The Bible Code (Paperback)

~ (Author) "ON September 1, 1994, I flew to Israel and met in Jerusalem with a close friend of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the poet Chaim Guri..." (more)
Key Phrases: hidden text states, same skip sequence, assassin that will assassinate, World War, Prime Minister, End of Days (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As God dictated the first five books of the Old Testament, He enclosed prophecies in a skip code--that is, every fifth letter in a sentence forms a word. The trouble is, the Code is so divinely complex, you need a computer to find it. Now that we have those, and author Michael Drosnin, you too can read God's secret messages in The Bible Code. Drosnin was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who turned into the Jeanne Dixon of the Middle East after "predicting" Rabin's assassination a year before it happened. Since then, with the help of mathematicians, he's been finding the bleak Future all over the Torah: an earthquake in L.A. (2010), a meteor hitting the Earth (2006, 2010, 2012, or all of these), and, of course, nuclear Armageddon (2000 or 2006). But don't write 2006 off yet, because the book says that the Code doesn't predict the Future, it merely reveals one possible future. Hmm. The Bible Code is this generation's The Late, Great Planet Earth. For those in the market, it delivers. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Time A new book says Rabin's murder was predicted, and there are dreadful things to come. Should we fear? -- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; 1st Touchstone Ed edition (April 7, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684849739
• ISBN-13: 978-0684849737
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (348 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #309,224 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The BIBLE CODE, December 29, 2003

By A Customer

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.

167 of 196 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars C'mon people, let's THINK here!, December 12, 2001

By	S. McDuffie (Pueblo, CO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Bible Code: Chariots of the Gods (Part II), April 12, 2004

By	Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Those who seek to know the future by studying records of the past will surely be intrigued by Michael Drosnin's THE BIBLE CODE. Drosnin's thesis is that the Old Testament has buried within it a hidden code that foretells events that have ranged from documented occurrences from the New Testament to those of a general/historical/geopolitical nature which are yet to come. Drosnin, with help from Israeli mathematicians Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg, devised a mathematical computer program that reduced the entire original Hebrew text to individual characters minus vowels in a single continuous stream, which was then configured into a flexible series of arrays. They then used what is now known as an Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) to identify recognizable word patterns that can be read from left to right, right to left, angled left, angled right, and just about any straight line pattern imaginable. The ELS program would then "skip" a fixed number of letters to determine if there were indeed a "hidden" message in the Torah. When they added actual names, dates, and places into the matrix, the ELS program scanned the entire Torah and revealed "hits" within close proximity to each other. These hits were hailed as references to people, places, events that were in the future of the events described in the bible. When, for example, they entered the name "Yitzhak Rabin," the ELS indicated the following hidden words: assassinated, 1995. And right on schedule, Israeli Prime Minister was assassinated on November 4, 1995.

What Drosnin and his colleagues have done was to tap into the universal desire for humanity for an explanation that our world and life are not a random series of chaotic events. There is a built-in tendency for the uninitiated to believe with no more proof than what is set forth in Drosnin's book. It is up to legitimate science to apply the rigorous methods of proof before the majority of hard-nosed scientists will accept this astounding thesis. There are two general objections to Drosnin: the philosophical and the experimental.

Philosophically, to accept Drosnin's thesis, one must first accept that a higher power at some point intervened to dictate to Moses the entire first five books of the holy Torah. This, by itself, is no small obstacle in that even the majority of those who read and accept the validity of the bible also admit that the Old Testament was not written exclusively by Moses or any other individual. Rather, the accepted current belief is that it was written, re-written, and edited many times over the centuries, with many entire passages added then deleted before the King James version was finally agreed upon in the 17th century. Since so many anonymous writers worked at cross purposes in distant lands at varying times, it is most unlikely that they were in some sort of secret cabal to produce a text that needed modern day computers to decipher.

(...)Experimentally, other mathematicians, most notably Brendon McKay of Australia, have called the entire process ridiculous and invalid. Among McKay's objections are the following:
1) With so many billions of letter combinations possible, it is a certainty that if you were to look long enough and hard enough in several dimensions, you will indeed find recognizable word patterns.
2) Drosnin does not indicate how many matched pairs of target phrases failed to return a hit before the use of synonyms returned a hit.
3) McKay was able to use other long texts (Moby Dick) using the same ELS program to get similar results.
4) Since Drosnin's original program eliminated vowels, then adding or subtracting a vowel from the target word would affect the probability of getting a valid hit.

(...)What THE BIBLE CODE boils down to is a gussied up new way to sell snake oil. Until such time as reputable scientists can predict then verify future events, then most educated readers will relegate Drosnin's theories to those of Erich von Donnikan, who similarly thought that human history has been altered by extraterrestrial influence. Besides, even if we know that a prediction is likely to be valid, then we are still left with the paradox of altering its occurrence so that it need not occur at all. What then the use of Drosnin's bible code at all.