The Secret Code Hoax

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If the Bible is the ineffable word of God, then it makes sense that all truth is to be found in it. An early rabbinic sage by the delightful name of Ben Bag-Bag said, “Turn it and turn it again, for all things are in it.”¹ The history of biblical interpretation is filled with attempts to discern the hidden secrets of the Bible. The earliest is probably the Book of Daniel’s attempt to understand Jeremiah’s prophecy of 70 years of desolation, which the angel Gabriel decodes as a cipher that really means 70 weeks of years of desolation (Daniel 9). Similarly, the Dead Sea Scroll community regarded the true sense of the Bible to be secret; only their teacher—the Teacher of Righteousness—could truly understand it. Since then many communities have relied on their own inspired teachers to discern the secret truths of Scripture.

In the modern age our teachers tend to be scientists rather than inspired sages. In a time when a computer can defeat the world chess champion, we look to the power of the computer to unlock hidden secrets. According to Michael Drosnin, author of The Bible Code, the new inspired interpreter is Eliyahu Rips, a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips has designed a computer program that supposedly decodes the Hebrew Bible, revealing its truths for the first time. A fundamentalist Jewish group called Aish Ha-Torah has been promoting Rips’s work as scientific proof of the existence of God and the infallibility of the Bible.

Drosnin uses Rips’s computer program to show that the Bible’s secret code accurately predicts historical events, including:

•the assassinations of Yitzhak Rabin, Anwar Sadat and John Kennedy, as well as the names of their assassins;

•the resignation of Richard Nixon;

•World War II and the Nazi holocaust;

•a comet that hit Jupiter in 1993;

•Shakespeare’s plays;

•the fall of Communism;

•Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

The Bible Code also reveals the future: A massive earthquake will hit Los Angeles in 2010, and, of course, the end of the world is at hand. Only careful attention to the secrets of the Bible Code will avert world destruction. As Drosnin reveals, the Bible says in code, “Code will save.”

If this book were sold only in supermarket checkout lines, it would be seen for what it is—a journalistic hoax. But it has been featured in Time, Newsweek and other major publications, and is already on best-seller lists.

Is the Bible Code a hoax? The only responsible answer is yes. In the accompanying article Shlomo Sternberg exposes the fallacies in Rips’s statistical method. I would like to concentrate on Rips and Drosnin’s misuse of the Hebrew Bible.

First, Drosnin abuses the language of the Hebrew Bible. The code featured on the book’s cover and mentioned dozens of times in the book includes a biblical law about the cities of refuge that says, “so that a murderer who murders his neighbor inadvertently may flee there” (Deuteronomy 4:42). Drosnin translates “murderer who murders inadvertently” as “assassin that will assassinate” and finds by his statistical method the encrypted name of Yitzhak Rabin. Drosnin mistranslates the Hebrew to arrive at his sensational conclusions.

Other such howlers include:

•“After the death of Abraham” (Genesis 25:11) is rendered as “After the death (of) Prime Minister” (p. 58);

•“[Jacob] set it up as a standing stone” (Genesis 31:45) is rendered as “Shooting from the military post” (p. 134);

•“Which she [Rebekah] had made” (Genesis 27:17) is rendered as “Fire, earthquake” (p. 142);

•“[You] will be my people. I am [Yahweh your God]” (Leviticus 26:12–13) is rendered as “July to Amman” (p. 157);

•“[the children of] Reuben said to Moses” (Numbers 32:25) is rendered as “Ramallah fulfilled a prophecy” (reading “Ramallah” backwards, p. 170);

•“[the men] numbered by Moses” (Numbers 26:64) is rendered as “Code will save” (p. 180).

This cavalier attitude toward biblical language hardly inspires confidence. Second, and perhaps more fatally, Rips and Drosnin misuse the biblical text. Both men believe that the biblical text in their computer is “the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament, the Bible as it was first written.” Drosnin makes this very clear. He states that “all Bibles in the original Hebrew language that now exist are the same letter for letter” and that “the Bible code computer program uses the universally accepted original Hebrew text.” All of these statements are false. In fact, we do not have the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament, and all ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible that we do have differ in the number of letters.

To be more precise, Hebrew spelling practices were not uniformly fixed, and our biblical manuscripts reflect this fact. In some biblical texts vowel letters (called matres lectionis, mothers of reading) are used in a given word, while in other texts they may be absent from that word. (Remember that Hebrew is written usually with consonants only.) The same word may be spelled with a vowel letter in one sentence and without that vowel letter in the next sentence. These differences in spelling make no difference in the meaning of a word; they are just alternative spellings. As a result of these differences, every known ancient Hebrew manuscript of the Bible—including every ancient manuscript of the traditional Masoretic text—has a different number of letters. This is a fatal problem for a computer program that relies on the manipulation of exact numerical sequences of letters. Which manuscript or edition should be used for such a program?

Rips and Drosnin use the version of the Masoretic text that is reprinted in most modern editions, called the textus receptus. What Rips and Drosnin don’t know is that this text became the standard text only in the 16th century, after the invention of the printing press. It was compiled from various manuscripts by a man named Jacob Ben Hayyim, who worked for the printer Daniel Bomberg in Venice. Ben Hayyim used good Masoretic manuscripts—and paid a good deal of Bomberg’s money to acquire them—but his eclectic edition of these manuscripts is certainly not the original Bible. (This edition is called the Second Rabbinic Bible and was subsequently revised by other scholars.) Our oldest and best manuscripts of the Masoretic text include the Aleppo Codex, the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Codex (see “The Leningrad Codex”), the Cairo 024Pentateuch Codex and the Damascus Pentateuch Codex, all from the tenth to eleventh centuries C.E. (The first two of these are available in facsimile editions.) All of these differ in their letter sequences because of minor variations in spelling. Like Shakespearean English, Hebrew spelling was never entirely uniform.

Moreover, the Hebrew biblical texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls show that spelling practices were not uniform in ancient Israel either. Our oldest biblical manuscripts—such as 4Q Samuel^b, from the mid-third century B.C.E.—use fewer vowel letters than the later Masoretic manuscripts. From earlier Hebrew inscriptions we can discern the history of Hebrew spelling practices. The spelling practices preserved in all of our Hebrew biblical texts stem from the post-Exilic period (after the sixth century B.C.E.), with sporadic preservations of pre-Exilic spellings. For example, dwd (David) is pre-Exilic spelling, while dwyd (David) is post-Exilic spelling. The later form uses a vowel letter to indicate the second vowel. The point is that biblical texts written before the sixth century B.C.E. would have had many fewer letters than even our earliest Hebrew biblical manuscripts. A Hebrew manuscript from the time of Moses would have used no vowel letters at all because vowel letters were not introduced into Hebrew until the ninth to eighth centuries B.C.E. So one can’t count the letters in any of our Hebrew biblical manuscripts and presume that the letter count is the original. The original was shorter.

I have not addressed here the problem of scribal errors in the transmission of biblical books. These, too, are numerous and affect the number of letters in biblical books. I have avoided this issue because scholars often disagree on the identification of scribal errors and the reconstruction of the original text.² I have emphasized matters on which there can be no disagreement because the facts are clear. All manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, including all Masoretic manuscripts, differ in their number of letters, and the original texts were spelled differently from the manuscripts in our possession.

Respect for the biblical text means that Rips and Drosnin are wrong. The Bible in their computer is not the original text and is not in God’s own handwriting. Their sensational claims are undermined by false assumptions. In short, they have perpetrated a hoax.

If the Bible is the ineffable word of God, then it makes sense that all truth is to be found in it. An early rabbinic sage by the delightful name of Ben Bag-Bag said, “Turn it and turn it again, for all things are in it.”1 The history of biblical interpretation is filled with attempts to discern the hidden secrets of the Bible. The earliest is probably the Book of Daniel’s attempt to understand Jeremiah’s prophecy of 70 years of desolation, which the angel Gabriel decodes as a cipher that really means 70 weeks of years of desolation (Daniel […]