K9APE’s Bookshelf

By

Shel Epstein

The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin

A Christian friend recommended that I read Michael Drosnin’s book entitled The Bible Code. The thesis of the book is that the Bible is a computer program that contains information about the future of the World. I have had numerous conversations with Christians –and especially Evangelicals seeking converts– about the Bible and its interpretation so I wasn’t especially interested in another debate. Still, I thought that his comments were deserving of at least a look at his arguments and that of the author.

Jews are divided on the question of whether the Bible is factual or allegorical. My secular view is that the Bible (the Torah, which contains the five Books of Moses) was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, that it is factual and that one has to interpret it in the technical vocabulary of its time

The question of ciphers in books is an old one. As Drosnin relates, Sir Isaac Newton was convinced that the Bible contained a secret code and he spend much effort looking for a key. More recently, Col. George Fabyan of Riverbank (near the Fox River) financed the research of William Friedman on the thesis that the works of Wm. Shakespeare were really authored by Sir Francis Bacon and contained encrypted material to prove it. Friedman was unsuccessful in that endeavor; however, he used the skills he developed to crack the Japanese Purple Code during World War II. So the question of a Bible code is not idle chatter for Amateur Radio operators, who may be confronted with decrypting a strange or unexpected message.

Drosnin’s first example of a Bible code prophecy is the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hand of Yigal Amir in late 1995 (the actual date was 04 NOV 1995). The prediction was decoded using an algorithm developed by Israeli statistician Eliyahu Rips that searched the text of Genesis for equidistant letter sequences in the strand of 304,805 letters. The algorithm depends on using a copy of Genesis in which there are no spaces between words or letters. In the case of the Rabin assassination, the skip distance between letters was found to be 4772, so that the text was divided into 64 rows of 4772 letters. Rabin’s name is spelled out in one vertical column. Intersecting that column is a row containing the phrase “assassin will assassinate”. Amir’s name is found nearby with a skip distance of nine letters.

Other examples of prophecies are provided. They include Clinton – President, Watergate, Man on Moon – Spaceship, Shoemaker-Levy (comet) – Jupiter, Hitler – Nazi, Shakespeare – Macbeth – Hamlet, Edison – Electricity, Einstein, Wright Brothers and dinosaurs.

I have a problem with the appearance of the word “dinosaur”. According to one website, the word “dinosaur” was not coined until the mid-1800s. Nevertheless, the Hebrew phonetic spelling of this English word is spelled out. Why English instead of some other language?

This raises several questions – including a) Whether it is possible to locate anything you define? b) Will the algorithm work with the Koran, the Book of Mormon and other religious texts? c) Will the algorithm work with non-religious texts? d) Should geometric (as contrasted with arithmetic) skips be tested? I don’t have an answer to the questions I raised; however, Drosnin’s book, which contains Rips’ paper, makes for some interesting speculation.

You can also search the WWW to find interesting articles that will arouse your curiosity. And yes, www.biblecode.com sells software that claims to allow you to do your own searching.