Cracking the Bible Code

A new book uncovers Old Testament references to such major world events as Watergate, Hiroshima, and Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. Some say this will rewrite the history of religion. Others say it's a folly of biblical proportions.

by Jason Gay

Imagine the ultimate crystal ball: a divine code, hidden within the 3200-year-old Hebrew text of the Old Testament, capable of forecasting the future, explaining the present, and unraveling the past in eerily precise detail. Explanations for the assassinations of Yitzhak Rabin, John F. Kennedy, and Anwar el-Sadat. Uncanny mentions of Watergate, Shakespeare, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust. Predictions aplenty: presidential victors, comet collisions, colossal earthquakes, and apocalyptic nuclear attacks.

This supposed phenomenon is spelled out in The Bible Code, a dramatic new book by former Washington Post reporter Michael Drosnin which has arrived with a Second Coming-like trumpet blast from its publisher, Simon & Schuster, and the worldwide press. According to the hype machinery, The Bible Code is a discovery for the ages, a scientific, computer-aided proof that shatters contemporary understandings of religion and God. "It challenges everything we know," Drosnin says confidently. "It demands that we accept some other form of intelligence that shares the world with us." Others take it a step further. To some religious sects, the code's revelations -- also supported by a 1994 study by three Israeli mathematicians -- are irrefutable evidence of the Supreme Being's very existence.

The Bible Code bandwagon is the latest example of a worldwide fascination with hidden messages -- a tradition stretching back thousands of years, long before Drosnin and his publisher dreamed of bestseller lists, multiple print runs, or movie rights. Americans, especially, are obsessed with decoding secrets, whether in the Bible, the Koran, cheesy Nostradamus books, or the A-side of a Led Zeppelin record. As computer technology -- and therefore, code-breaking technology -- improves and expands, so does our interest in probing the unseen and locating the veiled reference. We are a people fixated on reading between the lines, trying to find meaning where meaning isn't supposed to be.

For most people, this fascination with decoding is simply an amusement, a cool parlor trick to show friends. There are plenty of funny, freaky secrets out there -- consider the current craze over The Dark Side of the Moon's apparent fit as an alternate soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz -- most of them "discovered" by techno-geeks with far too much time on their hands. The World-Wide Web teems with conspiratorial code breaks. There are computer programs that use numerology -- the mystical practice of assigning numeric values to letters -- to convert any name into 666, the number of the beast. You can discover your own personal number to help predict your life expectancy, choose a lottery ticket sequence, or lose weight. You can even use a number-letter program to prove definitively that Barney, the fiendish purple dinosaur, is really the devil -- even though you knew that all along.

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See: Prophecy online

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But The Bible Code is different, its believers say: this apparent scriptural code is not only a testament to God's existence, it's also a detailed, preset agenda for life on earth, the day planner to end all day planners. According to Drosnin, the code may signal our need to change the way we view both faith and religion. The Bible is no longer an ambiguous read, open to various interpretations: it's a living, dynamic guide, suitable for a one-on-one chat with the guy (or gal) upstairs.

Predictably, the publication of The Bible Code has spawned a counterattack from members of the scientific community, who have questioned Drosnin's methods and conclusions, as well as the 1994 Statistical Science article detailing the work of Eliyahu Rips and two other Israeli mathematicians. The critics now include those mathematicians and a handful of Drosnin's own sources, who are quickly backpedaling from the book's explosive claims. And the fuss over The Bible Code has launched a rush of pop-culture interest in the semi-obscure field of statistics; suddenly, academics who spend their days toiling in front of computers are being invited to refute The Bible Code on CNN and Oprah.

One person getting those calls is Shlomo Sternberg, a Harvard mathematics professor and an Orthodox rabbi. By his own admission, Sternberg is a man uncomfortable with too much attention, preferring to lead a quiet existence away from newspaper reporters and television cameras. But The Bible Code is simply too much for him to resist -- "complete nonsense," he calls it -- and Sternberg has strongly criticized the book in Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times. For a couple of weeks, this mathematician/rabbi has been a reluctant media star.

"It would be very nice to be a purist and fight all my intellectual battles in scientific journals," Sternberg says. "But my feeling is that this thing has just fallen upon me, and I feel compelled to speak out on what I consider to be an outrage, a sacrilege."

Indeed, it is not the science of The Bible Code that threatens Sternberg. To him, the science is simply quackery at its worst. What's threatening about the code, he says, is the message it sends to the faithful.

"The code represents a denigration of religion," Sternberg says. "All of the things that the Bible has stood for over the last 3000 years have been turned . . . into a crossword puzzle."

Part 2

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.