The Bible Code is a book written by
Michael Drosnin, a reporter formerly with the
Washington Post and the
Wall Street Journal. First published in April 1998, it chronicles his five-year
investigation into the Code from a
secular perspective.
The theory here is that historical and future events are encoded in the original Hebrew text of the Bible. It's all about equidistant skip patterns. In order to reveal the code, the Hebrew is printed without spaces between words. This long line of text is then run through a computer which rearranges it into lines of equal length, forming a sort of crossword puzzle. For example, if the computer were skipping every fourth character of the text, it would be arranged in lines four characters in length, like the sentence below:
RIPS
EXPL
AINE
DTHA
TEAC
HCOD
EISA
CASE
OFAD
DING
EVER
YFOU
RTHO
RTWE
LFTH
LETT
ERTO
FORM
AWOR
D
Once the text has been arranged in this way, information is revealed horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. Related information is encoded closeby, or sometimes overlapping.
The Bible code was actually first introduced in a paper published in Statistical Science (1994, Vol. 9, No. 3) by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg entitled "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis." Rips and company searched the Hebrew text of Genesis for the names and birth and death dates of thirty-two sages from Biblical to modern times. They also searched a Hebrew translation of War and Peace and two other original Hebrew texts. All of the information they looked for was found encoded in Genesis. Nothing was found in the three control texts. After passing a peer review by three experts, the paper was published in Statistical Science. At the time of The Bible Code's publishing, no rebuttal had been offered.
Harold Gans, a senior code-breaker with the National Security Agency, heard about the surprising discovery made in Israel. In an effort to prove that the code indeed did not exist, he performed his own trials. He searched the original Hebrew text of Genesis for the same information that Rips and his group looked for. He found it all. Still unsatisfied, he decided that if the dates of the births and deaths of the sages were encoded, the cities of their births and deaths should be as well. Gans also added another thirty-four wise men to the list. He found all the information on his list encoded in Genesis.
Since the discovery of the Bible code, many historical events have been found encoded, such as:
- Bill Clinton's election as president
- Watergate and Nixon are encoded with "Who is he? President, but he was kicked out"
- "Economic collapse" is encoded with 1929
- The collision of Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter was found with the accurate date
- Hiter, Nazi, slaughter, and holocaust were all found together
- The date of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was found a year before it occured. After the event, the name of the assassin was also found.
Rewrite 07/20/01, 23:17. Thanks for the update, kto9. However, I'd be interested in a longer writeup detailing how the code was disproved.