 |  So, perhaps, it is the first rough take on the future. We have just begun to understand the Bible code. It is like a jigsaw puzzle
with an infinite number of pieces, and we only have a few hundred, or a
few thousand. We can only guess at the complete picture. | The only thing I can state with certainty is that there is a code in the Bible, and in a few dramatic cases it has foretold events that then happened exactly as predicted. | |
Michael Drosnin, a former journalist for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, began an incredible journey five years ago when he first flew to Israel to meet the Israeli chief of intelligence about the future of warfare in that country. A young officer stopped him as he left and recommended he see Eliyahu Rips, a mathematician in Jerusalem who could tell him the exact date the Gulf War would begin. It was in the Bible. Suddenly Drosnin, a man who professes no religious beliefs or knowledge of the religious text, found himself considering a moment in history that allegedly occurred 3,200 years ago; when God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai. It seemed beyond belief.But Rips was considered a genius in mathematics, one of the world's leading authorities on group theory (a field of mathematics underlying quantum physics) so Drosnin went to see him.
Their first meeting took place in June 1992. Drosnin believed that by the end of the evening he could leave Israel knowing that there was nothing to the purported Bible code. Upon his arrival, Rips, described as a modest man, read Drosnin a passage written by an 18th Century 'sage' called the Genius of Vilna: "The rule is that all that was, is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah, from the first word to the last word. And not merely in a general sense, but as to the details of every species and each one individually, and details of details of everything that happened to him from the day of his birth until his end."
Drosnin soon discovered that the Bible code was a computer program containing Hebrew letters in five different colours in a grid much like a crossword puzzle. Rips had removed the spaces between the Hebrew words creating a string of 304,805 letters in 64 rows of 4772 letters. According to legend, it was the way Moses received the Bible from God - "contiguous, without break of words". Drosnin viewed a printout that read "Hussein", "Scuds", and "Russian missile", words encoded together in the Book of Genesis. The full code sequence stated "Hussein picked the day." In Chapter 14 of Genesis where the story of Abraham's wars are written, the date 'fire on 3rd Shevat' had been found. That date from the Hebrew calendar is January 18, 1991, the day Iraq launched the first Scud missile against Israel. Rips discovered the date three weeks before the war started.
Almost two years later, Drosnin, still investigating the Bible code's existence and as sceptical as ever, found himself in a situation that was quite terrifying. The assassinations of Anwar Sadat, and John and Robert Kennedy had already been found using the code. (At this stage, the first and last name of Sadat's killer, the date, place and time the murder occurred and how it took place had also been found. Later, when the mathematical model that uses a sequential method of analysis called a skip sequence was applied to John F. Kennedy's assassination it revealed the place "Dallas", and "Oswald" - "name of assassin who will assassinate". In fact, the only time "President Kennedy" is found, the words "to die" are also found next to his name using the same skip sequence. "Oswald" is also encoded with "marksman" and "sniper" as well as the eerie description of how he would kill the President - "he will strike in the head, death". Oswald's killer "Ruby" along with "he will kill the assassin" is also encoded.) But this time, it was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin whose name was discovered along with "assassin will assassinate" crossing his name. It also stated that it would happen in the Hebrew year beginning in late 1995. On September 1, 1994, Drosnin flew to Israel with a letter purporting the code's prediction. It was given to Rabin but on November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by Amir in Tel Aviv. The assassin's name and place were later discovered in the code.
By the 20th page of The Bible Code, Drosnin has outlined a series of events and alleged facts that, if true, could change not only how humanity views its history, but its present, and possibly its future. The likelihood that such information could be contained in the book regarded as the fundamental doctrine of Western religion creates alarming religious implications, not to mention massive moral, philosophical and scientific dilemmas. It has the potential to change the very foundation of life as we now know it. And if we are to believe that the code does actually exist, we must ask who created it, how and why. Rips is a devout Jew, so he believes it was God. Drosnin, however, proclaiming no religious affiliations, is faced with the possibility that some 'higher intelligence' must (or did) exist.
It is believed that the Bible code, found in the Bible's original Hebrew form, was initially discovered by the rabbi H.M.D. Weissmandel in Prague, Czechoslovakia, some 50 years ago. By skipping the first 50 words and then another 50 words, the word 'Torah' - the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament usually ascribed to Moses - was spelt out at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. The same skip sequence spelled out 'Torah' in the Book of Exodus, the Book of Numbers and in the Book of Deuteronomy.
Rip's found the only copy of the rabbi's book on the subject at the National Library of Israel 12 years ago. The code was only briefly mentioned, but it was enough for Rips to start his own experimentations. Like Weissmandel, Rips began manually counting the words in the Book of Genesis using similar skip sequences. "You know, Isaac Newton also tried to find the code in the Bible," says Rips, "and he considered it more important than his Theory of the Universe." Newton so believed in the code's existence that he learned Hebrew and spent half his lifetime trying to find it. But no mathematical theory applied by him worked. Rips succeeded because he had the technology that Newton did not. The hidden text of the Bible was encoded with a kind of time-lock. It could not be opened until the computer was invented.
Scientifically, the Bible code has undergone rigorous testing. Rips, who developed a sophisticated mathematical model which he then wrote into a computer program "found words encoded far more than statistics allowed for by random chance". He believed that the Old Testament was coded but his mathematical model was still incomplete. It was the Israeli physicist Doron Witztum that made the final breakthrough. Testing the math and the code then began. The original experiment entitled "Equidistant Letter Sequence in the Book of Genesis" included this title page extract from the experiment's findings: Randomization analysis indicates that hidden information is woven into the text of Genesis in the form of equidistant letter sequences. The effect is significant at the level of 99.998%.
The experiment involved Rips and his colleagues (Witztum and Rosenberg) searching for the names of 32 influential sages - both Biblical and modern - to see whether their names and the dates of their birth and death were encoded in Genesis. This process was also applied to the Hebrew translation of War and Peace and two other Hebrew texts. Names and dates encoded together only appeared in the Bible. This set the odds of finding such encoded information by random chance at 1 in 10 million. Mathematicians say a hundred to one is beyond chance. The most rigorous test ever used is 1000 to 1.
In the final experiment, Rips took the thirty-two names and sixty-four dates and jumbled them in 10 million combinations, so that 9,999,999 were a mismatch, and only one was the correct pairing. He then did a computer run to see which of the 10 million examples got a better result - and only the correct names and dates came together in the Bible. Again the result was 1 in 10 million.
Harold Guns, one of The Pentagon's senior code breakers, heard about the Bible code and decided to investigate. A trained statistician and a man who spoke Hebrew, Guns wrote his own program and scanned the text for the same information as the Israeli mathematicians, sure that he could prove that the code did not exist. He believed it was "off-the-wall, ridiculous" but he too found the names and dates of the sages. So determined to find a hole in Rips' math, Guns conducted a 440-hour experiment that included finding the cities of the original 32 sages and then another 34. He checked all 66 against the names of the cities and found that the cities did match the names. The American and Israeli results had corroborated. "I set out to disprove the code and ended up proving it," says Guns.
Rips, Witztum and Rosenberg then submitted a paper to the leading American journal, Statistical Science. Its editor, Robert Kass, decided to have it tested by other experts and academics despite his scepticism. To his surprise, two tests proved the math correct so, in an unprecedented move, Kass had a third check run. That too confirmed the math, so the paper was published. There is a Bible within the Bible states Drosnin in his book and continues to say that The Bible is not only a book - it is also a computer program.
The continuous string of 304,805 letters is searched by the computer for words, names and phrases hidden in the Bible text. Starting with the first letter of the Bible, the program looks for words with skips of 1, 2 , 3, all the way up to several thousand. This process is then repeated from the second letter, the third and so on until the last letter of the Bible is reached. When a word is found, the computer can then search for any relevant information. It is a program based on two primary tenets; firstly, how close the words are encoded together, and secondly, whether the skips that find the words are the shortest in the Bible. Rips alleges there is an infinite amount of information encoded, for the discovery of a new word or phrase reveals another cross-word, with information found vertically, horizontally and diagonally.
The Bible code has yet to be scientifically refuted, although it does have its critics. In the three years since the Rips-Witztum-Rosenberg paper was printed in Statistical Science, other tests have been carried out by professors at Harvard, Yale and the Hebrew University. None can dispute the math nor the coded information subsequently found in the Bible. Drosnin, interested to see whether 'current' events would appear in the text, worked with Rips entering key words from the headline news of the New York Time and the Jerusalem Post. And they found the information - dates, times, public figures involved. If it was important enough in world history, it was there.
As well as the assassinations of Sudan, the Kennedys and Rabin, both World Wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Moon landing ("Man on Moon", "spaceship", "Apollo 13" plus the precise date) and the collision of Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter are encoded. And more. President Clinton, the Watergate affair ("Watergate", "Who is he? President, but he was kicked out"), the Great Depression; the list goes on. World leaders, artists, writers, scientists. "Shakespeare" appears with "presented on stage", "Macbeth", "Hamlet"; while "Einstein" appears with "science", "he overturned present reality". The Oklahoma bombing is encoded in terrifying detail including "his name is Timothy", "McVeigh", "day 19", "on the 9th hour", "in the morning", "he ambushed, he pounced, terror", "two years from the death of Koresh".
The Bible Code includes many examples of the computer-generated grids used by Rips and Drosnin. All are clearly marked showing where the encoded information was found and Drosnin takes the reader through the process in layman's terms. There is a strong sense that all those involved with the Bible code desperately wanted to disprove its existence. Drosnin's fear is almost audible when, with disbelief, the code's validity becomes more concrete with every scientific test and every proved prediction. He asks the big questions; Does this mean all history is predetermined?; Does it mean God does exist or, if not, what superior intelligence developed this code?; Isn't the survival of humanity in danger if the future can be known?
The questions are endless, but I too found myself wanting it to be discounted, to be proved incorrect. But if the scientific community doesn't dispute the findings, what are you to believe? When fanatical religious cults or self-professed profits claim to know the date of Armageddon or of the second coming, it is easy to dismiss with no scientific evidence. With the Bible code however, so far an irrefutable mathematical model has been developed and the code continues to be revealed.
The Bible Code is certainly a book that should be read. Its content far exceeds what is covered here with Drosnin investigating future predictions the code has already revealed, as well as the scientific theory that all possible future outcomes could be encoded within the Bible. Drosnin's style of reporting is far from sensationalist and it is this concerted professionalism, and the evidence presented, that should not be discounted when considering the book's content. Drosnin is an experienced writer and investigator but allows himself to be a person affected by what he has witnessed and the immense implications the code's validity might present. He does not say whether the code's existence is fact or theory although its existence is accepted in Israel. With the worldwide release of The Bible Code on May 30, 1997, it is surprising that the media has not covered it more extensively. But it is said that silence is more powerful than words, perhaps now is the time to ask what this silence is saying.
The "Bible code" itself is encoded in the Bible, and the same words also mean, "He hid, concealed the Bible." The suggestion is that there is another Bible encoded within the story that is openly told in the Old Testament. The computerized code clearly confirms that it is the "seal," the time-lock that until now has protected the hidden secrets. "Sealed before God" actually crosses "Bible code."
