Cracking the Bible Code

Part 2

by Jason Gay

But admit it: no matter what Sternberg or any of this smarty-pants colleagues say, you still want to know how the code works. You want to know how Drosnin interpreted old Hebrew scripture to predict Rabin's assassination; you want to learn how he found President Clinton, Hitler, and Nixon in a 3200-year-old document. And, admittedly, you want to know if your name is in there, too. You want to know if there is some way you can use the code to solve other questions of lesser import. Will I get that promotion? Will I get married? Will the godforsaken Red Sox ever win the World Series?

Here's how the code works: the Hebrew text of the first five books of the Bible -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, also known collectively as the Torah -- are arranged contiguously as a single thread of 304,805 characters. Then a computer scans this thread for names and events, searching for the desired words hidden in a "skip code" pattern. To illustrate, Drosnin uses this example:

Rips explained that each code is a case of adding every . . .

By skipping every fourth letter, the skip code of the above phrase reveals the hidden message: READ THE CODE.

This method of analyzing text -- known as equidistant letter sequencing, or ELS -- isn't new, but computers have vastly improved the speed and efficiency of searches. Once a name or event is located, the field of characters is narrowed, and a subsequent search looks for additional names and terms in that portion of the text. When Drosnin, for example, found the Hebrew characters for "Yitzhak Rabin" in the book of Deuteronomy, the name was intersected by another series of characters reading "assassin that will assassinate." He also found "Hitler" near "Nazi and enemy" and "slaughter"; "the Depression" with "economic collapse" and "1929"; "President" near "Clinton" and so forth.

Eerie results all, but they were supported by that 1994 paper in Statistical Science, a respected academic journal. The authors -- Dr. Rips, of Hebrew University, and two colleagues, Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg -- designed a computer experiment to unravel ELS patterns in Genesis.

The men took the names of 32 rabbis preselected by an outside party and searched Genesis for the rabbis' names and birth dates; in almost every case, they found both the names and dates in fairly close quarters. When the same experiment was applied to control texts -- the Book of Isaiah, and, humorously, a Hebrew translation of War and Peace -- the names and birth dates of the rabbis either did not appear at all, or didn't appear in any neat, ordered arrangement. Only in Genesis did ELS patterns turn up for most of the rabbis and their birth dates. According to Rips and his colleagues, the chance of this event occurring randomly was less than one in 50,000.

Rips, Witztum, and Rosenberg weren't exactly sailing in uncharted waters, and they didn't pretend to be. Theories about biblical code breaking have existed among theologians and scholars, fanatics and agnostics for thousands of years. The medieval cabalists, or Jewish mystics, believed there were dozens of code patterns within the Torah, including ELS. As Drosnin himself notes, even Sir Isaac Newton had a serious jones for encoding, learning Hebrew and devoting years to its study, but never unraveling any hidden messages before his death.

A half-century ago, Drosnin writes, a Czech rabbi discovered that if he started at the first T (known as a "taf") in the Hebrew text of Genesis, and skipped every 50 letters, the first five letters he collected spelled "Torah." He repeated the experiment in Exodus, and again, skipping every 50 letters from the first T, he obtained the word "Torah." The same applied to Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. What these earlier studies lacked, Drosnin notes, was a computer -- a tool capable of sifting through masses of text at great speed. This was precisely the advantage that Rips and his colleagues had for their study.

With The Bible Code, what Drosnin has done, essentially, is to take this cold data analysis and create a Hebrew scholar's version of the good old-fashioned potboiler. To his (and his editor's) credit, The Bible Code is a highly engrossing read, as Drosnin fashions complex statistical matter into a real-life thriller. This, of course, has attracted movie interest; Warner Bros. inked a deal for an undisclosed sum two weeks ago. Drosnin's role is that of the hard-nosed skeptic, the unbeliever who is convinced of the code's truth by his own Hebrew research and Rips's work in Jerusalem. He also finds believers in a number of top Israeli officials and a handful of US mathematicians.

But the climax comes when Drosnin, who single-handedly predicted Rabin's assassination and tried to warn the prime minister, learns the leader has been shot dead in Tel Aviv. "I slid right down to the floor," Drosnin recalls. The skeptic is a skeptic no longer. And what drama.

Part 3

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