Snake Oil for Sale

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The recent massive publicity surrounding Michael Drosnin’s book The Bible Code has aroused, alas, a great deal of interest in the patently ridiculous idea that future events were encoded in the “original Hebrew” text of the Bible—and done in such a way that they could only be decoded in our day with computers.

The key to the code is the idea of equidistant letter sequences (ELS), whereby you search for a name or phrase in the Hebrew text of the Bible by skipping an unspecified but fixed number of letters. For example, you might print out every tenth letter and hope that something significant appears. Or every 11th letter. And so on, until you find something. All spaces between words are ignored.

To see how this scam works, let us examine Drosnin’s most outrageous claim—that the Bible predicted the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The computer found that if you skip every 4,772 letters, the name Yitzhak Rabin is embedded in the biblical text. In other words, there is a yod, the first letter of Yitzhak, followed 4,772 letters later by the second letter of his name, and so on. This means that if you print out the letters of the Hebrew Pentateuch (using the Koren edition) in rows 4,772 letters wide, the name Yitzhak Rabin will appear in a vertical column. Of course, no piece of paper is wide enough to print out 4,772 letters that are visible to the human eye. So Drosnin provides a detail—a rectangular matrix of 38 by 18 letters—containing the region where Rabin’s name appears (see chart). The matrix is designed to create the false impression that this is the shape of a standard portion of the Bible.

The circled letters, from the top down, spell out Yitzhak Rabin. The horizontal rows give the ordinary text of the Bible (Hebrew reads from right to left), except that all spaces between words have been removed. (The asterisks and dashes in the matrix are to avoid the sacrilege of writing the divine name—as if this entire enterprise isn’t one huge sacrilege.) So each of the eight Hebrew letters spelling Yitzhak Rabin intersects a verse in the Bible. These are all in Deuteronomy: 2:33, 4:42, 7:20, 11:1, 13:11, 17:5, 21:5 and 24:16.

Drosnin claims that Rabin’s name is crossed with the phrase “assassin that will assassinate” in the text of one of these verses from Deuteronomy. But these verses say nothing about assassins or assassinations: Deuteronomy 4:42, which crosses the second letter of Rabin’s name, deals with cities of refuge, where those guilty of accidental manslaughter may flee: “Then Moses set apart three cities in the east beyond the Jordan, that the manslayer might flee there, who kills his neighbor unintentionally, without being at enmity with him in time past, and that by fleeing to 025one of these cities he might save his life” (Deuteronomy 4:41–42, Revised Standard Version).

The horizontal phrase marked by Drosnin in squares means “a slayer who happens to have killed.” Drosnin mistranslates these three words as “assassin that will assassinate.” With this method, it is pretty clear that you can predict anything.

Next Drosnin takes the word shamah, which means “there,” splits off the first two letters to get shem (name) and adds the final letter (h) to the next word to mistranslate the whole phrase as “the name of the assassin who will assassinate.” This, then, is the method of ELS.

In addition to the completely arbitrary choices and distortions that go into them, the ELS codes in the Bible are complete rubbish for two quite independent reasons, one having to do with the nature of equidistant letter sequences and the other having to do with the text of the Bible.

First, ELS codes can be found everywhere. In any sufficiently long text, in any alphabetic language, one can always find hidden messages by the ELS method. To illustrate, on several occasions (for example, as quoted in Newsweek, June 9, 1997) Drosnin has asserted, “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick I will believe them.” I took up the challenge and asked Professor Brendan McKay, a mathematician at the Australian National University, to search Moby Dick for such encrypted messages. He found 13 “predicted” assassinations of public figures, several of them prime ministers or presidents or their equivalents. See the two sample charts which are reproduced with Professor McKay’s kind permission (see President Anastasio Somoza chart and Indira Gandhi chart).

Notice that this experiment was completely objective, in that we did not select the text or the subject matter of the “hidden prediction” (assassinations of prime ministers), both of which were chosen by Drosnin. (We expanded the search to include other public officials for the sake of illustration.) Furthermore, we did not select the method; Professor McKay used the ELS method, as discovered by Eliyahu Rips and Doron Witztum and as used by Drosnin. This alone should convince the reader that the ELS method can produce any desired “hidden message” in any sufficiently long text.

ELS’s second flaw is its dependence on a particular edition of the Hebrew Bible. Rips, Witztum, Drosnin et al. must assume that the text of the Torah is divinely inscribed down to the very letter. In fact, in order to justify the code, Drosnin asserts (p. 194), “All Bibles in the original Hebrew language that now exist are the same letter for letter.” Readers of this magazine know that this is flagrantly false.

Drosnin refers to the “Leningrad Codex published [sic] in 1009.” The Leningrad Codex (see “The Leningrad Codex”), which is the basis for the Kittel-Kahle edition of the Hebrew Bible (known as Biblia Hebraica) and is available electronically, differs from the Koren edition used by Drosnin by 41 letters in Deuteronomy alone. Also, the Talmud frequently quotes passages from the Hebrew Bible that indicate that its text differs from that of the Koren edition. There are about 300 discrepancies between Talmudic quotations of the Hebrew Bible and the Koren edition.

The discoverers of the ELS method, Rips and Witztum, and its promulgators have quarreled with Drosnin, claiming that he has abused their “science” and that only their techniques are valid and objective. But this seems hardly more than a turf battle. All refer to a “scientific” article by Witztum, Rips and Yoav Rosenberg that appeared in the journal Statistical Science (August 1994). This article elicited no published response, presumably because few readers found it of any real mathematical interest. One strongly negative response, by Professor Persi Diaconis of Harvard, was not published because the editor found that it “read like a bad referee’s report.” In any event, then-editor Robert Kass told the New York Times that the publication of articles in the journal does not mean they have been scientifically checked. “We hope that the material in them is correct,” he said, “but we also try to publish pieces that are amusing to a wide variety of statisticians.”

A second, less technical article describing the codes appeared in BR,^a largely on the basis of the supposed imprimatur of a learned journal. It was greeted by the appropriate letters of outrage.^b Professor McKay is currently engaged (with Professor Dror Bar-Natan of Hebrew University) in writing a detailed refutation of the Statistical Science paper.

It is disturbing that a number of eminent mathematicians have put their reputations on the line in support of the ELS nonsense. Among them are two members of the Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences, both winners of the Israel Prize and members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Another is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a winner of the MacArthur Award. Several other equally distinguished mathematicians, including a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, round out the list. Some of the praises sung by these famous men to the Bible Code “discovery” compare it to the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Mendel, Pasteur and Rutherford—even to the discovery of electricity and the theory of evolution! This seems to reflect a general revulsion with science and rationalism on their part. At the same time, the use of codes to predict the future violates the explicit biblical prohibition against augury, necromancy and the like (Deuteronomy 9–13).

Perhaps this return to magic by eminent men should be seen in light of the current rise of astrology, UFO sightings, psychic counseling and the like, which is a worldwide phenomenon. But we had best leave these speculations to the psychologists and sociologists.

The recent massive publicity surrounding Michael Drosnin’s book The Bible Code has aroused, alas, a great deal of interest in the patently ridiculous idea that future events were encoded in the “original Hebrew” text of the Bible—and done in such a way that they could only be decoded in our day with computers.