| About this site |
| About us |
| Our beliefs |
| Your first visit? |
| Contact us |
| External links |
| Good books |
| Visitor essays |
| Our forum |
| New essays |
| Other site features |
| Buy a CD |
| Vital notes |
| Spiritual/ethics |
| Spirituality |
| Morality/ethics |
| Absolute truth |
| Peace/conflict |
| Attaining peace |
| Religious tolerance |
| Religious hatred |
| Religious conflict |
| Religious violence |
| Laws and news |
| Religious laws |
| Religious news |
|
|
 | Write down the "Nth" character; |
| Skip to the "D" character that follows the previous character; |
| Write down that character; |
| Continue with the next skip. |
For example, if N was 100 and D was 50, then the 100th, 150th, 200th, 250th... character would be selected. Mathematically, the characters selected were defined as: N, N+D, N+2D, ... , N+(K-1)D where
N is the location of start character;
D is the skip; and
K is the length of the ELS (i.e. the number of
characters in the string that the program creates.
The resulting string is then searched for pairs of meaningful entries in close proximity to each other. The entries that they searched for were the names of individuals and their date of birth or death as listed in the "Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel." The dates were specified by the Hebrew day and month. A list was drawn up of all 34 men mentioned in the encyclopedia, whose date of birth or death was given and whose lives were significant enough to cover at least three columns of text. Later, a second list was prepared; it consisted of 32 men whose descriptions took between 1.5 and 3 columns of text. It is important to remember that, all 66 men were born many centuries after Genesis was written.
The entire process was repeated many times, using different values of "N" and "D". They found many matches. And when they compared the name/date matches, then found that they were closer together than one would expect on the basis of chance. The results were very highly significant. (p = 0.000016). A "p" value of 0.01 is normally considered quite significant; it indicates that the result would only happen by chance once in 100 experiments. Smaller numbers are even more significant.
Their remarkable findings were submitted to Statistical Science magazine. This is a peer-reviewed journal which requires that every article be scanned by a number of experts in the field before it is accepted for publishing. 1 Because of the incredible nature of the discoveries, the review process took 6 years to complete!
They did a control study using a section of the Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace. They selected the first 78,064 characters in the novel, in order to match the length of the Book of Genesis. They did a second control study using the Book of Isaiah. Matches were found but the proximity of a name and its corresponding date were what one would expect from pure chance.
Robert Kass, editor of Statistical Science wrote:
2"Our referees were baffled: 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 paper is thus offered to Statistical Science readers as a challenging puzzle."
Harold Gans, a former cryptologist at the US Defense Department replicated the work of the Jerusalem team. He was able to corroborate their results. He further expanded the original study by finding the names of important Jewish individuals and the cities of their birth and death. His "p" value was even more significant.
Sponsored link:
Reactions to the Study of Dr. Rips et al:
| Liberal and many mainline Christian theologians believe that Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch were written by many different authors or groups of writers over a period of many centuries. It was then edited by one or more redactors to mold it into its present form. Since they believe that the books had very human authors and editors, it is difficult for them to see how such complex codes could be buried in the text. |
| Most theologians are not impressed by the findings of these codes. They note that the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Pentateuch contain many variations. Even a single difference would throw off the analysis procedure. |
| Dror Bar-Natan, Alec Gindis, Aryeh Levitan, Brendan McKay performed two experiments similar to the Jerusalem team. 3 They used the Koren version of the Book of Genesis. In the first study, they attempted to match the names of famous rabbis against the names of the books that they wrote. The second study attempted to match their names against the years of their birth or death. They reported that "In each case, the result was unambiguously negative. No indication of any extraordinary phenomenon was found." |
| Aish HaTorah, a fundamentalist Jewish group, looks upon the findings as a likely proof that God exists and that the Torah is of divine origin. |
| Rabbi Shlomo Sternberg, a Harvard mathematics professor argues that there is no way that the text of Genesis that was used in the study could be identical to that which tradition states was passed from God to Moses. 4 |
| Brendan McKay, a computer-science professor at Australian National University, has stated that after replicating the study, "failed to find any trace of the claimed phenomena." He went further and applied the ELS technique to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. He found a number of "hidden" statements, including "Hear the law of the sea." He computed that the chance of these words turning up by random chance was only about 1 in 10,500. |
| Ronald S. Hendel, the Hebrew Bible book review editor for BR (Bible Review), commented: "Respect for the biblical text means that Rips and Drosnin are wrong. The Bible in their computer is not the original text and is not in God's own handwriting. Their sensational claims are undermined by false assumptions. In short, they have perpetrated a hoax." 5 |
| Three professors at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, (Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel and Gil Kalai) and one from the Australian National University (Brendan McKay) have been able to disprove the Bible code theory. They prepared a paper for publishing in a late 1999 edition of Statistical Science. They performed hundreds of analyses on the book of Genesis and other biblical books and "have been unable to detect the codes." They found that codes can be found at the same rate in Tolstoy's "War and Peace" or in any long text. But they are not found any more frequently than random chance would predict. Bar-Natan said that the methods used in the original 1994 project had "enough wiggle room to produce whatever [results] you want." 6 |
Book by Michael Drosnin:
Drosnin was impressed by the work done in Jerusalem and developed an analysis method of his own. The result was his book "The Bible Code", Unfortunately, he does not fully explain in his book the statistical technique that he used. 5 He worked on the entire Pentateuch. By removing the spaces he formed with a string of precisely 304,805 characters. It seems that he uses the computer to transform the string of characters into something that resembles a standard crossword puzzle. A large grid with 552 columns and 553 lines, in which the final line was of partial length is one possibility. One source states that there are more than 150,000 possible grids that can be created. 7 One of his grids is known to have 64 rows, in which each row (except the last) contains 4,772 letters. This was followed up by numerous other grids of different dimensions. These grids are then scanned for meaningful words - reading forwards or backwards along a line; reading down or up along a column; or reading both diagonals downwards and upwards. He even skipped characters in his searches. Any find is considered valid as long as the letters form a straight line. Once he has found a word or name, he searches in the vicinity of the find for other information: dates, words, etc.
He wrote in his book that he uncovered information about the Rabin assassination one year before it occurred. He found mention of the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, and John F. Kennedy. References to the Gulf war, the collision of a comet with the planet Jupiter, the Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Nixon's resignation, World War II, the Holocaust and the fall of Communism were also decoded. The book predicted a cataclysmic earthquake in Los Angeles in 2010, and a nuclear war in Israel before 2001. 8 The latter prediction was a failure; we must wait in order to find out whether the former will happen.
Drosnin apparently used the textus receptus version of the Pentateuch, as did the Jerusalem team earlier. He stated in a CNN interview that "There is one accepted Hebrew text of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, that religious people believe God dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai." 9 He states in his book "all Bibles in the original Hebrew language that now exist are the same, letter for letter...The Bible code computer program uses the universally accepted original Hebrew text." All of these statements appear to be false. D.A. Akenson states that there are "myriad versions of the Torah. The first good quality Hebrew Bible, the Venice edition, was printed in 1524-5. The variant versions of the Hebrew Scriptures run into the hundreds of thousands and the Pentateuch has at least 10,000 versions." 7 R.S. Hendel, writes: "In fact, we do not have the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament, and all ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible that we do have differ in the number of letters." With such a variety of versions, it is extremely unlikely that any currently available version is precisely identical to the original. 5
Reactions to Drosnin's "The Bible Code" Book:
Michael Drosnin's book received a rocky reception from those working in the Bible code field:
| Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg issued a press release on 1997-JUN-4. (8)
| ||||||||
| Doron Witztum said in a public statement: 11 ** Dr. Witztum presumably means any 3 books of equivalent length to the Pentateuch. | ||||||||
| Harold Gans issued a public statement on 1997-JUN-3. He stated in part:12,13 | ||||||||
| A Time Magazine article quotes Rabbi Shlomo Sternberg, a Harvard mathematics professor, as calling the book "complete nonsense." 14 | ||||||||
| Ronald S. Hendel, commented: "If this book were sold only in supermarket checkout lines, it would be seen for what it is - a journalistic hoax." 15 | ||||||||
| On the other hand, Oprah Winfrey devoted a full half-hour segment of her show to this topic. Warner Brothers has bought up the movie rights. Topics like this one can clearly excite a lot of people. | ||||||||
| J.W. Moore pointed out that most Drosnin's future prophecies were in
error. 16
|
References used:
The following information sources were used to prepare and update the above essay. The hyperlinks are not necessarily still active today.
- Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", Statistical Science, 1994, Vol. 9, No. 3, Pages 429-438. It is available in abridged form at http://www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/delany/11/genesis.html
- The comments of Robert Kass, editor of Statistical Science, are at http://www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/delany/11/
- Dror Bar-Natan, Alec Gindis, Aryeh Levitan, Brendan McKay, "Report on new ELS tests of Torah", published at: http://www.math.gatech.edu/~jkatz/Religions/Numerics/report.html
- David van Biema, "Deciphering God's Plan", Time Magazine, 1997-JUN-9
- R.S. Hendel, "The Secret Code Hoax", BR, Vol. XIII, No. 4, 1997-AUG, Page 23 - 24.
- "Controversial 'Bible Code' debunked by team of scholars," APonline, 1999-SEP-10.
- D.H. Akenson, "The biblical X-files", The Globe and Mail Newspaper, 1997-AUG-2.
- Evan Solomon, "Hacking god's code", Shift Magazine, 1997-SEP, P. 16
- A CNN Interview "Meet Michael Drosnin" is at: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9706/04/israel.bible/drosninlog.html
- Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg, "Hidden Bible Codes Researchers Condemn Michael Drosnin", Press release issued 1997-JUN-4. Available at: http://www.discoveryseminar.org/cgibin/var/aishdisc/press.html
- Doron Witztum issued a public statement which is available at: http://www.discoveryseminar.org/cgibin/var/aishdisc/witztum.html
- Harold Glans, "Back to the Future" statement is : http://www.discoveryseminar.org/cgibin/var/aishdisc/goc.htm
- Harold Gans, "Public statement", 1997-JUN-3. Available at: http://www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/delany/11/public2.html
- David van Biema, "Deciphering God's Plan", Time Magazine, 1997-JUN-9
- R.S. Hendel, "The Secret Code Hoax", BR, Vol. XIII, No. 4, 1997-AUG, Page 23 - 24.
- J.W. Moore, "Bible codes, or matrix of deception, Part II," SCP Newsletter, 1998-Winter. Online at http://www.scp-inc.org
Copyright ©1998 to 2006 by Ontario Consultants on
Religious Tolerance
Latest update: 2006-JUN-10
Author: B.A. Robinson
|
|
