Decoding the Bible

An article about the book The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin. This article was published in Signs of the Times magazine in the March, 1998 issue.

by Ken Wade

Did the Bible predict the date of the assassination of a modern world leader, and his assassin's name? Is this great Book really just a giant word-search puzzle? Do we need the help of high-speed computers to find its hidden message to our era?

According to one recent best-selling book, we shouldn't read the Bible for its stories or encouraging messages. And translating it into various languages only conceals its most important prophecies. In order to discover its hidden meaning, you need a computer and the original Hebrew, exactly as (the book implies) it was dictated by . . .

Well, let's backtrack a moment. The book doesn't actually go so far as to imply that the Bible was dictated by God--in fact the author is an atheist, so he probably would have a hard time learning to believe in God even if he was taken to heaven and given a personal introduction. What the book, The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin, does imply is that at some time in the ancient past, some superhuman intelligence dictated every letter of the Bible in such a way as to encode messages that could only be found by computers.

It's an intriguing idea that I found attractive at first. After all, if it could be proven that the Bible is supernaturally encoded with predictions that are meeting fulfillment today, wouldn't that add credence to its claims of divine origin? Even skeptics would have to admit that the book is a valuable revelation. A hidden code running throughout the book would be supreme evidence that it was all written under the direct inspiration of some great intelligence. And if the code accurately predicted events in the lives of people named Kennedy, Clinton, and Hitler, then that would be conclusive evidence that the intelligence was not only a great code-writer, but was capable of seeing events thousands of years in advance.

What better name for such an intelligence than God?

But are the claims in The Bible Code valid? Is Michael Drosnin's method of finding the Bible's message valid? If so, should we be preparing, as he suggests, for a major disaster in the year 2000 (or perhaps 2006)?

Before you decide, or rush out to buy the book, let me explain a bit about the code that Drosnin believes he has found in the Bible. You've no doubt seen word-search puzzles in magazines and newspapers. A rectangle is filled with seemingly random letters, but if you search long enough, looking up, down, sideways, and diagonally, you can find hidden words.

What if you took the original Hebrew letters of the Old Testament and laid them out as a word-search puzzle? Is it possible that you might find hidden messages there? You wouldn't think so, but when Drosnin found the name of Yitzhak Rabin spelled out, and found the words "assassin to assassinate" running directly across the name, he began to worry. He tried to contact Rabin with a warning, but the Israeli prime minister ignored him, and on November 4, 1995 Rabin was shot by a man named Yigal Amir. Later examination of the passage that Drosnin says encoded the prediction revealed the year it occurred and the assassin's name.

I was intrigued by the cover copy on The Bible Code, which hinted at these remarkable predictions, so I bought the book and took a closer look. But what I discovered when I scrutinized the codes cited in the book amused more than amazed me.

While it may seem uncanny, at first, that so many apparent predictions can be found by laying the Bible out as a word-search puzzle, when you understand the methodology used, finding what you go looking for actually becomes almost inevitable. Given the amount of material in the Bible, and the variety of ways it can be arranged by a computer, the possibilities are literally infinite. Drosnin even admits this by citing the opinion of Israeli mathematician Dr. Eliayahu Rips, the man credited with discovering the Bible code: "In other words, the Bible code contains more information than we could even count, let alone find, in several lifetimes. . . . In the end, says Rips, the amount of information is incalculable, and probably infinite."

When there are an infinite number of possibilities to choose from, the probability of finding what you are looking for is limited only by the amount of time you are willing to invest in looking. You can find a needle in a haystack, if you're willing to look for long enough.

The way Hebrew is written makes the quest for apparent predictions even easier. Hebrew has only 22 consonants, and was originally written with no vowels and no spaces between words. Try reading this: frgdslvdthwrldththgvhsnlybgtnsnthtwhsvrblvthnhmshldntprshbthvvrlstnglf. With a few vowels and spaces inserted, it becomes the familiar John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life." But, by inserting different vowels, we can find other messages such as this from the letters three through nineteen: "Good slave, doth war lead the thug?"

Now, imagine that the rules for finding messages allow you to skip letters at will, as long as you always skip the same number within a given word. But the rule about skipping the same number of letters doesn't apply to all the words you find in your particular puzzle. And to make your task easier, you can pick and choose how you will transliterate from Hebrew to English. You can use the Hebrew letter waw as a W, a U, an E, an A, a V, or an O--sometimes within the same word. Need an S? You can choose among four Hebrew letters: samek, tsade, sin, and shin. For a K you can choose from heth, qoph, or kaph, but qoph doesn't always have to be a K, it can also do for a Q or C.

This may seem confusing, but what it does is make the task of finding any given word a lot easier. But the rules get even simpler. When transliterating, your words can either have vowels, or eliminate them. Thus page 110 Oswald is spelled WTSWWLD, with waws standing for an O, a W, and an A, but on page 111, Kennedy is spelled simply QNDY Also, remember that your words can run any which way, and at any angle, and you can make the lines of your puzzle any length you wish--even thousands of letters long! The phrases you find can be in either Hebrew or English, or in a combination of the two (apparently God spoke both fluently back when He was inspiring the Bible.) Just imagine the possibilities if we were to add more languages to God's vocabulary (He does hear prayers in all of them, doesn't He?) With the possibilities expanded that far, you probably could find complete instructions for removing your own tonsils somewhere in the first five chapters of Genesis (perhaps in the part about Adam's rib)!

And it gets easier still. Now that you have an infinite database of letter combinations to build predictions upon, go find a word like Hitler. Then think of any and all the words that could be associated with such a name, and what is the probability that you might find a few of them in close proximity to it? On page 40, Drosnin shares a few, but surely more could be found if we'd just try a little harder, or perhaps change the line length.

The point of what I'm saying is that the rules The Bible Code applies when searching for predictions are just too lax. With so few constraints on the methodology, it literally becomes possible to find whatever you go looking for. This fact has been noted by many reviewers. There's even a site on the Internet where someone has taken the effort to point out that if you take the King James Version of Revelation 5:12 - 9:10, dropping all the vowels, spaces, and punctuation, and lay it out at as a Bible-Code puzzle with 233 letters to the line, it is possible to find the name of Microsoft founder and president William Gates, and in close proximity you can find related acronyms and words such as MSDOS, Virtual Reality, and even the phrase "software horror!"

At another Internet site, someone took a Hebrew translation of the book War and Peace and ran it through a computer program similar to the one Drosnin used to find things in the Bible. Amazingly, in one passage they were able to find fifty-nine words related to the Jewish holiday Chanukah, all in close proximity to one another. Actually, it's not that amazing at all. As I've been saying, given the rules applied, you can find just about anything anywhere, if you're willing to look for long enough!

Unfortunately, for those who would like extra evidence to strengthen their faith in the Bible's divine origin, Drosnin's exercise in finding needles in haystacks doesn't prove much. But just because we can't use Drosnin's claims to prove that the Bible is divinely inspired, does that leave us with no evidence?

Certainly not. As regular readers of Signs of the Times recognize, there are many prophecies in the Bible. They can be found by taking its words at face value, without any help from computers. We can trace the fulfillment of these prophecies throughout history.

Even more important, perhaps, is the evidence of changed lives. Millions around the world have studied this Book and found new meaning and blessings in their lives.

And that brings up another thing that bothers me about the book The Bible Code. The real purpose of the Bible is to reveal God to humans, and to help them to come to faith in Him. Obviously, Drosnin's method of studying the revealed Word doesn't do that. He himself has remained an atheist through it all.

Our world is too taken with psychics and the search for ways to predict the future. God is not concerned with writing out predictions of intimate details of individuals' lives thousands of years in advance. His concern centers around the salvation of our souls, whatever situation we may find ourselves in.

The Bible is a timeless book whose message has always been available to those who would seek to understand it. Appealing as it may seem to say that it is addressed specifically to our computer age, the God who inspired this Book has been concerned with every age. His concern isn't limited to a few big-name individuals whose fate He hid in puzzles. He cares about you, me, and everyone named among the children of Adam and Eve.

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