JETS
43/4 (December 2000) 619–636
THE BIBLE CODE:
“TEACHING THEM [
WRONG
] THINGS”
RICHARD A. TAYLOR*
I. INTRODUCTION
Michael Drosnin, author of the 1997
New York Times
best-selling book
entitled
The Bible Code
, tells of ˘ying to Israel on 1 September 1994 in order
to convey to then Israeli prime minister Rabin an urgent and sober warning.
Drosnin had learned that the only time the name Yitzhak Rabin appeared
in the Bible code it intersected the words “assassin that will assassinate.”
Drosnin had therefore concluded that the life of the Prime Minister was in
grave danger. But he also thought that if immediate action were taken this
imminent catastrophe could perhaps be avoided. When he arrived in Israel,
Drosnin met with Israeli poet Chaim Guri, a close friend of the prime minister,
who in turn conveyed Drosnin’s message to Rabin. Drosnin urged that
the Bible code message concerning Rabin be taken seriously, especially in
light of the fact that the same Bible code had also accurately announced the
prior assassinations of Anwar Sadat, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy,
Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandi. Drosnin’s mission, however, did not
meet with success. Less than a year later, on 4 November 1995, Yitzhak
Rabin was unexpectedly killed by a Jewish assassin.
1
1Ù
Michael Drosnin,
The Bible Code
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) 13. Drosnin’s book has
attracted a lot of popular fanfare, not all of it positive. On 9 October 1997, in company with the work
of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg, Drosnin’s book won the 1997 prize for literature at the IgNoble
prize ceremonies presented at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater. The tongue-in-cheek purpose
of the ceremonies was to honor individuals whose accomplishments “cannot or should not be reproduced.”
Sternberg has referred to Drosnin’s claims as a “scam” and a “patently ridiculous idea.” See
Shlomo Sternberg, “Snake Oil for Sale,”
Bible Review
13/4 (August 1997) 24. Most of those who consider
themselves serious code researchers (including Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg,
and Harold Gans) have now publicly distanced themselves from Drosnin and other “amateurs.” One
of the major reasons for this rejection of Drosnin’s work concerns his use of Bible codes to predict
future events. Most code researchers maintain that the codes can be rightly interpreted only
after
the events to which they point have taken place. There are also complaints that Drosnin has not
been completely aboveboard in ful˜lling commitments to those who assisted with his research. The
Israeli ˜rm that produced the software that Drosnin used in ˜nding his codes has sued both Drosnin
and his publisher for some eighteen million dollars due to alleged breach of agreement for not
disclosing the identity of the software that was used. See “Israeli Firm Suing ‘Bible Code,’ ”
The
Jerusalem Post International Edition
(October 10, 1998) 32. For helpful evaluations of Drosnin’s
book see the following reviews: George C. Hammond, in
WTJ
59 (1997) 329–331; Michael Weitzman,
* Richard A. Taylor is professor of Old Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary,
3909 Swiss Avenue, Dallas, TX 75204.
Editor’s Note
: The theme of the ˜ftieth-anniversary conference of the Evangelical Theological
Society where this paper was ˜rst presented was “teaching them
all
things” (Matt 28:20).
JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
620
In the last ˜ve years or so there has been a rapidly growing interest in the
cryptic messages alleged to be encoded in the Hebrew text of the Torah and
perhaps in the rest of the Tanak as well.
2
An attempt to carry this approach
over to the Greek NT is now in its early stages.
3
A steady stream of
articles and books has appeared,
4
in some cases generating huge pro˜ts
for publisher and author alike. As Jeˆrey says, “The whole world is talking
about the remarkable phenomenon known as the Bible Codes.”
5
Some
of the more sensational messages thought by many to be found in the
Bible code concern the following events: World War II, the Watergate
aˆair, the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, the United States moon
landing, the 1994 collision of a comet with the planet Jupiter, the Gulf
War, the fall of communism, the Oklahoma City bombing, etc. Historical
details connected with the names of Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler,
Princess Diana, and many others are also said to appear in the Bible code,
in some cases along with formidable messages of warning. The Bible codes
also allegedly contain messages concerning Germany, England, France,
Russia, Japan, the United States, etc.
Is there a mysterious code in the Hebrew Scriptures, “a Bible beneath the
Bible” as it were,
6
containing foreboding but accurate warnings for contem-
2Ù
Numerous web-sites provide information on the Bible code phenomenon, as well as facilitating
discussion both pro and con. Due to the fact that materials available at these sites are often in a
state of ˘ux, and some of the sites themselves are somewhat ephemeral, I have decided not to attempt
a listing of them here. But a search on the web using the key words “Bible code” will turn
up current information.
3Ù
See the chapter entitled “The Discovery of Bible Codes in the Greek New Testament” in Grant
R. Jeˆrey,
The Mysterious Bible Codes
(Nashville: Word, 1998) 169–179. Apart from the patent
unlikelihood of such an idea, the choice of a Greek text for this purpose could not be poorer—the
textus receptus
.
4Ù
In a few instances recently published volumes that actually have nothing to do with the Bible
code have inadvertently stumbled into a potentially misleading choice of words in their titles. For
example, consider the following titles: Bruce M. Metzger,
Breaking the Code: Understanding the
Book of Revelation
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1993); D. Brent Sandy and Ronald L. Giese Jr., eds.,
Cracking Old Testament Codes: A Guide to Interpreting the Literary Genres of the Old Testament
(Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1995); Jonathan M. Watt,
Code-Switching in Luke and Acts
(Berkeley
Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics 31; ed. Irmengard Rauch; New York: Peter Lang, 1997);
Wolfgang Roth,
Hebrew Gospel: Cracking the Code of Mark
(Yorktown Heights, NY: Meyer-Stone
Books, 1988); Northrop Frye,
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
(New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982); Hal Lindsey,
Apocalypse Code
(Palos Verdes, CA: Western
Front, 1997).
5Ù
Jeˆrey,
Mysterious Bible Codes
1; cf. p. 60. Jeˆrey’s enthusiastic use of hyperbole in this citation
may be excused, since he himself is an ardent advocate of the Bible codes. Cf. Jeˆrey Satinover,
Cracking the Bible Code
(New York: William Morrow, 1997) 10, who thinks that the Bible codes
“. . . might well prove to be the most momentous discovery of the twentieth century.”
6Ù
The phrase is Drosnin’s. See Drosnin,
Bible Code
25.
in
The Jewish Chronicle
(July 25, 1997); H. Van Dyke Parunak, in
JETS
41 (1998) 323–325.
Largely due to the notoriety of Drosnin’s book, Bible code research has received considerable attention
in the general press. Articles have appeared in
Time
(9 June 1997) 56;
Newsweek
(9
June 1997) 66–67;
USA Today
(4 June 1997); and newspapers such as
The Dallas Morning
News
,
The New York Times
,
The Los Angeles Times
,
The Jerusalem Post
,
The Jerusalem Report
,
etc. A two-hour television documentary entitled “Secrets of the Bible Code Revealed,” featuring
Drosnin and other advocates of the Bible code, is also scheduled to air.
THE BIBLE CODE: “TEACHING THEM [
WRONG
] THINGS”
621
porary society? And if there is, would not the existence of the Bible code be
of inestimable apologetic value in demonstrating the divine origin of the
OT?
7
After all, there is obviously no way apart from divine assistance that
the ancient human authors could have encoded such messages about the
future in their writings. If there is a valid Bible code, it would seem to provide
irrefutable proof of the involvement of a supra-human intelligence in
the writing of the ancient Biblical text.
8
II. THE BIBLE CODE THEORY
The basic concept behind the Bible code theory is relatively simple. If
one takes the Hebrew text of the Torah, as found for example in the Koren
edition, and deletes all spaces and punctuation between words and verses,
this creates a continuous strand of text consisting of 304,805 letters.
9
One
can then search that text for encoded messages found by skipping a certain
equal number of letters in the Biblical text in order to isolate the letters of
a particular word being sought. Ideally, this is done with the help of a computer
that can be programmed to look for certain combinations of letters
that together form a word. For example, if I instruct the Bible code program
10
to look for my surname (in Hebrew,
rwlyyf
), the program will search
for that sequence of letters by skipping the same number of intervening letters
until it locates the entire sequence. The skip pattern can be a relatively
small number of letters, or it can be so large as to number in the tens of
thousands. The procedure is known as an “equidistant letter sequence,” or
7Ù
Such is the conclusion of, for example, Satinover. He thinks that the results of Bible code
research eventually “. . . may demolish the claims of the ‘higher’ critics, and support, rather, the
Orthodox Jewish contention as to the nature of the Torah.” See Jeˆrey B. Satinover, “Divine
Authorship? Computer Reveals Startling Word Patterns,”
Bible Review
11/5 (October 1995) 28.
Likewise, Jeˆrey repeatedly avers that the value of the Bible codes lies in the fact that they prove
that the Bible is inspired by God. See Jeˆrey,
Mysterious Bible Codes
1, 2, 14, 16, 54, 59, 65, 68,
149, 152, 165, 166, 181, 184. But such tables can be easily turned. A reader of Satinover’s article
mischievously created a grid of the ˜rst few sentences in the article and then proceeded to ˜nd an
encoded message that read “No, no, no, a lie!” See Marvin F. Cain in “Readers Reply,”
Bible Review
12/1 (February 1996) 10.
8Ù
For most investigators the presence of the Bible code is proof of God’s involvement in the writing
of the Bible. Gans’s comment is fairly typical: “The phenomenon of hidden codes in the Bible
is real, and its implication should not be minimized. . . . serious scienti˜c evidence supports this
contention and points to a divine author of the Bible” (Harold Gans, “Bible Codes,” a paper available
at the Aish HaTorah web site). But Drosnin, who describes himself as a skeptic who does not
believe in God, goes only so far as to suggest that the codes are the result of supra-human intelligence.
See Drosnin,
Bible Code
181; cf. pp. 14, 50–51, 57, 61, 79, 91, 97–98, 103, 133, 174.
9Ù
The number applies only to the Torah. Weldon mistakenly thinks of this number as a total of
letters for the entire Hebrew OT. See John Weldon, with Cliˆord and Barbara Wilson,
Decoding
the Bible Code
(Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1998) 10. Drosnin makes the same mistake. See
Drosnin,
Bible Code
25, 27, 44; but cf. p. 126.
10Ù
I have used two electronic Bible code programs for this study. The ˜rst is the 1997 release of
Bible Codes
distributed by Computronic Corporation (mailing address: Computronic Corporation,
P.O. Box 102, Savyon 56530, Israel; e-mail address: [email protected]). The second is the
1998 release of
Bible Decoder
(address: Graphonet Ltd., 61 Disraeli Street, P.O. Box 7234, Haifa
31071, Israel; e-mail address: [email protected]). A number of other programs are also available.
JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
622
ELS. It does not matter whether the sequence is found in a right-to-left
combination of letters, or a left-to-right combination, or one that is vertical
or diagonal. Once the desired word is found and the text is arranged in lines
whose width is determined by the ELS, the surrounding text can then be
searched to see what message emerges.
So far I have had the humbling experience of being unable to detect anything
of clear signi˜cance in the Torah in connection with my own name. I
did ˜nd certain “messages,” but they seem to con˘ict in terms of content.
Using an ELS of 97 I found my surname encoded with an intersecting message
that said “Yahweh is my God.” My elation over ˜nding this favorable
message did not last long, however. There was another intersecting message
a little lower that said, presumably in reference to me, “the evil one.”
Which message should I prefer, and on what basis?
When Drosnin looked for the name Yitzhak Rabin, he claimed to have
found an encoded message (with an ELS of 4,772) indicating “assassin will
assassinate,”
11
and on this basis he concluded that Rabin was in grave danger.
And the Israeli scholars Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg claim to have
found embedded in the Hebrew text of Genesis the names of thirty-two
prominent Jewish personalities described in the
Encyclopedia of Great Men
in Israel
,
12
along with the dates of their birth or death. On the basis of
statistical probability their conclusion was that “. . . the proximity of ELSs
with related meanings in the Book of Genesis is not due to chance.”
13
In approaching Bible study this way, Scripture becomes an amorphous
collection of letters with an almost in˜nite number of combinations based
on ELSs that run sometimes forward, sometimes backward, sometimes vertically,
and sometimes diagonally. Bible study is thus reduced to discovering
what one sets out to ˜nd rather than listening patiently to what the
divine author has to say in and through the text. Is there a code to be found
in the Bible? Is it through mathematical computations or mystical combinations
of letters separated sometimes by vast distances that God has chosen
to reveal himself and his plan for the universe? I think not. The combinations
of letters and so-called messages discovered by Bible code researchers
11Ù
In actuality, the Biblical text is here referring to involuntary manslaughter rather than to
assassination. But Bible code advocates do not seem to hold themselves to the meanings of words
as found in the Biblical text when looking for encoded messages. In this case, since
j”xErO
in modern
Hebrew can refer to an assassin, and since that meaning is more suitable for describing the circumstances
of Rabin’s death, it is the preferred meaning. In other words, in this way the text
takes on a new life, and meanings of words in the alleged codes need not necessarily be the same
as in the Biblical usage. Some critics of Bible code methodology have failed to acknowledge this
assumption, with the result that their criticisms are not viewed as entirely valid by those who are
engaged in code research.
12Ù
M. Margalioth, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel: A Bibliographical Dictionary of
Jewish Sages and Scholars from the 9th to the End of the 18th Century
[Hebrew] (4 vols.; Tel
Aviv: Joshua Chachik, 1961).
13Ù
Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the
Book of Genesis,”
Statistical Science
9/3 (August 1994) 434.
SHORT ONE
THE BIBLE CODE: “TEACHING THEM [
WRONG
] THINGS”
623
appear to be contrived and/or coincidental.
14
I do not believe that there is a
code to be found in the Bible.
III. DELIMITATIONS
In this paper I would like to examine the claims of those who advocate
the existence of the Bible code from the standpoint of what we know about
the history of transmission of the Biblical text. Space constraints permit me
to discuss the Bible code mainly from this single perspective alone. I will not
seek to address other more peripheral issues such as the defective knowledge
of the Hebrew language re˘ected in the writings of many Christian advocates
of the theory, or examples of glaring inconsistencies in method, or
the ever-present tendency toward eisegesis.
More speci˜cally, I will not seek to answer the argument for the Bible
code that is based on statistical probability as set forth by the Israeli team of
Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg.
15
There are several reasons for this decision.
14Ù
Sussman is more direct: “The point is that almost any alleged decoding system, if applied to
a lucky spot (and a modern computer can keep trying until it does get lucky), will yield almost
any . . . message.” See Bernard J. Sussman, “A reader-response to Jeˆrey Satinover’s ‘Divine Authorship?
Computer Reveals Startling Word Patterns,’ ”
Bible Review
12 (February 1996) 8. Even
without the aid of computers, students of the KJV long ago called attention to an interesting feature
of that translation. The
forty-sixth
word from the beginning of Psalm
46
is “shake,” and the
forty-sixth
word from the end of that psalm is “spear.” To make matters even more interesting, in
1611, when the KJV was published, Shakespeare was
forty-six
years of age. See Solomon W.
Golomb, “Did Shakespeare or Wycliˆe Translate the King James Version?”
Bible Review
13/6
(December 1997) 8–9. Such coincidental messages may of course be found in non-Biblical texts as
well. Mark Perakh, a physics professor emeritus at California State University Fullerton, teasingly
discovered the following encoded message in a 1979 volume written in modern Hebrew:
“Amir will kill Prime Minister hero Rabin.” See Mark Perakh, “Some Bible Code Related Experiments
and Discussions,” previously available at the following web-site: http://www.jps.net/perakh/
fcodes.htm. Bar-Natan and McKay, critics of the Bible codes, have identi˜ed various encoded messages
in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
and in Melville’s
Moby Dick
. See Dror Bar-Natan and Brendan
McKay, “Equidistant Letter Sequences in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
,” and Brendan McKay, “Assassinations
Foretold in
Moby Dick!
” Both of these essays were made available at the following website:
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html. Responses by Witztum and others were made
available at the following web-site: http://www.torahcodes.co.il (e.g. Doron Witztum, “A Refutation
Refuted: How the List of Famous Rabbis Failed in
War and Peace
”; Doron Witztum and Yosef
Beremez, “The ‘Famous Rabbis’ Sample: A New Measurement”; Doron Witztum, “Did They Really
Find Codes in
War and Peace
?”; idem, “Does Tolstoy Really Love Brendan McKay?”).
15Ù
Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg, “Equidistant Letter Sequences” 429–438. This article is reprinted
as an appendix (using the pagination of the original article) in Drosnin,
Bible Code
429–438.
Perhaps more than any other single publication, this article has provided a scienti˜c basis for
Bible code research and has contributed immensely to the widespread notoriety of the theory.
Hasofer is no doubt correct in suggesting that due to the popularity of Drosnin’s book, this paper has
been more widely disseminated than any previous paper on mathematical statistics in history (A. M.
Hasofer, “A Statistical Critique of the Witztum
et al.
Paper,” published on the internet). With regard
to the division of labor in this triumvir, apparently it is Witztum who is the main code researcher
in this group; in fact, he is thought by many to be the preeminent code researcher in the world.
Rips, a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was primarily responsible
for the system of statistical analysis used to validate the ˜ndings. Rosenberg developed the
necessary computer program for the project. See “Statement by Doron Witztum” (June 4, 1997) at
JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
624
First, I am not quali˜ed to do so. I am a Biblical scholar and not a mathematician.
I confess to being quickly overcome by the ethereal air of the
sophisticated mathematical computations that are a necessary part of any
discussion of statistical probability. My expertise does not lie in that area.
Second, there are quali˜ed mathematicians who have responded to that part
of the Bible code discussion, and I am content simply to refer the interested
reader to those discussions.
16
In the opinion of a number of mathematicians
who have investigated the matter, there are serious ˘aws in the formulaic
expressions of probability as presented by Rips and other code researchers.
17
Third and most important, I do not believe that the real issues in this discussion
actually lie in the discipline of mathematical probability. Bible code
advocates have based much of their theory upon arguments from statistical
probability. However, the Bible code phenomenon is ultimately an issue of
OT textual criticism, and no amount of statistical probability or mathematical
speculation can alter that fact. Any Bible code theory that plays loose
with known facts concerning the transmission of the Biblical text is working
with an inherent ˘aw that is actually fatal to its claims and conclusions. In
such a case sophisticated mathematical computations may be nothing more
than distracting and misleading subterfuge.
IV. HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS TO MODERN VIEWS
Few theories burst on the scene without prior antecedents, and this is
certainly true of the Bible code theory. It has certain historical roots, if not
in terms of speci˜c methods and procedures at least in terms of general desires
and expectations. The idea that the Hebrew Bible contains encoded
messages that lie beneath the surface is not a new idea. Certain Biblical
scholars of previous generations also maintained such a belief. However,
they lacked the means to follow through on their hunches as completely as
they might have wished. In fact, it is only the advent of modern computer
technology that has made it possible to search the Biblical text with suf-
˜cient speed as to make recovery of an alleged code practical. Because we
are now able to do in seconds or minutes what previously would have taken
a lifetime if in fact it were possible at all, the prospects for discovering codes
16Ù
A list of more than ˜fty individuals who hold doctoral degrees in mathematics and/or are faculty
members in various college or university departments of mathematics or statistics and who
have gone on record as rejecting the validity of the Bible code theory from the standpoint of its
mathematical probabilities is available at the following web-site: http://www.math.caltech.edu/
code/petition.html.
17Ù
Bar-Hillel, McKay (of the Australian National University), and Bar-Natan (of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem) have pointed out certain methodological ˘aws in the research of Witztum,
Rips, and Rosenberg. See the following article: Maya Bar-Hillel, Dror Bar-Natan, and Brendan
McKay, “The Torah Codes: Puzzle and Solution,”
Chance 11/2 (1998) 13–19.
the Aish HaTorah web-site. A related article may also be mentioned here: D. J. Bartholomew,
“Probability, Statistics and Theology,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, vol. 151,
part 1 (1988) 137–159. This article is followed by “Discussion of the Paper by Professor Bartholomew”
(pp. 160–178), in which Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg (among others) provide some commentary
on and interaction with Bartholomew’s essay.
THE BIBLE CODE: “TEACHING THEM [WRONG] THINGS” 625
in the Bible are feasible like never before. As a backdrop for understanding
modern views on the Bible code I will ˜rst brie˘y describe a few of the earlier
views.
1. The tetragrammaton in Esther. The canonical questions that surround
the Book of Esther have largely to do with the absence of any mention
of the name of God in the book. This apparent absence of God’s name in
a canonical book of Scripture was particularly troubling for many ancient
scholars. However, in some medieval manuscripts of Esther the initial letters
of four successive Hebrew words found in Esth 5:4 are presented in
such a way that together they spell out YHWH.18 Is this a divinely encoded
expression of the tetragrammaton in the Book of Esther, as certain medieval
scholars supposed? I doubt it. The combination of letters, though unexpected
and interesting, is merely coincidental. It probably would never have
been noticed were it not for an ancient rabbinic interest in overcoming the
canonical questions concerning the Book of Esther.19
2. The Kabbalah. In the Middle Ages the circulation of the Zohar20
contributed to the spread of an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism known as
the Kabbalah.21 Many of its exegetical methods were eventually adapted
and adopted by Christian scholars of the Renaissance period and afterward.
Kabbalistic reasoning in general and the Zohar in particular seem to
have contributed to interest in the Bible codes. Jeˆrey goes so far as to
suggest that the Zohar may even have prophesied of the rediscovery of the
Bible codes in the present generation.22 The use of gematria, by which
Scriptural messages were encoded numerically, also became increasingly
popular among both Jewish and Christian scholars alike who utilized Kabbalistic
techniques.23 Although many Bible code researchers do not employ
18ÙSee the discussion in Carey A. Moore, Esther: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (AB 7B;
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971) 56. The words in question are as follows: μ/Yh” ˆm:h:w] ˚‘l
