Harum-scarum
In 1859, John Taylor published a book entitled “The Great Pyramid,” in which he concluded that if you divide the height of a pyramid into twice the side of its base you get a number close to 7. He found this and other mathematical relationships to be deeply meaningful. Soon after, others began to turn up similar discoveries, such as that the base of the pyramid divided by the width of a casing stone equals the number of days in the year and that the height of the pyramid multiplied by 10 to the ninth power approximately equals the distance from Earth to the sun.
Humans are pattern-seeking animals. At Skeptic magazine, we routinely receive calls from people who see the Virgin Mary in the shadows of a tree, the face of Jesus on a burned tortilla, Mother Teresa in a sweet roll or a face on Mars. JFK lives in stone profile in Hawaii. The neighborhood of Eagle Rock sports a giant winged boulder overlooking the city. Patterns are everywhere. But which patterns are meaningful and which are not?
Science is a pattern-seeking system of thought. Naturalists find patterns in a fossil record. They once saw a pattern indicating creation and now they see a pattern indicating evolution. Nature has not changed. The perceived pattern has. The principal purpose of science is to help us identify true patterns while weeding out false ones. This assumes, relativists and deconstructionists notwithstanding, that there really is a pattern to be found. But whether we have detected a genuine pattern or not is another story. Science is an exquisite blend of observation and theory, of finding patterns in nature and creating them in our minds. We will never know for certain if we have identified the pattern, but we can establish degrees of confidence.
The problem gets complicated when the patterns are loaded with mystical significance. Louis Farrakhan’s Million-Man March speech in 1995 was full of mystical numerology. For example, he said that adding a “1” to the front of the numerical height of the Washington Monument (555 feet) yields “1555,” the alleged date of the first slave ship’s arrival in America. Even scientists are not immune to finding religious patterns in nature. Physicist Frank Tipler believes physics proves the existence of God and our own immortality, and he supports this belief with the fact that the electrical force between a proton and an electron divided by the gravitational force between a proton and an electron approximately equals the age of the universe divided by the time it takes for light to cross an atom. Is God a physicist?
No, says Michael Drosnin, author of “The Bible Code”--God is a cryptanalyst and computer programmer! It turns out that the Hebrew Bible, written 3,000 years ago, is actually an encrypted code book filled with meaningful portents of newsworthy events: Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination; JFK’s and RFK’s, too; Benjamin Netanyahu’s election; comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s collision with Jupiter; Watergate; the Oklahoma city bombing and Timothy McVeigh; the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs; and, of course, just in time for the soon-to-come millennium marketing madness, the end of the world in 2000.
Don’t bother dusting off your old King James Version of the Bible. You won’t find any of these revelations in there. You need the Torah --Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy --written in the original Hebrew. “The Bible Code” is based on the work of Eliyahu Rips, an Israeli mathematician and computer expert who, along with two other authors (Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg), published an article in 1994 in the prestigious academic journal Statistical Science. It is a peer -reviewed journal, but the editors made it clear that they were publishing it not because they endorsed it but because it was an interesting statistical phenomenon and “a challenging puzzle.” Since the publication of “The Bible Code,” Rips has publicly denounced Drosnin’s conclusions.
Rips’ original paper was based on Genesis. Since then, he has eliminated the spaces between all the words in the entire Torah, converting it into one continuous strand of 304,805 letters (which, Drosnin explains, is how the Torah was originally dictated to Moses by God). With this strand, Rips used an equidistant letter sequencing program, in which one begins with the first letter of Genesis and then enters a “skip code” program that tells the computer to take every nth letter. N will equal whatever number one wishes, whether it’s seven, 17, 3,007 or whatever it takes to find meaningful patterns. If no meaningful patterns are found by starting with the first letter of Genesis, then one tries again with the book’s second letter, or the third, altering the skip amount until a pattern emerges. It doesn’t take long before the computer finds it, and such words as “Hitler,” “Nazi,” “Kennedy,” “Dallas” and “Pearl Harbor” suddenly appear. How can this be?
With a knowing wink to readers, the press release accompanying the book gives us a playful upper- and lowercase clue: “Rips ExplAineD thaT eacH codE is a Case Of adDing Every fourth or 12th or 50th letter to form a word.” The hidden message here is: “READ THE CODE.” But this is not what Drosnin and Rips have done. Since Hebrew is written without vowels, these are added after the skip search program is run on the 304,805 letters. If it were English, for example, “RBN” could refer to “Rabin,” or “Ruben,” or “Robin,” or “Rubin” or “Rabon” depending upon what vowels one selected. And even though Hebrew is read from right to left, the Bible decoders have not restricted themselves to such a limited search. They look for patterns moving from left to right, up to down and diagonally in any direction. Herein lies another serious problem. The diagonally found words depend on the margins of the page of type. Change the margins and the letters flow into different positions on the page. The previous diagonal word disappears.
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Using the method of the Bible decoders, I searched for meanings among the consonants of the English alphabet. I employed a skip code of three, and I came up with the following result: bcd -F-ghj -K -lmn -P -qrs -T -vwx -Z. The selected letters are FKPTZ, and I’ve decided on adding the vowels A,E,U and O. The resulting message? “FAKE PUT OZ.”
Perhaps we should do a search of Frank Baum’s Oz books for their hidden messages. Using the same procedure, an Australian math professor found “Hear the law of the sea” in the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea. He also found 59 words related to Hanukkah in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, including “miracle of lights” and “Maccabees.” The odds against randomly finding all 59, he calculated, are more than a quadrillion to 1. Are we then to believe that Tolstoy’s hand was directed by God?
In “The Signature of God,” published in 1995, Grant Jeffrey and Yacov Rambsel reported that they found the phrase “Yeshua [a Hebraic form of the name Jesus] is my Name” with a skip search of 20 letters in Isaiah 53, in which Christian scholars for centuries have interpreted signs of Jesus’ birth. But other computations show that the phrase “Muhammad is my name” also occurs 21 times, and “Koresh is my name” appears no less than 43 times! Should we have listened to David Koresh’s ramblings more closely?
There are additional problems with “The Bible Code.” Some scholars believe that the Torah was written by more than one individual, thus accounting for its different narrative styles, for the two creation stories in Genesis and for other inconsistencies, such as the fact that Moses, the alleged author of the Torah, describes his own death. The theory that an ancient editor coalesced multiple writings into one set of books contradicts the belief that the Torah was written by Moses and inspired by God. Without this foundation, the Bible as an encrypted code of prophecies falls apart. In addition, what meanings do we lose in the Torah’s translation from Hebrew into English? The phrase “assassin that will assassinate” near Rabin’s name, as one scholar commented, could be translated as “murderer who murders”: an accusation against Rabin for his political actions against his enemies.
Nevertheless, it is of great sociological interest that this book would strike such a chord now (with full-page reviews in Time and Newsweek magazines, author appearances with Oprah Winfrey and Charlie Rose and a recent Daily Variety report that Warner Bros. has acquired the film rights), as we rapidly approach the millennium. Doom-and-gloom books about assassinations, earthquakes and war do well in times like these. Indeed, on the back cover of “The Bible Code,” there’s Drosnin’s incredible claim that he tried to warn Rabin a year before his assassination. Let’s consider the implications: Say Rabin took the warning seriously, changed his schedule and was not assassinated. Would this mean that humans are more powerful than God or that some statistician can rerun the universe to produce a different outcome? Does this mean that biblical prophecies are self-fulfilling prophecies or that they are not prophecies at all, but warnings?
In the book’s final chapter, “The Final Days,” Drosnin says the Bible code predicts that the end of the world will occur in 2000, or in 2006, or it may be delayed until a later date or it may not happen at all. Some prediction. He gets around this problem--applying chaos theory, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Richard Feynman’s quantum physics--when he writes: “There isn’t just one real future, there are many possible futures.” In fact, he concludes, “The Bible code revealed each of them.” Apparently he is unaware of the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s just as well. None of this works. Remarkably, after 178 pages of breathtaking revelations abut biblical prophecies, Drosnin confesses that the Bible doesn’t actually predict anything: “It is not a promise of divine salvation. It is not a threat of inevitable doom. It is just information.” Einstein once said: “God does not play dice.” Now Drosnin would like us to believe that God plays computer games. This is all good fun if you don’t take it seriously.
Unfortunately, many are taking it seriously, as if to say, “See, modern science supports what we have been saying all along--there really is something unique and special about the Bible.” Is there?
There is. The Bible is one of the greatest works of literature in the history of Western thought. It is a book of myth and meaning, poetry and prose, moral homilies and ethical dilemmas. In his epilogue, Drosnin admits, “I’m not religious. I don’t even believe in God.” It shows. Drosnin has taken a beautiful work of literature and ruined it by trying to turn it into a book of science. Science and religion are separate spheres of knowledge, but because we live in the Age of Science and no longer the Age of Faith, temptations abound to use the former to bolster the latter. Such attempts always fail because religion ultimately depends on faith. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews says. O ye of little faith. Why do you need a computer code? You don’t. “The Bible Code” is not only an insult to science and to those who are deeply religious, it is also an insult to God.
