Copying Errors: The Dead Sea Scrolls contain segments of all 5 books of the Pentateuch. Comparing the scrolls with versions dated many centuries later shows that a few errors had crept in over the few hundred year period. By extrapolation, the total number of errors from the "original" text to modern versions would be much greater.
	Spelling Formats: Hebrew spelling practices are not totally rigid. Although most ancient Hebrew is spelled with consonants only, vowels are occasionally used. Some manuscripts might have a vowel inserted in a word in one sentence, and show the same word without the vowel in the next sentence.

Ronald S. Hendel states: "Every known ancient Hebrew manuscript of the Bible...has a different number of letters." ₂ These differences do not change the meaning of the books significantly; but such errors are devastating to an ELS analysis. If one were to assume that:

	There were only 100 copying and format differences between the original text and the modern version of the Pentateuch which resulted in the dropping of a letter, adding of a letter, changing a word to another word of another length, dropping a word, adding a word, etc.
	These differences were more or less evenly distributed throughout the Pentateuch.
	That God had encoded messages in the original text.

then a pass of the ELS computer program that started at some point in the Pentateuch would stumble after it had gone only about 1% further into the text. For example, if the pass began with the first character of Genesis 1:1 then it would stumble at about Genesis 3, when the "fall" of humanity is discussed. All analysis after that point would be meaningless, because the ELS would initially be out of synchronization by one or more characters. It is conceivable that a second, compensating error might be encountered later in the text which would bring the computer back into proper synchronization. But it is more likely that the next error would force the scan even further away from where it should be. It would seem that when the ELS method is used on modern versions of the Bible, it is incapable of detecting any significant percentage of encoded messages inserted by the author into the original text.

In spite of Drosnin's initial book ₈ having been exposed as meaningless, he wrote a second book on the same theme. ₉ which starts with the 9/11 terrorist attack and counts down to the War of Armageddon, and TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it). People appear to be catching on. Although Drosnin's first book received a rating of 3 out of 5 on the Amazon.com web site, his second book has a rating of 2.5 out of 5. Mark Perakh's review of the second book is particularly biting:

"The new book by Drosnin is what could be expected if you knew his previous despicable output. I was especially amused by the appendix to Drosnin's new opus wherein he painted a picture which is blatantly untrue, being a fantastic concoction about noble and highly qualified code defenders fighting against a few malicious attackers of low intelligence who, in Drosnin's learned opinion, either do not understand the codes (while he does) or intentionally try to discredit a high quality research allegedly proving the reality of the code. In fact the opposite is true. Contrary to Drosnin's assertion, the overwhelming majority of experts in mathematical statistics decisively rejected the claims by the code proponents. As to Drosnin's own contribution to the code lore, even professor Rips himself, to whom Drosnin refers with admiration and who (actually together with Witztum, whose name Drosnin does not seem to deem worth mentioning) is the originator of the code affair, has expressed his disapproval of Drosnin's attempts to predict the future by means of the alleged code sequences. In an interview to Newsweek a few years ago Drosnin claimed that he would admit his error if somebody found the "prediction" of a prime minister assassination "encoded" in a non-biblical text. A number of such "codes" was demonstrated. McKay found a whole bunch of them in Moby Dick. I found a set of "codes" spelling "Amir Will Kill Prime MInister Hero Rabin" in a Hebrew book by an Israeli writer Dahn Ben Amotz, published in 1979, this "code" being much better than Drosnin's acclaimed "prediction" of Rabin's assassination in the Bible. Drosnin never acknowledged this finding although it has been widely known and invoked multiple responses. That much about Drosnin's integrity. ...Overall, his new book is a piece of arrogant nonsense which of course will find thousands of gullible readers on whose ignorance and eagerness to believe in miracles [a] journalist of Drosnin's type can always rely so he can laugh all the way to the bank."

In reference 11, Brendan McKay took up Michael Drosnin's comment: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them." ₁₀ McKAy writes:

"Note that English with the vowels included is far less flexible than Hebrew when it comes to making letters into words." However, he scanned the book and found references to the assassinations of two prime minister: Indira Gandhi and Yitzhak Rabin. He continued and found codes for President Rene Moawad, Leon Trotsky, Reverend Martin Luther King, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, President J.F. Kennedy, President Abraham Lincoln, and assassin Sirhan Sirhan.

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