Wayne D's Blog

Throughout history there has been interest in uncovering the “secrets” of the Bible. In 1997 Michael Drosnin published The Bible Code which explores biblical prophesy based on a coding method called Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS). In an ELS code a text has all punctuation and space removed to form one long unbroken string of letters.  The coded message can be found by selecting letters based on a fixed spacing which is often referred to as a skip number. The underlined letters in this sentence form an ELS that encodes the word safest with a skip of -4.[1]  Words can be encoded in either the forward or reverse direction.

Drosnin based his book on the work of Dr. Eliyahu Rips an Israeli mathematician who along with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenburg published a paper in Statistical Science in 1994 which described an experiment where they searched for the name of 32 prominent Rabbinic personalities along with the dates of their birth or death in the Hebrew text of Genesis.  They then measured how close together the names and dates were found and compared these results with control texts.  They concluded that “the proximity of ELS’s with related meaning is not due to chance”.[2]  In searching for these messages the letters were arrayed in a grid so that words of related meaning can be searched for.  An example from Gen. 26:5-10 (KJV) is shown in the figure. [3]  The grid is formed by dividing the text into lines 33 characters long. The word code has a skip of  -36, bible a skip of  -100.

Drosnin's book illustrates multiple examples of these interlocking words found in the Old Testament written in Hebrew. Drosnin suggests the sealed book referred to in Isaiah is the bible code.[4]  He also believes that the stories of Joseph and Daniel contain references to the Bible Code.[5]  In Drosnin’s book Rips states very low probability estimations of these interlocking words occurring by chance without ever explaining the mathematical basis for his estimates.[6]

Not to be outdone Christian's have undertaken Bible Code research. One well known group runs a website called Bible Code Digest,[7] This site purports to present “compelling empirical evidence that the Bible was written by an intelligence far beyond the abilities of man”.

There are a number of scholars who have challenged both the original research by Rips et.al. and Drosnin's findings. One is Brendan MacKay, an Australian mathematician.  In 1999 he and Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai published a refutation of Rips’ article in Statistical Science.  They offer explanations other than the hand of God which explain the original results.  MacKay also maintains that no one has been able to find coded messages in the Bible that cannot be easily explained by random chance.[8]

One statement of Drosnin's that has caused much disagreement is “Consistently, the Bible code brings together interlocking words that reveal related information ... In experiment after experiment, the crossword puzzles were found only in the Bible. Not in War and Peace, not in any other book, and not in ten million computer generated cases”.[9]  Thomas have found interlocking words in War and Peace, Moby Dick and Drosnin's own works.[10]   Price has also generated a collection of coded contradictions found in Genesis.[11]

MacKay has replied to Drosnin's assertion that MacKay's examples from books other than the Bible don't follow Rips' rule of minimal skip.  Minimal skip is an important factor in Bible Code research as shorter words will appear many times in any text.  Witztum, Rips and Rosenburg applied an arbitrary rule that words are only valid when they have the minimum skip that occurs in the text under study.[12]  MacKay maintains that Drosnin does not always follow this rule in the diagrams in his book and that MacKay's examples are as valid as Drosnin's.[13] 

It is clear that hidden words can be found in any text.  The question is whether those found in the Bible are the work of God or are a result of the same rules of chance that produce the messages found in secular works.  Jeffrey Tigay has suggested that the convoluted path the Hebrew texts have followed make the preservation of any ancient code extremely unlikely.[14]  Drosnin maintains that these code words were placed to warn of impending problems and disasters.

In the end whether one believes in coded messages in the Bible or not is a matter of faith.  These coded messages discovered in the Bible do not prove the existence of God any more than the rising and setting of the sun proves that God exists.  Attempting to use these “messages” as an interpretive short cut is as valid as saying the locusts in Revelation are helicopter gunships.  Biblical interpretation is not as easy as sitting down at your computer and typing in a few search terms and seeing what pops up.