Interview by Wendy Cavenett
"The Bible's history, the story of how it was made and how it has been used, is the story of how some of civilisation's oldest ideas passed from the ancient East to the modern West. In the course of its journey, the Bible provided the West with a unique sense of universal order and its understanding of God. It also gave the West its particular ambitions, its sense of progress and reason, and something, too, of its discontents."
- John Romer, 'Testament: The Bible And History'
The release of Michael Drosnin's 'The Bible Code' has, understandably, caused worldwide controversy. But his is not the only book that purports the existence of a code in the original Hebrew form of the Torah. He is, however, the author who claims that information contained in the code has predicted important world events; the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin being the most well-known. Indeed, hundreds of details concerning major world events - including the Holocaust and both Word Wars - have been found using the code.
Stanley Kubrick immediately compared the Torah Code to the Black Monolith in '2001', stating it was like a "mysterious source of knowledge that comes around everytime we're ready to be taken to a new level in our evolution."
Recently in Sydney, Drosnin spoke to Between The Lines' Editor, Wendy Cavenett about not only the validity of the Code's existence, but the important prophetic information he alleges it contains and, as he states in his book, the belief that all possible future outcomes could be encoded in the Bible.
In was June, 1992 when Michael Drosnin first stumbled across the existence of the Bible code. He was in Israel to meet a top Israeli intelligence officer to discuss the escalating Gulf War crisis when a young soldier approached him and suggested he see Eliyahu Rips, a top mathematician in Jerusalem who had found "the exact date the Gulf War would begin. In the Bible".
Curious, Drosnin visited Rips sure that he would leave the following day for America, the Bible Code just another theory with an interesting religious twist. When he arrived, Rips - one of the world's leading authorities on group theory (a field of mathematics underlying quantum physics) - read 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."
Rips showed Drosnin a computer program containing Hebrew letters in five different colours in a grid much like a crossword puzzle. What Drosnin was looking at was the original Hebrew form of the Bible without word breaks. This created a string of 304,805 letters in 64 rows of 4772 letters. Professor Rips, along with his colleague, the physicist Doron Witztum, were researching unique encoded patterns found in the Book of Genesis. With a computer program that scanned the text using a scientific method called Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS), the scientists had discovered information regarding important world events including the Holocaust, the assassination of J.F. Kennedy and the French Revolution. They believed this occurred more frequently - and with more accuracy - than chance allowed.
ELS searches the continuous string of 304,805 letters 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.
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'," writes Drosnin. 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.
It has been five years since Drosnin's initial meeting with Professor Rips and today he sits in a quiet room in Sydney's Sebel Hotel, doused by the sun that escapes through the wooden blinds behind him. He is still the investigative reporter who worked for the Washington Post and New York's Wall Street Journal; he exudes that focussed, attentive demeanour that has carried him through many stories, the Bible code he admits, being the most controversial. Crisp white shirt, tie and grey pin-striped pants; official attire that seems more casual than it actually is. Certainly this could be said of Drosnin himself. His resume, and indeed the events that led him to pen The Bible Code should make him a tad more clandestine in conversation. Slightly unsettled even. But no, he is a lucid thinker, a cerebral humanitarian, an intelligent journalist whose creed of scepticism has survived amidst the incredible - and to some, fantastic - story that unfolds in The Bible Code. And he remains staunchly non-religious, admitting that he had very little knowledge or understanding of the Bible until his introduction to the code. He even learnt Hebrew to assist him in his investigations.
"Nothing is taken on faith," he says in the book's introduction. "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." A code that casts its eye into the future and possibly the entire past, "maybe before the Big Bang" says Drosnin later. Doubt is understandable; Drosnin is the first to admit this, genuinely encouraging intelligent scepticism in the pursuit of truth. But the book has, in an increasingly declining religious climate, provoked massive worldwide interest.
"It's been published in 15 countries now, in 10 languages," says Drosnin. "It's a bestseller in every country it's been published so far which is extraordinary and it hasn't left the list in any country. It's recently come out in Japan, in Korea, in Tawain. It's number one in Korea, number one in Tawain and it went through three printings the first week it was published in Japan and will be on the list this week and that's a country with no Christians, no Jews and no Bible. They have the sayings of Buddha in the bedside night-table in the hotels and yet the book is hugely successful there."
So is this just another disturbing theory masquerading as fact for popular consumption? It's difficult to take this view when scientists and mathematicians cannot dispute the maths involved in breaking the code, nor can they rebuke the information it reveals. If science with its stringent tenets that prove fact from theory cannot find fault with the Torah Code (referred to as the Bible Code by Drosnin throughout this article), what should you believe? And does the public really know what Drosnin's book is all about anyway?
"I'm not sure I understand what it really means," admits Drosnin. "So I don't know if they do, but yes, I have a basic belief in the wisdom of the people which is in some ways greater than the wisdom of the few great thinkers or government leaders of the professors or whatever. I think people are responding to this book at large because they do get it. It means that we're not alone in the world or at least we were not alone at the time the Bible was written and it's the first scientific evidence that some other intelligence does or at least did once exist and that is flat out amazing of course, and I think that's why the book has been so successful.
"I've looked at the Bible code every day myself for five years. I've learned Hebrew in order to do it. I have a complete copy of the computer program that Eli Rips used to discover the code, and I'm absolutely certain there is a code in the Bible that does reveal events that happened thousands of years after the Bible was written. I indeed have found events in the code first and then seen them later happen in the real world and when that happens to you, you believe. It happened to me in a very dramatic way with Yitzhak Rabin where I found the prediction of the assassination a year before he was killed, warned him [which Rabin chose to ignore], and then saw him killed, exactly as predicted, indeed in the year it was predicted.
"I've also spoken to senior mathematicians, really well known people at Harvard, Yale - all of whom have confirmed that the Bible code is real - and to a top co-director at the U.S. Department of Defence [Harold Gans, now retired] who set out to prove the code was a hoax, a fraud and ended up proving that it was real. The original scientific paper by Eli Rips [about the code] has been published in 'Statistical Science', the respected referee journal in the U.S. after it passed three separate reviews by secular mathematicians. In three years since the original experiment was published, not one rebuttal has even been submitted to the math journal.
"It is proven, which is not to say that everyone accepts it," adds Drosnin. "Obviously, when you have a new scientific discovery that challenges all conventional reality, a lot of people aren't going to believe it not matter how overwhelming the evidence.
But there have, of course, in the three years since the publication of the 'Statistical Science' paper, many who have come forward claiming to have found flaws in the Torah Code. None, however, have withstood scientific analysis. The original paper therefore stands as do the results of many independent scientific studies that support the code's existence.
The original experiment by Rips and Witztum saw the scientists 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. Writes Drosnin, "Mathematicians say a hundred to one is beyond chance. The most rigorous test ever used is 1000 to 1." Indeed, the title page to their Equidistant Letter Sequence in the Book of Genesis, subsequently published by 'Statistical Science' states in part that: "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%."
Despite this, opinions remain polarised. The fact that science can not dispute the code's existence leads to disturbing philosophical, moral and religious dilemmas. Indeed, the entire notion of religion could be undermined. Writes Drosnin, "The Bible itself, of course, says that God is the author, that he dictated the original five books to Moses on Mount Sinai: 'And the Lord said to Moses, Come up to me to the mountain, and I will give thee the tablets of stone, and the Torah.' " It is, therefore, the fundamental debate between science and religion. If the Torah Code was to stand as fact and be accepted as such, the relatively calm debate about its possible author - whether that be God or some unknown intelligence - that we are witnessing now, could develop into a major cosmological problem. As it stands - and as history testifies - scientists, philosophers and theologians have been locked in the God versus science debate for centuries.
"If there's one thing that's certain," says Drosnin, "is that this information [in the Torah Code] must come from another dimension because no one of us can see across time. Whoever or whatever encoded the Bible sees time in a totally different way than we do. We have a very sharp division between past, present and future; not so for the encoder of course, and not so for Einstein by the way - at least in his theory. As a being he saw it as we do; in other words he lived in the time as we do, but his theory of time said past, present and future were one and all took place simultaneously.
"And Newton not only believed you could see the future but actually looked for the code in the Bible. I've always experienced time sequentially, but the two greatest minds of the modern age say otherwise. The Bible Code proves otherwise but now it's not only just a scientific theory but rather a fact and I assume that means it's from someone outside of time as we understand time which probably suggests another dimension.
"Dr Rips thinks we should be looking for the code not in two dimensions as we are now but at least in three dimensions but he doesn't know how to model it mathematically although computers are probably capable of doing it. But he says, even then we're probably not seeing it as we should; we should at least be looking in four dimensions - Einstein's dimension of time - and then probably five dimensions and, unfortunately, no one even knows what the fifth dimension even is, although physicists pretty much agree that it does exist. I met with the chairman of the physics department at Harvard and asked him what is the fifth dimension and he said, 'Well, it's very small, it's smaller than the nucleus of an atom.' And I said, 'Where is it?' and he said, 'Here,' and I said, 'Well, where in relation to us right now, in your office?'. And he said, 'Oh, no, no, the whole universe.' 'Well how can it be smaller than the nucleus of an atom and yet we be inside it, the whole universe?', I asked and he spent the next two hours trying to tell me and I never got it. A person at MIT told me that we're inside it.
"I asked Dr Rips to explain it to me but he said it would take 10, one hour lessons in math to bring me up to speed, so I don't have the answer mathematically but then he pointed to an ancient religious text called The Book of Creation, which some believe is older than the Bible and written by Abraham ... and in that text it says there are five dimensions and it defines the fifth dimension as a depth of good and a depth of evil and Dr Rips says that can explain how we're inside of it because the distance between good and evil maybe the greatest distance in the world."
America's Newsweek, in a feature-length article about the issue, quoted NASA's Don Foster as saying, "A wicked little devil is whispering in my ear that these code finders could do the same thing with a telephone directory if they thought it was a spiritually significant text." Drosnin's response is emphatic. "Most of the critics - including this gentleman from NASA - have never actually investigated the Bible Code. They've never actually checked it out. Let him [Foster] find in the telephone directory the assassination of Rabin and I'll take the gentleman seriously. Let him find information about Shoemaker-Levy, the Gulf War ... in the telephone directory and I'll take the gentleman seriously."
"The notion of God putting secret codes in the Torah is idolatress," says an American Rabbi at the end of the Newsweek article. "God doesn't play dice as Einstein says. Does he write word games?"
"Many religious leaders - from every faith - are troubled, feel threatened by a Bible that is no longer cut in stone," Drosnin counters, "that it is not a settled text they must interpret for us, but rather a fluid, dynamic source of information that anyone who learns Hebrew and obtains the proper computer program can access and have a dialogue one to one.