount of nonsense is a biased attempt to interpret white noise into a supposedly divine message. Basically, what the researchers are saying is that if you let a two-year-old bang away on a keyboard for long enough, some words that appear to have meaning will be accidentally typed. That doesn't mean that there is any secret keyboard-banging code that the two-year-old was trying to get out. The Bible Code team started out trying to find patterns of certain kinds but not of others. For example, they tried to find the birth and death dates of famous rabbis, but didn't do the same for other figures in popular culture, like the Beatles. By starting out with the goal of forcing these particular names out of the text and not giving up until the goal was achieved, the Bible Code team missed a huge amount of other coincidental wordings that would by far drown out the supposed prophecy. With enough work, a person could find a so-called code to find prophecies about Big Bird and Snuffleupagus in the Bible. In sum, a huge majority of scientists and mathematicians agree that the Bible Code is nonsense. Why would you go out and buy this book knowing that it doesn't measure up to even the most basic professional standards of reason and logic? Well, it might be because you really want to believe that the Bible has some kind of secret divine message for you. That's telling, because it's exactly the same motivation that led the writers to concoct their ridiculous scheme. This book is an exercise in blind faith in religion. It's not science. If you want to read religion, go look in the religion section, but leave this piece of bunk where it belongs.

The first thing you must know about this book is that the author - while claiming to be a journalist (he makes this claim many, many times, as though insecure about his credibility) - cites *no* sources for any of the "research" he quotes claiming that this Bible Code is real. There are no footnotes; no references to any published documents; no journals or page numbers to cross-check. This alone should raise tons of red flags among any sensible and intelligent reader.

Secondly, Drosnin contradicts himself many times throughout the book. Here's only one example. On page 55 he states that "Atomic Holocaust" apprears only once in the Bible code, and he links it with the dates 1995-1996. On page 126 he agains cites reference to "Automic Holocaust", stating this occurance is the "only time it is encoded inthe Bible", yet he cites it with a completely different date, 2006. First, why are there two seperate references to "automic halocaust", if there is only one occurance? Secondly, how can either be credible if there is more than one reference to a date? And since the same Hebrew letters are used for both text and numbers, couldn't you pull *any* date out of the text if you really want to?

This is frightening stuff, not because the Bible has a hidden code, but because so many people are duped by this. We want desperately to know what will happen in the future, without regard for our own personal consequences or our own personal relationship to God. Hal Lindsay proved the gullibility of society in the 70s with his "Late Great Planet Earth" nonsense. He even went so far as to predict the Second Coming of Christ (something the Bible is VERY clear cannot be known by anyone except the Father - even Jesus doesn't know the date, so how did Hal get it??). Lindsay's legacy in the church is still being felt: self-centeredness, abandonment of missions, fixation with quasi-science rather than concern for lost souls. (And Hal is still pedalling his garbage today, much to my amazement.)

Mr. Drosnin's book belongs in the circular file. His writing is atrocious, and his journalistic integrity is nil. The Bible has alot to say about the human condition and God's remedy for our sin - read it. The Bible Code is science-fiction. If that's all you're after, go out any buy some Asimov. Isaac may have been hopelessly humanistic, but at least the man could write.

I had been meaning to read this controversial book for some time now, but only recently did I pick The Bible Code up to see just what all the brouhaha was really about. This is certainly an interesting subject, but I was a little disappointed in the theory, arguments, and proofs presented here. As the book progressed, the open mind I began the book with started to shrink, as Drosnin began to backpedal and hurt his own case. I don't doubt the author's faith in the method and results of his work, but this book falls way short of convincing me that the Bible Code exists and, if so, that its existence is even meaningful. The book has a number of weaknesses. First of all, Drosnin is a former reporter working outside of his trained field; The Bible Code is supposedly built on a sophisticated mathematical model, and its interpretation requires significant knowledge of the Hebrew language in its original form - the original language of the first five books of the Bible. He presents us with printout after printout of data, but all I can do is stare at the Hebrew letters; the actual scientific paper that first delved into this mathematical issue is included in an appendix, but the math is way over my head. Drosnin says other mathematicians have verified that the model is correct, but I just have to take his word for it. I simply don't have any significant data upon which to form an opinion yea or nay about the Bible code. Drosnin may actually have done better to include no illustrations whatsoever; what I see are foreign letters marked in areas all over a given page; it's like a find-a-word puzzle, only the letters of your words don't even have to be connected directly. Odds of given terms "crossing" one another on one page are given, but I still don't know how these odds were determined. Drosnin also indicates that the same model was run against two other long books and showed no kind of code whatsoever, but two books alone seems to be a small sample set, and I have no idea how many attempted searches were done in these limited sample sets.

The "evidence" sounds pretty good at first. Drosnin constantly repeats the fact that the Bible Code predicted the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister Rabin, the collision of the comet Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter, the start of the first Gulf War, etc., all to the very day. Tell me more, you think to yourself. This is where Drosnin starts to slip, however. He spends most of his time talking about Armageddon, specifically how Jerusalem will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. He was certainly right in naming terrorist acquisition of weapons of mass destruction to be the greatest threat to the modern world, but prophesying trouble in the Middle East doesn't exactly require a Karnak. He predicts that then-Prime Minister Netanyahu will be assassinated and that Israel will be attacked in 1996. This book was published in 1997, completed after 1996 came and went. Suddenly we find Drosnin discovering that the word "delayed" just so happens to turn up alongside all of those dire predictions of his. He actually expresses the opinion that a delay in Netanyahu's visit to Jordan prevented the Armageddon he had predicted. The Bible Code, he now decides, must include eventualities, things that may come to pass, things that we can prevent from coming to pass. This back pedaling hurts his credibility quite a bit in my eyes.

In summary, I can't argue the mathematical validity of The Bible Code in any way, shape, or form, but Drosnin's arguments fail to convince me that he is right about this subject. He can barely find anything in his code until that "thing" has already happened, and it seems to me that finding a few related words after the fact on a sheet full of letters is no difficult feat. I do know that there is one definite error in the book, as Drosnin (and the Bible Code) shows that FDR declared war on Japan on December 7, 1941, when war was not declared until the following day, December 8. As for the predictions he did make about the future, he doesn't exactly go out on a limb. There will be strife in the Middle East and a series of earthquakes in Japan. These things happen every year, so these are hardly convincing prophetic tests of his code. I can't say The Bible Code does not exist the way Drosnin says it does, but it will take a whole lot more evidence to ever convince me of such a fact.

I first picked up Michael Drosnin's book when I was spending the summer with my father three years ago. I had some extra time for reading and stopped in at the library. I have always been fascinated with language and thought that it would be interesting to find some things out about the Hebrew of the Bible and what different claims were being made about it. Until that time, I had not studied any biblical Hebrew (or Hebrew of any other time, for that matter). The intricate problems of the Hebrew language did not have any root in my mind. At the same time as I checked out this book, I borrowed the "Living Language" course on modern Hebrew, hoping to familiarize myself with the alef-bet and some basic words before I began my reading.

I read the book and was well-persuaded by it. I thought that it had some interesting speculations in it. Some of the things that really bothered me, though, in my first reading were dealings with Armageddon and the different aspects of the end of the world, which I already did not believe in. It was interesting that he used the book of Revelation in correlation with the Torah text. I would not expect someone with a real knowledge of the Torah to do that.

Since that time, I have studied biblical Hebrew rather deeply. In first-year grammar, you learn that there are three vowel letters (matres lectionis) that are really consonantal representations of vowel sounds (vav, heh, and yod). These letters were often optional, making the spelling of words variable. The different spelling of words are called plene (full) and defective. "Plene" means a word has vowel letters, and "defective" means they are lacking. The problem that this raises with the Bible Code is that in several places vowel letters are lacking between manuscripts. Add to this the fact that the text became more plene through time, and you have to wonder what the basis for the "code" is. Should not the code be based on the original "God-given" text of the Torah? Instead, we have the redacted version that came through an entire alef-bet shift from paleographic Hebrew to square script Aramaic letters (which is what Drosnin shows in his book). Beyond this, during the time of Ezra there is supposed to have been a spelling redaction, where matres lectionis were added to make the text more accurate to read. Where is the base for the code?

Basically, I have come to realize that the Bible Code is a fantasy. Michael Drosnin's rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew is no springboard to intelligent thinking. Rather, what he has produced is a book for ignorance, built from ignorance. Surely, professor Ripps does not agree with Drosnin (as he has disassociated himself from him) and would confront his conclusions. While the Kabbalists did believe in Gematria and they are interesting for Midrashic purposes, the Bible Code is way off-base. It cannot be looked at by any intelligent thinker as any more than flat superstitious lies.

Consider the following: The way the Bible Code works is by treating all the letters in a Hebrew book of the Bible as a giant acrostic. The computer scans the text, skipping every other letter to try to find words in close proximity that are key words to a major event, such as "JFK Assassin Texas" (using the modern Hebrew equivalent for these words). If it finds a string that describes the essence of a major event, then it has predicted the future.

Here are the catches and the reason the Bible Code is a farce: 1) The decoders improve their odds of finding something that appears significant by listing as many keywords for an event as they can think of. The computer only needs to find two or three out of the list. 2) If the computer doesn't find two or three key words for an event, it moves to skipping to every third letter, then every fourth and so on up to skipping to every hundredth letter or every five hundredth (whatever it takes to find the desired words). 3) If that still doesn't yield anything, the computer goes through the whole process all over again, beginning at the second letter of the book being scanned; and if that doesn't yield a few of the significant words, it starts skipping from the the third letter of the book, and so on. 4) If that still doesn't yield a few words from their list describing an historic event, they simply begin the whole process all over with the next book of the Bible. 5) The Hebrew Bible uses only consonants; therefore, B-R-D (to use an English example) could be BIRD or BOARD or BORED or BROAD or BRIDE or BEARD or BREAD or BRED or BARED or BREED or ABROAD or ABOARD. You get the point. In other words it's like playing jeopardy with all the vowels free and you can put them anywhere you need them.

With thens of thousands of consonants in a single book of the Bible and so many words possible from just a few consonants plus hundreds of ways of skipping through the letters and several books to try it in, the truth is that it is NOT unlikely that the decoders would find significant words in close proximity describing an event. The truth is that it is nearly inconceivable that they would be unable to find enough words in proximity to cryptically describe every event in history, no matter how small.

Finally, consider this: if the code were genuine, then omitting a single letter early in the text would obliterate the code because its all about placement of the letters. (All the letters that followed would slide forward one space.) Though the Hebrew manuscripts have been handed down with extraordinary accuracy, none of them agree with each other exactly to the letter. It's a crock.

I was in the library doing a school assignment when a particular book on the shelf across from me caught my eye. Against my better judgement, curiousity got the better of me and I borrowed it. The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin is one insanely crazy book, and a very deceptive one at that. What the author claims to be encodings in the bible, from possibly, a higher intellegent race (in his case he went so far as to claim the voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush to be that of an alien)is just a bunch of chance word findings among more than 304,000 + different words from the Bible. I am not a math wiz, nor am I an expert in the subject, but the info that Mr. Drosnin gives the reader in his silly book, is enough to bring out the skeptics in all of us. He never goes into detail about the math formula used to get the "bible code", only to say that it has been proven to be legit by every well known mathematician, scientist and other gullible academic. I've done my own research and have learned that many other cryptic warnings and passed assassinaitons were embedded in many other books, using the same formula, Moby Dick being one of them. Mr. Drosin also seems to think that the majority of the English speaking Western world would be able to read pages of Hebrew characters with the occasional circle,square,diamond,etc shape to signify the secret names and dates/events that had been secretly encoded. His pages of "crossword puzzles" didn't help to explain his proof just because I didn't know what lines of the Bible were being used. For all I knew, he could have been stringing together whatever characters would help him get the "prediction" he wanted. And his "predictions" always seem to come after the event had actually taken place. It gave me the impression that he does random searches in his database of Hebrew words for possible real life events. After reading the book, I realized right away that he never mentions once about the attacks of Septembter 11, nor is Sadaam, Iraq, President Bush or Tony Blair ever mentioned. Some prophecy.

This book became really stale, really fast and he nearly lost me at his theory of God being possibly alien. What makes this book even more ill-fated is the fact that although he insists in the legitimacy of this code, he does not believe in God nor is he religious.
Huh?
You'd expect someone who claims to have stumbled across a cryptic biblical code to become a true believer in a second.

As a deeply religious person and devout believer in God, I took great offense at this book. It doesn't have the power to look into the future, all it has is the power of mass (and false) hysteria. For those of us that are religious, there is one message that Mr. Drosnin fails to report from the bible.

Beware of false prophets.

Michael Drosnin's book touched a personal chord for me because I was involved in the code debate since last December or so, obtained the original Statistical Science article that this book is based on about a year after it was published in 1994, and first learned about the codes around 1989. I read this book and it is unfortunate that this journalist doesn't understand the precise mathematical structure of the codes, has made a few spelling errors in Hebrew, fails to give due credit to Doron Witztum who is the most important codes researcher in the world, and even more dangerously, believes in his unique completely unsubstantiated claim that codes can be used to tell the future that we do not know. Because of his unfamiliarity with the proper procedures, several of the examples that he found are not really significant at all and may be found in any other book such as Moby Dick and War and Peace. The real Torah codes discovered by Doron Witztum can hold up under the harshest statistical tests including the method originally suggested by Persi Diaconis that is brought down in the original Statistical Science paper, the Best Star Team methodology developed by Prof. Robert Haralick in response to several criticisms of the original method, as well as other stringent tests. There is a solution, however, for those who have read the book and want to know the real science behind it as well as those who have dismissed the entire phenomenon because of Drosnin's weak portayal of the matter. The solution is to read Dr. Jeffrey Satinover's new book Cracking the Bible Code and to wait for Doron Witztum's book on the Bible Code which may come out in a few months. Hopefully this will result in more interest and serious research in the "codes."

Having read a fair number of arguments about why this book is a hoax, I concur with the critics and don't find it convincing. Sure, it's interesting to think of the idea that a master being, G-d if you will, encoded the Bible with everything that will every happen or everything that could happen. As a Jewish person who has studied Torah and Old Testament in college and in religious school, I concede that there are lots of interesting phenomenon in Hebrew: Gematria for instance, which uses the Hebrew number equivalents to prove points. As much as I like the idea, this book is bogus. It was so bad that it made me think that it was an elaborate hoax to sell books. The author spends a lot of time telling us that he worked for the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as how much time he spent flying back and forth to Israel to warn various political figures that they might be knocked off by a killer any time now. The science is shaky, and the author shifts the sands constantly to prove his point. Once an event happens, he finds it in the code, but for future events, all he can say is that any outcome is only a possibility until it happens. Give me a break! Now I'm motivated to check up on the sites and articles that show exactly what is wrong with his argument. I'm not a mathematician or a biblical scholar, but believe me you won't need to be either to see through this pathetic excuse for unbiased scholarship. Give me a few hundred thousand dollars and a computer and I'll show you that the cartoon Garfield contains everything we need to know about quantum physics!

The codes exist, that is for sure, but are they significant? I wasn't convinced at all. The first thing you notice is how flexible the author's rules are. They can start at any Hebrew consonant they want and choose the line width as convenient. Secondly given a sequence of Hebrew consonants there is room for interpretation meaning they can get many words from the same sequence of letters. Given such a huge playing field and a computer they can find what they want. I could go on but this book isn't worth it. The only other thing to say is that it is quite boring, many examples over and over with the same emotional padding to explain them. It's a bit like a tabloid article that is drawn out. The only thing I felt convinced of was that the men behind this bestseller were in marketing and not mathematics. It's a clever way to make money, I'll give them that.