Cracking the Bible Code

Part 3

by Jason Gay

It's captivating material for a book or a movie, perhaps, but an increasing number of mathematicians say The Bible Code is a highly suspect work. The growing pigpile of academic critics now includes Eliyahu Rips, the book's self-effacing star, who last week issued a statement from Israel that acknowledged his belief in the Torah code, but disavowed his role in Drosnin's conclusions. ("The book gives the impression that I have done joint work with Mr. Drosnin," Rips states. "This not true.") A rebuttal to the 1994 Statistical Science article is planned; one of its co-authors will be Brendan McKay, a mathematician at the Australian National University.

Like Harvard's Sternberg, McKay has assumed the mantle of code debunker in recent weeks. His principal argument is that the Torah's text is so long, and that Hebrew -- almost totally devoid of vowels -- admits multiple translations so easily, that it's possible to find anything you're after, given enough time.

The "50,000-to-one" probability of the Rips-Witztum-Rosenberg rabbi findings, too, leaves McKay unimpressed. The same long odds apply to other exhaustive documents, he says, like the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, where McKay found more than 59 words related to Chanukah. Statistically speaking, he says, the chance of such a correlation is 95 out of a million. (It's also worth nothing that some mathematicians find the whole searching-for-names-in-text exercise less than compelling. "From a scientific point of view," says MIT mathematician Richard Dudley, "this whole thing is just not that interesting.")

As for the book's major whiz-bang moment -- the Rabin assassination -- McKay calls it a "big yawn." Lots of people were concerned about Rabin's fate in the turbulent Middle East, McKay notes, and predicting his death took no genius. If people are taking The Bible Code seriously, McKay says from his home in Canberra, "it's a great pity, but I can't help but be amused."

Sternberg is less than amused. He disputes Drosnin's assumption that there is a single, universally shared version of the Torah, arguing that there are dozens of versions, and almost none exhibit the unusual richness of encoded text the author found. Furthermore, Sternberg questions the reporter's translation skills, charging that the Hebrew passage that Drosnin read as "assassin that will assassinate" is correctly translated as "slayer which should be killed" -- as if to say Rabin himself should have been killed. Not that Sternberg believes any of this prognostication, anyhow. "More or less, you are picking [letters] at random," he says. "If you put a monkey at a typewriter, if he typed long enough, sooner or later he would type `Yitzhak Rabin.' "

There's also some question about the merits of the 1994 Statistical Science paper by Rips and his Israeli colleagues. The publication's then-editor, Carnegie-Mellon statistician Robert Kass, says that although the Torah paper withstood the journal's standard peer-review process, it was published largely as entertainment -- a "challenging puzzle" for readers.

"Some people seem to think that the publication of the Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg article in Statistical Science serves as a stamp of approval upon the work," Kass responded in an e-mail statement. "This is a great exaggeration. Statistical Science publishes a wide variety of papers of general interest to statisticians."

But no one explained that to certain religious groups, which have treated the Rips-Witztum-Rosenberg paper as evidence akin to a burning bush. Whole movements have been inspired by the code, with leaders holding the paper up as Exhibit A that God truly exists.

One particularly successful group, Aish HaTorah, runs an ongoing religious seminar called Discovery that uses the Bible Code to encourage mainstream, secular Jews to pursue a more Orthodox lifestyle. The movement has attracted 60,000 people worldwide, including actor Elliott Gould, Larry King, and Seinfeld's Jason Alexander. Christian evangelicals have also used codes as a recruitment tool. And the World-Wide Web is overrun with the sites of various religious groups proffering the code as a spiritual smoking gun.

"What you have just read is unrefutable [sic] scientific evidence that the Bible is God's word," one website exclaims. "You've asked for proof. There's your proof!"

As millennium fever intensifies, it's tempting to suggest that the hype over The Bible Code is all about our growing obsession with doomsaying -- the increasingly aggravating "end-is-nigh" psychobabble sprouting up everywhere. But it's not. The breathlessness behind The Bible Code offers irrefutable proof of a more substantive kind: controversy sells.

Drosnin's claims are grand, but his Simon & Schuster-backed marketing campaign is downright grandiose, marked by full-page advertisements in the New York Times and appearances on CNN, The Today Show, and Oprah. No matter how many authorities take swipes at the book, sales are rocketing, and the cash register will continue to ring. Drosnin, who compares the storm over the code to the persecution of Galileo, is now on a major, very un-Galileolike European book tour, and convincingly predicts his tome will be a "bestseller in every country." Rest assured he didn't have to consult the Old Testament to make such a claim.

Is Drosnin simply Nostradamus with a better publisher? The author bristles at suggestions that his book is anything but the result of ultra-serious, skeptical investigative reporting in the Woodward-and-Bernstein mold. Clearly, Drosnin can't stand the idea of being considered a crackpot or a soothsayer. Don't lump The Bible Code with all the "airhead, New Age bullshit" on the market today, he warns -- and, to be fair, a man who spent five years painstakingly combing Hebrew text isn't exactly ladling chicken soup for the soul. Still, the intensity of the Bible Code debate may be taking its toll. "I have more supporters than critics," Drosnin says cheerily. But how many attacks can his book take before his own reputation starts to wither?

Suppose Drosnin is right. Suppose there is an all-knowing code hidden in the Hebrew Bible. Drosnin believes this discovery spells an end to conventional religion as we know it. If the code exists, then the Bible is no longer a text to be taken on faith and interpreted by believers; it is an unambiguous guide to life on earth that simply requires the right key to unlock its message. "We're looking at something so new, so startling, that people should leave behind the doctrines that confine them," Drosnin says.

But to scholars like Shlomo Sternberg, religion is about faith, not proof positive. "The book doesn't really bother me, because Drosnin is the one guy who was smart enough to turn this into a fortune," Sternberg says. "What bothers me . . . is that there are people who are reverting to Orthodox Judaism on the basis of this code. I'm an Orthodox Jew, and I believe in all of the rules, but I don't believe you need the code to be persuaded into the rules."

And consider this: maybe we're all just treading a little too close to where we aren't supposed to tread. If there really is a Bible Code -- Drosnin's, Rips's, or anyone else's -- maybe it was never meant to be discovered and spread around the world. Maybe the code's creator doesn't want His or Her secrets exposed in the New York Times, or on Oprah. Like Oprah, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and perhaps we should all heed the message of Deuteronomy 18:10, which states:

Let no one be found among you who consigns his son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer, one who cast spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead. For anyone who does such things is abhorrent to the Lord, and it is because of these abhorrent things that the Lord your God is dispossessing them before you.

You don't need a code breaker or computer program to spot that warning.

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