The Search for the Bible Code

by Jason Margolis
originally printed August 21, 1997

If nothing else, Michael Drosnin's bestselling book The Bible Code has caused more than a few people to dust off their old Sunday School texts for another look.

And if that's all that comes of his book, that's not such a bad thing. The Bible makes for some good reading and has been the inspiration for several exciting movies, too. However, according to Drosnin, it can also predict the future.

The Bible Code controversy began several decades ago with a discovery by Rabbi Weissmandel, who realized that there were some hidden words in the Bible. Now it should be acknowledged that the Bible researched by the Rabbi was not the English language Bible with which most people are familiar - if they are familiar at all with the Bible. The Rabbi was working with the source Bible, in ancient Hebrew: the Torah, also known as the Five Books of Moses or the Pentateuch.

His discovery consisted of words or phrases stated in the form of equidistant letter sequences (ELS's). In other words, by selecting sequences of equally spaced letters in the text you could find a meaningful word. For instance, starting at the first Hebrew letter “T” in the Bible (actually part of the title for Genesis) and then selecting every fiftieth letter, you get the word “Torah,” which is the title of what you were reading.

Of course the Hebrew word for “Torah” actually only has four letters because vowels don’t really exist as singular letters in Hebrew text, instead they are represented as dashes and dots below and occasionally above the consonants. There are also some Hebrew consonants that would be considered vowels in English, but then again, in English we still have that debate about the letter Y.

The reason I bring this up, is that ancient Hebrew is written without the little dashes and dots, essentially rendering it without vowels. Can you imagine English without vowels? It would be like another language - maybe something spoken in the former Yugoslavia. But nevertheless, for thousands of years scholars have understood the vowel-free text that is the Bible. Amazing, eh?

Recently, two professors from Hebrew University in Jerusalem decided to test Rabbi Weissmandel’s theory with the use of modern computers. Mathematician Eliyahu Rips and physicist Doron Witztum sought out unique and relevant patterns in the Book of Genesis. Essentially, they decided to turn the Bible into a giant game of Word Search. However, they were not just searching for single words, but words found in pairs that had some sort of connected relevance.

Consulting the Hebrew reference book The Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel, Rips and Witztum chose the 34 most important men in Israeli history - anyone with over three columns of text. They searched Genesis for the names of these men along with their respective dates of birth or death in ELS code. The trick was to find the corresponding information relatively near to each other.

All 34 were found. Just to be sure, Rips and Witztum chose the next 32 most important men out of the Encyclopedia and searched for their ELS code data in Genesis. And all 32 were found. Rips and Witztum’s breakthrough was duplicated and expanded by Harold Gans, a former cryptologic mathematician at the US Defense Department.

Other interesting matching pairs were discovered, such as the name Eichmann by the name Auschwitz, which in essence foretells the Holocaust and World War II. Drosnin’s book indicates that equidistant letter sequences also apparently predict such events as the French revolution, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Richard Nixon and Watergate, the Gulf War, the election of Bill Clinton, and the assassination of the Kennedys and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, along with a host of natural disasters still to come.

The scientists claimed the statistical odds of these matches in the ELS code occurring by chance are less than one in 50 quadrillion. According to scientific analysis, a finding of less than one in 20 is significant.

What the scientists are really underplaying is the fact that the skip in the code (the distance between the letters in a Code “word”) can range over a 1,000 or more letters. I don’t know about you, but that kind of makes the whole discovery a lot less impressive.

I decided to test the ELS theory on some other books. My sample included James Michener’s The Drifters, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (which is almost as thick as the Bible), the user’s manual for ClarisWorks 3.0, and the September 1997 issue of Details with Vince Vaughn on the cover. After hours of exhaustive research, I found little of relevance, although I spent a great deal of the time pouring over the Details article on effective ways to seduce women.

Finally, in The Drifters I did find this ELS match: the words “Beck” and “Odelay” were both spaced with a 23-letter skip over a range of less than two pages. So, somehow Michener was able to predict the name of the Grammy-winning album by Beck Hansen. He knew “Where It’s At."

Some people believe that the Bible Code is evidence that God wrote the Bible - and not just because of the seemingly accurate predictions found in the ELS code. As stated in an article entitled “Divine Authorship?” in the October 1995 issue of Biblical Review, “The capacity to embed so many, meaningfully related, randomly selected word-pairs in a body of text with a coherent surface meaning is stupendously beyond the intellectual capacity of any human being or group of people, however brilliant, and equally beyond the capacity of any conceivable computing device."

The existence of the Code is merely God’s way of signing authorship of the work to a technologically advanced society. What I find cool about this revelation is that if God did indeed write the Bible, that means God is left-handed. Hebrew is written from right to left, and you wouldn’t expect God would want to cause smudges while writing such an important work as the Bible. This must be good news to Ned Flanders.

What I would like to see now is a search for ELS code in the holy books of all world religions, because if such code is found, it may lead to the truthful realization that we are all of the same creation and we shall ever more live in eternal peace. Amen.

Back to Jump Communications articles and links