Cracking the Bible Code

A new book uncovers Old Testament references to such major world events as Watergate, Hiroshima, and Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. Some say this will rewrite the history of religion. Others say it's a folly of biblical proportions.

by Jason Gay

Imagine the ultimate crystal ball: a divine code, hidden within the 3200-year-old Hebrew text of the Old Testament, capable of forecasting the future, explaining the present, and unraveling the past in eerily precise detail. Explanations for the assassinations of Yitzhak Rabin, John F. Kennedy, and Anwar el-Sadat. Uncanny mentions of Watergate, Shakespeare, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust. Predictions aplenty: presidential victors, comet collisions, colossal earthquakes, and apocalyptic nuclear attacks.

This supposed phenomenon is spelled out in The Bible Code, a dramatic new book by former Washington Post reporter Michael Drosnin which has arrived with a Second Coming-like trumpet blast from its publisher, Simon & Schuster, and the worldwide press. According to the hype machinery, The Bible Code is a discovery for the ages, a scientific, computer-aided proof that shatters contemporary understandings of religion and God. "It challenges everything we know," Drosnin says confidently. "It demands that we accept some other form of intelligence that shares the world with us." Others take it a step further. To some religious sects, the code's revelations -- also supported by a 1994 study by three Israeli mathematicians -- are irrefutable evidence of the Supreme Being's very existence.

The Bible Code bandwagon is the latest example of a worldwide fascination with hidden messages -- a tradition stretching back thousands of years, long before Drosnin and his publisher dreamed of bestseller lists, multiple print runs, or movie rights. Americans, especially, are obsessed with decoding secrets, whether in the Bible, the Koran, cheesy Nostradamus books, or the A-side of a Led Zeppelin record. As computer technology -- and therefore, code-breaking technology -- improves and expands, so does our interest in probing the unseen and locating the veiled reference. We are a people fixated on reading between the lines, trying to find meaning where meaning isn't supposed to be.

For most people, this fascination with decoding is simply an amusement, a cool parlor trick to show friends. There are plenty of funny, freaky secrets out there -- consider the current craze over The Dark Side of the Moon's apparent fit as an alternate soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz -- most of them "discovered" by techno-geeks with far too much time on their hands. The World-Wide Web teems with conspiratorial code breaks. There are computer programs that use numerology -- the mystical practice of assigning numeric values to letters -- to convert any name into 666, the number of the beast. You can discover your own personal number to help predict your life expectancy, choose a lottery ticket sequence, or lose weight. You can even use a number-letter program to prove definitively that Barney, the fiendish purple dinosaur, is really the devil -- even though you knew that all along.

But The Bible Code is different, its believers say: this apparent scriptural code is not only a testament to God's existence, it's also a detailed, preset agenda for life on earth, the day planner to end all day planners. According to Drosnin, the code may signal our need to change the way we view both faith and religion. The Bible is no longer an ambiguous read, open to various interpretations: it's a living, dynamic guide, suitable for a one-on-one chat with the guy (or gal) upstairs.

Predictably, the publication of The Bible Code has spawned a counterattack from members of the scientific community, who have questioned Drosnin's methods and conclusions, as well as the 1994 Statistical Science article detailing the work of Eliyahu Rips and two other Israeli mathematicians. The critics now include those mathematicians and a handful of Drosnin's own sources, who are quickly backpedaling from the book's explosive claims. And the fuss over The Bible Code has launched a rush of pop-culture interest in the semi-obscure field of statistics; suddenly, academics who spend their days toiling in front of computers are being invited to refute The Bible Code on CNN and Oprah.

One person getting those calls is Shlomo Sternberg, a Harvard mathematics professor and an Orthodox rabbi. By his own admission, Sternberg is a man uncomfortable with too much attention, preferring to lead a quiet existence away from newspaper reporters and television cameras. But The Bible Code is simply too much for him to resist -- "complete nonsense," he calls it -- and Sternberg has strongly criticized the book in Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times. For a couple of weeks, this mathematician/rabbi has been a reluctant media star.

"It would be very nice to be a purist and fight all my intellectual battles in scientific journals," Sternberg says. "But my feeling is that this thing has just fallen upon me, and I feel compelled to speak out on what I consider to be an outrage, a sacrilege."

Indeed, it is not the science of The Bible Code that threatens Sternberg. To him, the science is simply quackery at its worst. What's threatening about the code, he says, is the message it sends to the faithful.

"The code represents a denigration of religion," Sternberg says. "All of the things that the Bible has stood for over the last 3000 years have been turned . . . into a crossword puzzle."

BUT ADMIT it: no matter what Sternberg or any of this smarty-pants colleagues say, you still want to know how the code works. You want to know how Drosnin interpreted old Hebrew scripture to predict Rabin's assassination; you want to learn how he found President Clinton, Hitler, and Nixon in a 3200-year-old document. And, admittedly, you want to know if your name is in there, too. You want to know if there is some way you can use the code to solve other questions of lesser import. Will I get that promotion? Will I get married? Will the godforsaken Red Sox ever win the World Series?

Here's how the code works: the Hebrew text of the first five books of the Bible -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, also known collectively as the Torah -- are arranged contiguously as a single thread of 304,805 characters. Then a computer scans this thread for names and events, searching for the desired words hidden in a "skip code" pattern. To illustrate, Drosnin uses this example:

Rips explained that each code is a case of adding every . . .

By skipping every fourth letter, the skip code of the above phrase reveals the hidden message: READ THE CODE.

This method of analyzing text -- known as equidistant letter sequencing, or ELS -- isn't new, but computers have vastly improved the speed and efficiency of searches. Once a name or event is located, the field of characters is narrowed, and a subsequent search looks for additional names and terms in that portion of the text. When Drosnin, for example, found the Hebrew characters for "Yitzhak Rabin" in the book of Deuteronomy, the name was intersected by another series of characters reading "assassin that will assassinate." He also found "Hitler" near "Nazi and enemy" and "slaughter"; "the Depression" with "economic collapse" and "1929"; "President" near "Clinton" and so forth.

Eerie results all, but they were supported by that 1994 paper in Statistical Science, a respected academic journal. The authors -- Dr. Rips, of Hebrew University, and two colleagues, Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg -- designed a computer experiment to unravel ELS patterns in Genesis.

The men took the names of 32 rabbis preselected by an outside party and searched Genesis for the rabbis' names and birth dates; in almost every case, they found both the names and dates in fairly close quarters. When the same experiment was applied to control texts -- the Book of Isaiah, and, humorously, a Hebrew translation of War and Peace -- the names and birth dates of the rabbis either did not appear at all, or didn't appear in any neat, ordered arrangement. Only in Genesis did ELS patterns turn up for most of the rabbis and their birth dates. According to Rips and his colleagues, the chance of this event occurring randomly was less than one in 50,000.

Rips, Witztum, and Rosenberg weren't exactly sailing in uncharted waters, and they didn't pretend to be. Theories about biblical code breaking have existed among theologians and scholars, fanatics and agnostics for thousands of years. The medieval cabalists, or Jewish mystics, believed there were dozens of code patterns within the Torah, including ELS. As Drosnin himself notes, even Sir Isaac Newton had a serious jones for encoding, learning Hebrew and devoting years to its study, but never unraveling any hidden messages before his death.

A half-century ago, Drosnin writes, a Czech rabbi discovered that if he started at the first T (known as a "taf") in the Hebrew text of Genesis, and skipped every 50 letters, the first five letters he collected spelled "Torah." He repeated the experiment in Exodus, and again, skipping every 50 letters from the first T, he obtained the word "Torah." The same applied to Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. What these earlier studies lacked, Drosnin notes, was a computer -- a tool capable of sifting through masses of text at great speed. This was precisely the advantage that Rips and his colleagues had for their study.

With The Bible Code, what Drosnin has done, essentially, is to take this cold data analysis and create a Hebrew scholar's version of the good old-fashioned potboiler. To his (and his editor's) credit, The Bible Code is a highly engrossing read, as Drosnin fashions complex statistical matter into a real-life thriller. This, of course, has attracted movie interest; Warner Bros. inked a deal for an undisclosed sum two weeks ago. Drosnin's role is that of the hard-nosed skeptic, the unbeliever who is convinced of the code's truth by his own Hebrew research and Rips's work in Jerusalem. He also finds believers in a number of top Israeli officials and a handful of US mathematicians.

But the climax comes when Drosnin, who single-handedly predicted Rabin's assassination and tried to warn the prime minister, learns the leader has been shot dead in Tel Aviv. "I slid right down to the floor," Drosnin recalls. The skeptic is a skeptic no longer. And what drama.

IT'S CAPTIVATING material for a book or a movie, perhaps, but an increasing number of mathematicians say The Bible Code is a highly suspect work. The growing pigpile of academic critics now includes Eliyahu Rips, the book's self-effacing star, who last week issued a statement from Israel that acknowledged his belief in the Torah code, but disavowed his role in Drosnin's conclusions. ("The book gives the impression that I have done joint work with Mr. Drosnin," Rips states. "This not true.") A rebuttal to the 1994 Statistical Science article is planned; one of its co-authors will be Brendan McKay, a mathematician at the Australian National University.

Like Harvard's Sternberg, McKay has assumed the mantle of code debunker in recent weeks. His principal argument is that the Torah's text is so long, and that Hebrew -- almost totally devoid of vowels -- admits multiple translations so easily, that it's possible to find anything you're after, given enough time.

The "50,000-to-one" probability of the Rips-Witztum-Rosenberg rabbi findings, too, leaves McKay unimpressed. The same long odds apply to other exhaustive documents, he says, like the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, where McKay found more than 59 words related to Chanukah. Statistically speaking, he says, the chance of such a correlation is 95 out of a million. (It's also worth nothing that some mathematicians find the whole searching-for-names-in-text exercise less than compelling. "From a scientific point of view," says MIT mathematician Richard Dudley, "this whole thing is just not that interesting.")

As for the book's major whiz-bang moment -- the Rabin assassination -- McKay calls it a "big yawn." Lots of people were concerned about Rabin's fate in the turbulent Middle East, McKay notes, and predicting his death took no genius. If people are taking The Bible Code seriously, McKay says from his home in Canberra, "it's a great pity, but I can't help but be amused."

Sternberg is less than amused. He disputes Drosnin's assumption that there is a single, universally shared version of the Torah, arguing that there are dozens of versions, and almost none exhibit the unusual richness of encoded text the author found. Furthermore, Sternberg questions the reporter's translation skills, charging that the Hebrew passage that Drosnin read as "assassin that will assassinate" is correctly translated as "slayer which should be killed" -- as if to say Rabin himself should have been killed. Not that Sternberg believes any of this prognostication, anyhow. "More or less, you are picking [letters] at random," he says. "If you put a monkey at a typewriter, if he typed long enough, sooner or later he would type `Yitzhak Rabin.' "

There's also some question about the merits of the 1994 Statistical Science paper by Rips and his Israeli colleagues. The publication's then-editor, Carnegie-Mellon statistician Robert Kass, says that although the Torah paper withstood the journal's standard peer-review process, it was published largely as entertainment -- a "challenging puzzle" for readers.

"Some people seem to think that the publication of the Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg article in Statistical Science serves as a stamp of approval upon the work," Kass responded in an e-mail statement. "This is a great exaggeration. Statistical Science publishes a wide variety of papers of general interest to statisticians."

But no one explained that to certain religious groups, which have treated the Rips-Witztum-Rosenberg paper as evidence akin to a burning bush. Whole movements have been inspired by the code, with leaders holding the paper up as Exhibit A that God truly exists.

One particularly successful group, Aish HaTorah, runs an ongoing religious seminar called Discovery that uses the Bible Code to encourage mainstream, secular Jews to pursue a more Orthodox lifestyle. The movement has attracted 60,000 people worldwide, including actor Elliott Gould, Larry King, and Seinfeld's Jason Alexander. Christian evangelicals have also used codes as a recruitment tool. And the World-Wide Web is overrun with the sites of various religious groups proffering the code as a spiritual smoking gun.

"What you have just read is unrefutable [sic] scientific evidence that the Bible is God's word," one website exclaims. "You've asked for proof. There's your proof!"

AS MILLENNIUM fever intensifies, it's tempting to suggest that the hype over The Bible Code is all about our growing obsession with doomsaying -- the increasingly aggravating "end-is-nigh" psychobabble sprouting up everywhere. But it's not. The breathlessness behind The Bible Code offers irrefutable proof of a more substantive kind: controversy sells.

Drosnin's claims are grand, but his Simon & Schuster-backed marketing campaign is downright grandiose, marked by full-page advertisements in the New York Times and appearances on CNN, The Today Show, and Oprah. No matter how many authorities take swipes at the book, sales are rocketing, and the cash register will continue to ring. Drosnin, who compares the storm over the code to the persecution of Galileo, is now on a major, very un-Galileolike European book tour, and convincingly predicts his tome will be a "bestseller in every country." Rest assured he didn't have to consult the Old Testament to make such a claim.

Is Drosnin simply Nostradamus with a better publisher? The author bristles at suggestions that his book is anything but the result of ultra-serious, skeptical investigative reporting in the Woodward-and-Bernstein mold. Clearly, Drosnin can't stand the idea of being considered a crackpot or a soothsayer. Don't lump The Bible Code with all the "airhead, New Age bullshit" on the market today, he warns -- and, to be fair, a man who spent five years painstakingly combing Hebrew text isn't exactly ladling chicken soup for the soul. Still, the intensity of the Bible Code debate may be taking its toll. "I have more supporters than critics," Drosnin says cheerily. But how many attacks can his book take before his own reputation starts to wither?

Suppose Drosnin is right. Suppose there is an all-knowing code hidden in the Hebrew Bible. Drosnin believes this discovery spells an end to conventional religion as we know it. If the code exists, then the Bible is no longer a text to be taken on faith and interpreted by believers; it is an unambiguous guide to life on earth that simply requires the right key to unlock its message. "We're looking at something so new, so startling, that people should leave behind the doctrines that confine them," Drosnin says.

But to scholars like Shlomo Sternberg, religion is about faith, not proof positive. "The book doesn't really bother me, because Drosnin is the one guy who was smart enough to turn this into a fortune," Sternberg says. "What bothers me . . . is that there are people who are reverting to Orthodox Judaism on the basis of this code. I'm an Orthodox Jew, and I believe in all of the rules, but I don't believe you need the code to be persuaded into the rules."

And consider this: maybe we're all just treading a little too close to where we aren't supposed to tread. If there really is a Bible Code -- Drosnin's, Rips's, or anyone else's -- maybe it was never meant to be discovered and spread around the world. Maybe the code's creator doesn't want His or Her secrets exposed in the New York Times, or on Oprah. Like Oprah, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and perhaps we should all heed the message of Deuteronomy 18:10, which states:

Let no one be found among you who consigns his son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer, one who cast spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead. For anyone who does such things is abhorrent to the Lord, and it is because of these abhorrent things that the Lord your God is dispossessing them before you.

You don't need a code breaker or computer program to spot that warning.

JJason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com