Does God’s Hand Write in Code?

A Prague rabbi--who escaped a Nazi death train--claimed to have discovered coded messages in the Hebrew Bible shortly after World War II. He declared, among other things, that the word “Torah” was spelled in the books of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy--you just had to take the first letter of each book and skip ahead 50 letters at a time.

Then in 1986, two Israeli scientists, out of curiosity, started running the Hebrew letters of Genesis through a computer and reported that all sorts of historical names and events were “encoded” in the sacred texts--most notably names of three dozen famous rabbis. Others with computers then found word combinations linked to 20th century wars and assassinations, including clusters such as “Hitler,” “Auschwitz” and “Holocaust.”

Soon, Orthodox Jewish groups were touting the “Torah codes” as evidence of God’s hand on all of human history. Christians got into the act, too, claiming to have discovered coded phrases about Jesus within the Old Testament, citing them as confirmation that he was indeed the awaited messiah.

These days, the codes are a certifiable phenomenon--and a religious controversy.

About 30 Internet sites are devoted to them, seminars on them feature Hollywood celebrities and at least three books decipher the supposed hidden messages. The latest was just released with a publicity blitz suggesting that familiar Bible narratives, written 25 centuries ago, contained predictions of the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin--prompting complaints that this was taking the codes too far into the realm of sensationalism.

But movie rights have already been sold. And the codes have clearly become part of public consciousness--Jay Leno has satirized them in his monologues.

To the unconvinced, the drive to find hidden codes in Scriptures is a meaningless “word search puzzle,” or worse, “magic in the guise of science.”

The critics see the burgeoning fascination as only the latest effort to replace faith with scientific certainty, resembling attempts to authenticate Bible stories through expeditions to find the remains of Noah’s Ark or to prove with carbon dating tests that the Shroud of Turin bears the image of the crucified Jesus.

To Michael Shermer of Altadena, publisher of Skeptic magazine, the “discoveries” of secret messages in the Bible can be compared to perceived images of the Virgin Mary in light and shadows on a wall. “The human mind is very good at finding patterns,” Shermer said.

Critics lament that the codes debate diverts attention from core questions of faith. “What does this have to do with values and one’s direction in life?” asked Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, director of UCLA’s Hillel student center.

More than one rabbi has pointed out that code advocates may eventually reap their own embarrassment if their computer programs discover the wrong message in the Bible. “What if someone found a code that says, ‘Just kidding,’ ” asked Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein of Yeshiva University in Los Angeles.

But the “codes” have undeniable appeal to legions of devotees.

Over the last decade, 60,000 people around the world have been exposed to the messages during $25 daylong seminars run by Aish HaTorah, an Israeli-based organization that seeks to bring secular Jews back into the fold.

Kirk Douglas hosted one seminar last year at Universal City. Actor Jason Alexander--the nebbishy George on TV’s “Seinfeld”--hosted another in February at UCLA, attracting a sellout crowd of 430.

To one attendee, Century City attorney William Dickerman, it was “mind-blowing stuff.” Although having a secular and “skeptical” background, he found himself driven to a spiritual search after hearing how a computer found the names of two dozen trees mentioned elsewhere in the Bible all encoded in the short Garden of Eden story.

“A very appealing explanation,” Dickerman concluded, “is that God wants us to know the truth and makes it accessible in a way befitting each age.”

Now, when “so many people don’t believe in miracles,” he said, God is using “scientific methods.”

The notion of scientists scrutinizing the Bible is not new. Isaac Newton, the 17th century physicist, was convinced the Old Testament contained a “cryptogram set by the Almighty,” a biographer wrote, and that he might find hidden riddles of “past and future events divinely foreordained.”

Taking a Statistical View of the Torah

During the current frenzy of code breaking, Jewish practitioners have focused on the first five biblical books, known as the Torah.

Their method resembles what was done by cryptanalysts on both sides in the Cold War. They tried to read each other’s secret communications by submitting intercepted messages to computer analysis, hoping that meaningful words and phrases would emerge.

First, all the letters of a text--304,805 in the case of the Torah--are combined in a single chain. Then the code breakers look for messages by linking letters at regular intervals, taking every 10th one, for instance, or every 142nd--sometimes reading forward, sometimes backward.

Although searches conceivably can be conducted by hand, the possible combinations are so staggering that it takes a computer to scan an entire text for desired words or names.

Such computer searches lead both Jewish and Christian code proponents to maintain that the Hebrew spellings of Hitler, Auschwitz and Holocaust could be found grouped at 22- or 13-letter intervals in Deuteronomy 10:17-22.

Claims like that might have remained a backwater curiosity except for one elaborate test, printed in a scientific publication. In August 1994, the journal Statistical Science published a paper describing research on the Book of Genesis led by physicist Doron Witztum of the Jerusalem College of Technology and mathematician Eliyahu Rips of Hebrew University--the two men who had been running computer tests on the sacred texts since 1986.

The editor at the time, Robert Kass, chairman of the statistics department at Carnegie-Mellon University, wrote that the paper was offered “as a challenging puzzle” to readers of the quarterly published in Hayward, Calif. Outside evaluators were “baffled,” he reported: “Their prior beliefs made them think the Book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern-day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks the effect persisted.”

The Israeli scientists originally sent the journal the results of an experiment that pulled out from Genesis the names and birth or death dates of 34 eminent Jewish rabbis who lived between the 9th and 18th centuries.

“Simply put, the results were stunning,” said Rabbi Daniel Mechanic, who heads the U.S. headquarters of Aish HaTorah’s Discovery Seminar in Brooklyn, N.Y., the group that touts the validity of the codes at seminars.

But the peer review committee for Statistical Science was not satisfied, Kass said. The panel asked that the authors attempt to find the names and birth or death dates of 32 additional rabbis drawn, like the first group, from the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel.

The authors reported finding them too--and said the odds were 62,500-to-1 against that happening by chance. As a control, a Hebrew translation of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” was tested for similar data. The result? No bonanza of rabbis’ names in the secular novel.

Harold Gans, a seminar teacher with Aish HaTorah who recently retired as a mathematician with the U.S. Department of Defense, said he has taken the experiment another step by finding the locations of the births and deaths of the 32 rabbis encoded in Genesis.

Also found in a section in Genesis, Mechanic said, were words and phrases linked to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat: “Sadat,” “parade,” “the president will be shot,” the name of assassin Chaled Islambooli and 5742, the Hebrew year corresponding to 1981.

The code project received wider exposure in October 1995, in the magazine Bible Review.

“To any rational mind, it’s got to be wrong,” said editor Hershel Shanks. “But it’s been under intensive scholarly review . . . and I decided to put it out there.”

Then came the counterattack by no shortage of skeptics.

Letters to the magazine questioned how many failures occurred while looking for word pairs and how many contradictory or religiously offensive pairs went unmentioned, such as “water” and “dry,” or “Yahweh,” one of the biblical names of God, and “liar.”

In addition, because Hebrew is written with consonants only, critics said many words contained only a few letters--”Torah,” in Hebrew, has only three--greatly increasing the chances that some words could be found in profusion.

Dispute Between Bible Researchers

Indeed, some of the critics’ arguments now are being used by Mechanic and colleagues to counter claims by two fundamentalist Christian writers that “Yeshua” can be found repeatedly in parts of the Hebrew Bible.

A 1996 paperback, “The Signature of God” by Grant R. Jeffrey of Toronto--which includes research by Yacov Rambsel--has risen high on evangelical bestseller lists this year. Its core contention is that Old Testament texts, written before the birth of Jesus, contain coded references to him.

The two men found “Yeshua is my Name” at 20-letter intervals in Isaiah 53:10, a verse many Christians regard as foreshadowing Jesus’ punishment. They also said Leviticus 20:27, which mentions death and blood, contains the phrase “Yeshua’s blood.”

But Aish HaTorah researchers reject the idea that the Hebrew Bible--the same verses they say contain hidden Jewish references--also contains hidden validations of Christianity.

Because “Yeshua” in Hebrew has only four letters--two of them among the most common in the Torah--it will appear accidentally thousands of times, they say.

To belittle Jeffrey’s touted discovery of “Jesus is my name” in Isaiah, Mechanic reported that his organization was able to find “Muhammad is my name” 21 times and “Koresh is my name” 43 times--a reference to slain Waco, Texas, cult leader David Koresh.

Mechanic also complains that the Christian writer, unlike the Jewish researchers, does not merely cite words and phrases found in code, but draws correlations between such discoveries and the actual Biblical text in which they are found--as when he says that coded references to Jesus turn up “in every single verse that is a prophecy about the messiah.”

Drawing a correlation between a section of biblical text and words encoded in it is a subjective exercise, the rabbi said, similar to “reading clouds, tea leaves, and Tarot cards, and can undoubtedly be exploited to promote one’s religious or political agendas.”

Yet the Jewish and Christian researchers agree on two points: that no codes are found in the New Testament, which was written in Greek, and that it is wrong to try to use the codes to predict the future. They note that the Bible admonishes against fortunetelling.

But the newest book on the codes suggests that the texts abound with stunning predictions, including the sort of headline-grabbing prophecies that tabloids like to attribute to Nostradamus, the 16th century astrologer.

Delivered to bookstores late last month, “The Bible Code” was promoted by full-page newspaper ads stating that the author, ex-Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Drosnin, tried through a friend to warn Israel’s Rabin one year before his assassination that hidden messages suggested he was in peril.

Drosnin, who wrote a 1985 book on the last years of Howard Hughes, also said he found a code pointing to a “great earthquake” in Los Angeles in 1994 and another in 2010. He has been making the rounds of talk shows and Warner Bros. announced that it purchased film rights to the Simon & Schuster book.

“The Bible Code,” however, drew immediate denunciations from other leading code advocates, who say they worry that the sensationalistic book could undermine the scientific basis of their own work.

“It’s so irresponsible and subjective--there are no rules to it,” said Mechanic, the New York rabbi.

Drosnin writes that he found the encoded name of Rabin intersecting a plain text phrase in Deuteronomy 4:42 which he translated, “assassin that will assassinate.” After Rabin was killed, Drosnin said, he also found “Amir,” the last name of the assassin.

But Mechanic said the phrase in Deuteronomy should be translated, “murderer who murders” and could be interpreted by some as an accusation against Rabin. As for finding the last name of the assassin, Mechanic said, “That combination of letters probably could be found 100,000 times in the Torah.”

One Method Produces False Prophecies

Last week, the two Israeli scientists who did the original computer experiments held a news conference in Jerusalem to reject the predictions in the new book.

“No distinction is made between statistically valid codes and accidental appearances, which can be found in any book,” Witztum said.

To make his point, the physicist displayed a printout of biblical text showing “Churchill” and “will be murdered” intersecting.

In the case of Churchill, “it didn’t happen,” he noted.

The evening after the news conference in Israel, Jay Leno made light of the codes in his “Tonight Show” monologue, suggesting that the Bible contained a hidden prediction about the current National Basketball Assn. playoffs: “The Bulls in four games.”

Yet observers of the phenomenon say all the satires and skeptical retorts may go unheeded among those looking for scientific evidence of God--or those who see the codes as a way to jolt nonbelievers toward faith.

UC San Diego’s Richard E. Friedman, author of “Who Wrote the Bible?” and “The Hidden Face of God,” recalled the reaction in a religion class months ago when he spoke critically of the Bible codes.

“A lady launched a passionate defense for 10 minutes of how scientists and atheists who had turned away from religion were now Orthodox Jewish because of these findings,” he said.

“People are desperately looking for something spiritual after a horrible century, and here is a path for someone who says she’s a logical, scientific-minded person.”

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Hidden Meaning?

Enthusiasm for a secret code or hidden messages in the Bible has enthralled Jewish and Christian mystics for centuries. “The Bible Code,” a new book about hidden messages in the Hebrew text by controversial author Michael Drosnin, cites references to earthquakes in Los Angeles.

1) Hebrew for “great earthquake” spelled out at equal letter intervals stretching in the Hebrew Bible from Exodus to Numbers.

2) When the margins of the text are widened enough to show the Hebrew letters in a line, Drosnin found nearby the Hebrew years equivalent to 1994 (the year of the Northridge earthquake) and 2010.

3) The abbreviation “L.A., Calif.” appears in the same grid. Note: Letters for “2010” and “L.A., Calif.,” continue beyond the margins in this illustration.