CRACKING "THE BIBLE CODE"
Robert C. Newman
Biblical Theological Seminary
For some years now, several Israeli mathematicians and rabbis have been investigating the idea that the Bible contains "code words" hidden in its text.[i] These words are claimed to validate the divine authorship of the Bible and the rabbinic understanding of it and to give us information about the future, especially about Israel and the end of the age. Recently, some of this material has been published in a popular presentation for lay readers by Michael Drosnin in his book The Bible Code.[ii]
Using computers to search the text, these investigators look for hidden words that are spelled by letters spaced at equal distances in the text. In some cases the letters are immediately adjacent; in others, they are thousands of letters apart.[iii] In one example, Drosnin finds the name of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in close proximity to the phrase "assassin will assassinate." The context also contains the year Rabin was killed, and the assassin's name![iv] In spite of this rather impressive success, some of the predictions Drosnin has found have not come true.[v]
The proposed "Bible Code," like the claim that the Gospel message is displayed in the constellations,[vi] is attractive to many who are Bible believers. Obviously, God is capable of doing something of this sort should He choose to. The question is, do we have any good evidence that He has chosen to do so?
Biblical Problems with "The Bible Code"
There are good biblical reasons for thinking that this is not God's work. First of all, the Bible does not make much provision for true prophecy that doesn't come true. Deuteronomy 18 clearly indicates that unfulfilled prophecy is a mark of false prophets, and this is a characteristic feature of the biblical teaching elsewhere (1 Kings 22, Isaiah 42-46, Jeremiah 28). The book of Jonah does allow for the possibility that a prophecy might be postponed if those for whom disaster is predicted should repent.[vii] Presumably, something similar might happen with a prophecy of blessing if the recipients became arrogant (see Paul's warnings in Rom 11:17-22). I would not, however, want to make any large use of this kind of qualification, given the Bible's emphasis on fulfillment and on God's foreknowledge and control of history. In any case, for the Bible Code's failed prediction of the assassination of Benjamin Netanyahu, there is no evidence of repentance.[viii]
Another feature also makes me suspicious. The hidden messages of the Bible Code are typically single, disjoint words or very short phrases. These are naturally rather ambiguous, and there is no context available by which to resolve the ambiguity. This is not typical of biblical prophecies, even though these sometimes have ambiguities too.
A very serious problem with the Bible Code is related to this. How do we know that in a particular passage we have found all the coded words that are necessary to understand the prophecy? For instance, after some of the "Bible Code" prophecies did not come true, Drosnin found the word "delayed" in several of them![ix] But what good is a prophecy for warning or guidance if somewhere in its vicinity we later find the isolated word "not" qualifying it? This resembles the work of astrologers and modern-day occult prophets rather than that of the biblical prophets![x]
Chance and Human Manipulation?
But if this is not God's work, whose is it? Neither humans nor angels can tell the future with consistent accuracy, and in any case, there is no reason to believe the Bible texts have been modified since they were first written down by the ancient Jewish prophets. I suggest that the phenomena are just a combination of chance and human manipulation. Let's see.
In thinking that the Bible Code is the work of human manipulation, I am not here claiming that Rips, Drosnin, and friends have changed the text to make things work out. That is too easily checked, and they have been pretty straightforward in showing us where they found their words and in offering to provide copies of their text and search program.
What I am thinking is this: Both the prime code word (usually displayed vertically on the diagrams in the Bible Code), and the secondary prophetic code-words which cluster around it, are words that are found by searching the text using various fixed spacings between letters. But with a long enough text and not too long a search word, one is bound to find nearly any code word selected (or some suitable abbreviation or synonym thereof), as we will show below. So there is nothing to finding code words. Around the prime code word a "context" is displayed, typically some 700-1500 characters. This is not always a real context, however, as each line shown may be hundreds or thousands of letters away from the line displayed above or below it. So the question is, can we find some word or words hidden in this array of 700-1500 characters which seem to relate to the prime word in some predictive way, even without supernatural intervention? I believe we can, by a combination of chance and manipulation. Let's look at the chances first.
Chance?
The chance of finding these code words is enormously increased by several techniques employed in The Bible Code. All spacing between words is removed, though this was never a characteristic of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, so far as I know.[xi] Finding code words is also more likely in Hebrew than in most Western languages, as the investigators read it (as is usual in modern Hebrew newspapers) without vowel points. The vowel points used in the standard printed Hebrew Bibles are removed, and Drosnin and company supply their own vowels when they read their code words. In this, at least, the investigators are following the earliest Hebrew Bible manuscripts, which were not written with vowel points either. Of course it is going considerably further to say that you can supply just any vowels of your own. The choice of vowel points in a given passage is strongly constrained by the context, so here the investigators are assuming that one of the rules of this hidden code is to supply whatever vowels are necessary to make it work!
Likewise it is easy to find encoded numbers in the Hebrew language, since Hebrew, unlike western languages, uses (all) the letters of its own alphabet to represent numbers. Thus it will be easy to find specific years given as part of the alleged prophecies.
In trying to evaluate the claims of the Bible Code, we are at a serious disadvantage if we are not fluent in modern or ancient Hebrew. We can look at one of Drosnin's diagrams and have no idea what else the letters not marked might spell. However, a good test for us Hebrew-challenged types will be to try to do the same thing with some famous text in English (say, the Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, Gettysburg Address, or something from Shakespeare). After some experience with these materials, we should be able to tell whether or not there is anything really peculiar in the biblical text of the sort alleged by Drosnin and the others.
For our test, we chose the text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.[xii] We converted it to something like the compressed and unpointed Hebrew text Drosnin and friends use by changing all the letters to capitals and by deleting all spacing, punctuation, and vowels (a,e,i,o,u, but not y or w). As a result, we ended up with an alphabet of 21 letters, and the condensed Gettysburg Address turned out to have a text length of almost exactly 700 letters!
After spending several hours searching the text visually (a tedious process!), we wrote a program to do the hard work automatically.[xiii] The program reads in whatever text we are asking it to search, then it asks us to supply a search word. Starting at the beginning of the text, the program searches for a match to the first letter in the search word. When this match has been found, it continues looking forward from that point till it finds a match for the second letter. When this second match is found, the distance between the two matches sets the spacing distance for the rest of the letters of the coded word (as they must be equidistant), and the succeeding search letters are checked against the text at that particular spacing. If successful, the starting position and spacing of the coded word are recorded. Successful or not, the program next goes back and looks for another match for the second letter further along in the text. When all second-letter matches have been tested, the first letter of the search word is moved along to its next match in the text, and the process is repeated until the whole text has been searched. Finally the program reports its results for that search word. Searches for the code word spelled backwards (a common phenomenon in the Bible Code) are not done automatically, but a new search word can be entered which is the first one reversed.
Some results for the Gettysburg Address are displayed below:
FRSCRNDSVNYRSGRFTHRSBRGHTFRTHNTHSCNTNNTNWNTNCNCVDNLBRTYNDDDCTDTTHP
RPSTNTHTLLMNRCRTDQLNWWRNGGDNGRTCVLWRTSTNGWHTHRTHTNTNRNYNTNSCNCVDND
SDDCTDCNLNGNDRWRMTNGRTBTTLFLDFTHTWRWHVCMTDDCTPRTNFTHTFLDSFNLRSTNGP
LCFRTHSWHHRGVTHRLVSTHTTHTNTNMGHTLVTSLTGTHRFTTNGNDPRPRTHTWSHLDDTHSB
TNLRGRSNSWCNNTDDCTWCNNTCNSCRTWCNNTHLLWTHSGRNDTHBRVMNLVNGNDDDWHSTRG
GLDHRHVCNSCRTDTFRBVRPRPWRTDDRDTRCTTHWRLDWLLLTTLNTNRLNGRMMBRWHTWSYH
RBTTCNNVRFRGTWHTTHYDDHRTSFRSTHLVNGRTHRTBDDCTDHRTTHNFNSHDWRKWHCHTHY
WHFGHTHRHVTHSFRSNBLYDVNCDTSRTHRFRSTBHRDDCTDTTHGRTTSKRMNNGBFRSTHTFR
MTHSHNRDDDWTKNCRSDDVTNTTHTCSFRWHCHTHYGVTHLSTFLLMSRFDVTNTHTWHRHGHLY
RSLVTHTTHSDDSHLLNTHVDDNVNTHTTHSNTNNDRGDSHLLHVNWBRTHFFRDMNDTHTGVRNM
NTFTHPPLBYTHPPLFRTHPPLSHLLNTPRSHFRMTHRTH
Figure
1. Gettysburg Address (No Vowels)
and
the Civil War Situation
With
a line-length of 66 letters, we get "Lincoln" (spelled phonetically)
right in the middle! Above him are
"Civil War" and "Battlefield." Both to Lincoln's right and left we find the name of the
Confederate commander at Gettysburg, "Gen. R. Lee." The Union commander at Gettysburg,
General "G. Meade," appears just below the righthand Lee. Finally, "Abraham" is seen in
the lower right corner of the text.
All of these, naturally, are spelled without vowels! (LNCN, CVLWR,
BTTLFLD, GNRL, GMD, BRHM)
Now
the two longest code words, "Civil War" (5 letters) and
"Battlefield" (7 letters) are actually a part of the regular text of
Lincoln's speech C not code C and so their appearance is not particularly
surprising. But the same can be
said for Drosnin's "assassin that will assassinate,"[xiv]
which is the regular text of Deut 4:42, a regulation concerning the cities of
refuge to which the "killer that has killed" might escape.
I
admit that I was disappointed not to be able to find the exact spelling of
"Lincoln" (LNCLN) in our text, but this is mainly due to the text
being so short. The Bible Code faces no such problem, having all the resources of
the Old Testament text available for search.
It
is important that we think through the probabilities or statistical
expectations involved in what we have found in our search of the Gettysburg
Address. We have a 21-letter
alphabet and a 700-letter text.
Ignoring the fact that the various letters of the alphabet occur with
rather different frequencies, we can still get a "seat of the pants"
estimate by assuming all letters occur with equal frequencies.[xv] Then the chance that a particular
letter will occur in our text is 700 divided by 21, or 33. We should expect about 33 occurrences
of a given letter in our text, on average.
For
a two-letter search word, either letter can occur in either order at any
spacing, so the probability is essentially 33 times 33. The pair will occur some 1089 times in
the text!
But
for search words of three letters and longer, the rule that the code words
appear with equidistant letter-spacing now comes into play to make matches much
rarer. The third letter must be
exactly the same distance from the second as the second is from the first, and
it must be on the opposite side of the second letter from the first. Thus a particular location in the text
must contain a particular letter for a match C only one chance in 21. The resulting probability for a three letter search-word is
1089 divided by 21, or 52; so we can expect about 52 matches of a given
3-letter search word in a 700-letter text.[xvi]
For
a four-letter search word, this is divided by 21 again, giving a probability of
about 2.5. For a 5-letter word,
divide again by 21, giving .12 C about one chance in eight that a given five-letter
search word will find a match in a 700-letter text. Not surprising, then, that we couldn't find the particular
5-letter combination LNCLN in our text.
As
a formula for this rough calculation, we can say that the probability (or
expected number) N of occurrences of a given search word of length n in a text
of T letters using an alphabet of A letters is:
Nn
= T2 / An, n = 2 or more (1)
Now
let's apply the same reasoning to the Hebrew alphabet and the text of the
Hebrew Old Testament. The Hebrew
alphabet has 22 letters. We list
the calculations for a 700-letter text and a 1,000-letter text:
Table
1: Expected Matches for Hebrew Texts |
||
Length Search Word |
700-Letter Text |
1,000-Letter Text |
One Letter |
32 |
45 |
Two |
1010 |
2065 |
Three |
46 |
94 |
Four |
2 |
4.3 |
Five |
.095 (9.5 x 10-2) |
.19 |
Six |
4.3 x 10-3 |
8.8 x 10-3 |
Seven |
2.0 x 10-4 |
4.0 x 10-4 |
Eight |
8.9 x 10-6 |
1.8 x 10-5 |
Our
English text, the Gettysburg Address, was 700 letters long with the vowels
removed. How big is the Old
Testament text? We don't need to
have an exact count of letters, such as was made by the ancient Hebrew scribes;
a rough estimate will be good enough for our purposes. I have here a text of the Hebrew Bible
with virtually no footnotes.[xvii] Taking a typical line, there are some
33 letters per line, and 20-25 lines per page, so 650-750 letters per
page. Let's use the number 700 per
page, making our Gettysburg Address just the length of one page in this printed
edition of the Hebrew Bible. When
we count the pages, we find that Genesis takes up 84 pages, the five books of
Moses 335 pages, and the whole Old Testament 1360 pages. Since the number of expected matches of
2-letter and longer combinations increases with the square of the text length
(as we saw in multiplying 33 by 33, above), a calculation of the number of
pages squared (last column, below) will also be helpful.
Table
2: Text Length - Hebrew Bible |
|||
Section |
Pages |
Letters |
Pages Squared |
Genesis |
84 |
58,800 |
7056 |
Pentateuch |
335 |
234,500 |
1.12 x 105 |
Old Testament |
1360 |
952,000 |
1.85 x 106 |
If we now compare the
last column of Table 2 with the 700-letter text (= single page) column of Table
1, we see that the expected matches for 7-letter search words (per 700-letter
page) is 2 x 10-4 and the squared length of Genesis is about 7 x 103,
so the two multiplied together C the chance of finding a given 7-letter match in
Genesis C is 1.4.
We should typically expect to find 7-letter matches in Genesis, if our
formula is not too rough. For
8-letter matches, we would probably need the Pentateuch to search, or even the
whole Old Testament. And, indeed,
Drosnin points out that the 8-letter combination spelling "Yitzhaq
Rabin" in Hebrew occurs only once in the Hebrew Bible, just about what we
would expect.
Once
we have located our long "prime code word" (of say six to eight
letters) to be displayed, what size code words can we expect to find in its
vicinity? If we have only 700
letters of text displayed as the "context" of our prime code word,
then our typical cluster words will have four letters or less, as we saw above.
If our context is, say, 1400 letters (twice as long) then the chances of any
particular combination appearing with be four times larger. In general, we can find out the minimum
text length in which to expect to commonly find words of length n by solving
equation (1), above, for the text length T, with Nn set = 1 and A to
22, for various values of n:
T
= An/2 = 22n/2
(2)
The results are given in
Table 3:
Table
3: Text Needed for Search Word |
|
Letters Search Word |
Length of Text |
3 |
103 |
4 |
484 |
5 |
2270 |
6 |
10,678 |
7 |
49,943 |
8 |
234,256 |
9 |
1,098,758 |
Notice,
in our example of the Gettysburg Address (text length 700), that most of the
code words which we displayed were four letters in length (LNCN =
"Lincoln"; GNRL = "Gen R Lee"; BRHM = "Abraham"),
in accordance with the largest sorts of words one will easily find in a text of
that length. We could have chosen
to display many words of 3 letters or less, but we only chose to display one
(GMD = "G Meade"). We
will come back to this point when we discuss the matter of human manipulation,
of which more later.
We
did, however, find two even longer words CVLWR = "Civil War" (5
letters) and BTTLFLD = "Battlefield" (7 letters), which are longer
than we would have antecedently expected.
In general, one can expect to find some longer code words even in a text
of 700 letters. If our
calculations for these probabilities are not too far off, perhaps one in eight
of the 5-letter search words we try will be successful. But both of our longer words came from
the regular text of the Gettysburg Address, just as Drosnin got "assassin
who will assassinate" (11 letters) from the regular text of Deut
4:42. Naturally, we can expect to
get long meaningful phrases from the regular text of our "context"
since this by definition is a meaningful, connected text. So, in our example, we could have
expanded CVLWR = "Civil War" to GRTCVLWR = "Great Civil
War" (8 letters) and BTTLFLD = "Battlefield" to GRTBTTLFLD =
"Great Battlefield" (10 letters) or even GRTBTTLFLDFTHTWR = Great Battlefield
of that War" (16 letters)!
Let
us now look at the decoding diagrams given in the Bible Code to see what sorts of words Drosnin has found. We will tabulate the length of the
words which Drosnin marks and comments on. Our table 4 will distinguish between coded words (labelled
"Spaced"), which have some space between letters in the original text
though they are often aligned vertically in the diagrams with no spacing, and
regular text words (labelled "Unspaced"), which have no spaces
between letters in the original text, even though some of these will have the
words divided differently than in the Bible, or will be read backwards. To give some idea what is going on in
each diagram, we will also spell out (sometimes abbreviated) the main code word
in each.
Table
4: Length of Diagrammed Words in Bible Code |
||
Page |
Spaced (Code Word) |
Unspaced |
15 |
8 Yitzhaq Rabin |
11 |
16 = 15 |
8 Yitzhaq Rabin |
14, 6, 4 |
17 |
7, 6, 4, 4 Rabin assas. |
|
19 |
7, 4, 4, 3 Fire on 3 Shev |
5, 3 |
27 = 15 |
8 Yitzhaq Rabin |
|
28 = 15 |
8 Yitzhaq Rabin |
11 |
29 = 15 |
8, 4 Yitzhaq Rabin |
(11) |
32 |
7 Clinton |
5 |
33 |
7 Watergate |
16 |
34 |
8, 5, 4 Econ. Collapse |
5 |
35 |
7, 5 Man on Moon |
|
36 |
8, 4, 3 Shoemaker-Levy |
4 |
37
36 |
8, 3 Shoemaker-Levy |
|
40 |
5, 4 Hitler |
7, 5 |
47 |
6, 4, 4, 3 Shakespeare |
|
48(1) |
7, 6 Wright Brothers |
|
48(2) |
6, 4, 4 Edison |
|
49(1) |
6, 5 Newton |
|
49(2) |
9, 3 Einstein |
10, 8, 6 |
54 = 15 |
8 Yitzhaq Rabin |
11, 11 |
55 |
9 Holocaust of Israel |
6 |
56 |
10 Atomic Holocaust |
5 |
58 |
9 The Next War |
10, 4, 3 |
62 |
8 Libyan Artillery |
5 |
64 = 56 |
10, 5 Atomic Holocaust |
3, 3, 3 |
66 |
8 Atomic Atilleryman |
9, 5 |
70 |
7, 4, 3 Autobus |
5 |
71 |
7 Autobus |
11, 5, 5 |
73 |
9 Pr Min Netanyahu |
4, 4 |
76 = 15 |
8 Yitzhaq Rabin |
11, 11, 6, 6 |
80 = 58 |
9 The Next War |
10, 3! |
81 = 73 |
9 Pr Min Netanyahu |
10, 7, 3, 3 |
86 |
6 In 1995-96 |
11 |
87 |
8 World War |
11 |
88 = 56 |
10 Atomic Holocaust |
11 |
89 |
7, 5 End of Days |
|
92 = 89 |
7, 5, 4 End of Days |
5 |
93
89 |
7 End of Days |
11, 4, 4 |
96 |
5 Made by Computer |
21 |
99(1) |
6 Bible Code |
11 |
99(2) |
4 Computer |
24 |
104 |
5 (year) 1997 |
13, 7, 7 |
106(1) = 87 |
8 World War |
9 |
106(2) |
7 Roosevelt |
15, 4 |
107 = 56 |
10, 3, 3 Atomic Holo. |
3 |
108 |
11 Pres Kennedy to Die |
5 |
109 |
7 Oswald |
14, 3 |
110 = 109 |
7, 4 Oswald |
10 |
111 |
6, 6 R. Kennedy; Sirhan |
10 |
113 |
12 Captivity of Toledano |
9, 4, 3 |
114 |
7 Goldstein |
19, 5 |
117 |
8, 7 Oklahoma |
7 |
118 |
9 Murrah Building |
6, 6, 3 |
119 |
9, 6, 4, 4 Name Timothy |
8, 5 |
124(1) = 87 |
8, 4 World War |
|
124(2) = 87 |
8, 6 World War |
|
125 = 56 |
10, 6 Atomic Holocaust |
|
128 = 87 |
8, 2 World War |
6, 4 |
129 |
8, 5, 4, 4 Communism |
3 |
132 |
7 Atomic Weapon |
6, 5 |
133 = 87 |
8 World War |
5 |
134 |
13 Armegeddon Asad Holo. |
9 |
135 |
5 Syria |
13, 11, 4, 3 |
138 |
6 In (year) 2113 |
18, 5 |
139(1) |
7, 4 Great Earthquake |
|
139(2) = (1) |
7, 5 Great Earthquake |
|
141
139 |
7, 4, 3, 3 Gt Earthquake |
|
142 |
6 L.A. Calif. |
5, 4? |
143 = 139 |
7, 4, 4 Gt Earthquake |
3 |
145 |
7, 4 Kobe, Japan |
6, 5 |
146 |
7 Year of the Plague |
9 |
147(1) = 139 |
7, 5, 3 Gt Earthquake |
|
147(2) = 34 |
8 Economic Collapse |
10 |
149 |
8, 4, 4 Dinosaur |
5 |
151 |
6, 4 Swift |
11 |
154 |
7, 5 Comet |
10 |
155(1)=154 |
7 Comet |
6, 4 |
155(2)=154 |
7 Comet |
8, 4 |
157 = 81 |
9 Pr Min Netanyahu |
9 |
158 = 81 |
9 ditto |
9, 3 |
160 = 81 |
9, 4 ditto |
12, 9, 3, 3, 3 |
161 = 58 |
9 The Next War |
12 |
163 = 87 |
8 World War |
12, 5 |
164 |
8, 4, 4 25 July 1996 |
18 |
166 = 55 |
9, 6, 4 Holocaust of Isr |
3 |
167 = 146 |
7, 4 Year of Plague |
9 |
168 = 87 |
8 World War |
11, 6 |
169 = 55 |
9, 5 Holocaust of Israel |
|
170 = 56 |
10 Atomic Holocaust |
7, 5 |
171(1) = 55 |
9 Holocaust of Israel |
3, 3 |
171(2) = 93 |
7 End of Days |
11, 5 |
176(1) |
|
16, 4 Future Bkwds |
176(2) = (1) |
|
16, 6 ditto |
180 = 56 |
10 Atomic Holocaust |
11, 7 |
Looking
at the middle column of this table, we see that a number of 8-letter code words
have been found, somewhat fewer 9-letter, and one each of 10, 11, 12, and
13-letter words (most of these are actually phrases):
8-letter:
Atomic
Artilleryman
Communism
Economic
Collapse
Libyan
Artillery
Oklahoma
Shoemaker-Levy
(2x)
25
July 1996
World
War
Yitzhaq
Rabin
9-letter:
Einstein
His
Name is Timothy
Holocaust
of Israel
Murrah
Building
The
Next War
Prime
Minister Netanyahu
10-letter:
Atomic
Holocaust
11-letter:
President
Kennedy to Die
12-letter:
Captivity
of Toledano
13-letter:
Armageddon
Asad Holocaust
We
would expect, given the length of the text of the Old Testament, that one could
find virtually any 8-letter word desired, or at least some synonym. It should also contain lots of 9-letter
words (the text length of the OT C 952,000 letters C is over 90% of that needed [table 3] for 9-letter
search words to be very common). Ten-letter and longer words or phrases would
be much rarer, but there are also many more such word combinations. With enough searching, investigators
are bound to find some. We don't
know how much searching they did.
At
this point it is possible to see a real problem with the idea that this
"Bible Code" is the work of God or even a very clever author. Such a divine or human author who is constructing the text of the Bible from scratch ought to be able
to insert within it a meaningful coded text of almost any length. (A good experiment would be to try
constructing such a text yourself!)[xviii]
Yet the longest coded words or phrases (not regular text or redivided regular
text words) that occur in the Bible Code are "Captivity of Toledano" (12 letters)[xix]
and "Armageddon Asad Holocaust" (13 letters).[xx] Getting long words in the regular
text is much easier, as we saw with our Gettysburg example. Yet the longest examples used by
Drosnin in the Bible Code are
"to shut up the words and seal the book until the end" (24 letters
straight out of Daniel 12)[xxi]
and "the writing of God engraved on the tablets" (21 letters straight
from Exodus 32).[xxii]
It
seems like a text the length of the Bible will supply virtually any 8-letter
word you wish in the form of code, many 9-letter combinations, long stretches
of regular text, and a few longer coded words. Thus the phenomena of the Bible Code do not appear to be out of the range of chance.
Human Manipulation?
The
presentations by Drosnin and company, however, are not fully explained by
chance. They are an excellent
illustration of intelligent design at work, namely the designing intelligences of
these men!
Comparing
tables 2 and 3, above, we see that for the Old Testament, or even the
Pentateuch, finding code words of eight letters should not be difficult. Words of seven letters will be, on
average, 22 times more common, 6-letter words 484 times, and 5-letter words
over 10,000 times more common.
Thus around any given 8-letter word, there will be lots of 6- and
7-letter words and literally hordes of shorter words.
It
should not be surprising, then, that by some astute selection of data, the
investigator should be able to assemble a constellation of these that are
striking "fulfillments" regarding persons or events in the past. But as for getting the future right,
the investigator, not knowing the future himself, will be no better than any
other merely human prognosticator.
This, I think, explains Drosnin's dilemma: that God Almighty would be
needed to get right all the stuff that Drosnin finds if someone centuries ago
really put it there, but that God would not make all the mistakes that turn up
when Drosnin decodes the future!
Let's
go back and have a look at our Gettysburg Address again. So far, I have presented no prophecy in
connection with Lincoln's speech, so one might propose that Abe himself had put
in the code words LNCN, GNRL, GMD, and BRHM, if the antecedent probability that
he would do any such thing weren't so small. And, indeed, nothing we have presented so far would have
been beyond his knowledge at the time he gave the speech.
But
we're not finished yet. We do a
search on "Booth" (BTH) and "Grant" (GRNT), and lo and
behold, we find in the Address some striking fulfilments of prophecy! Selecting out one of the 10 matches
found for GRNT, three of the 63 for Booth, and another of the four matches
found for LNCN and NCNL, we assemble the following picture:
FRSCRNDSVNYRSGRFTHRSBRGHTFRTHNTHSCNTNNTNWNTNCNCVDNLBRTYNDDDCTDTTHP
RPSTNTHTLLMNRCRTDQLNWWRNGGDNGRTCVLWRTSTNGWHTHRTHTNTNRNYNTNSCNCVDND
SDDCTDCNLNGNDRWRMTNGRTBTTLFLDFTHTWRWHVCMTDDCTPRTNFTHTFLDSFNLRSTNGP
LCFRTHSWHHRGVTHRLVSTHTTHTNTNMGHTLVTSLTGTHRFTTNGNDPRPRTHTWSHLDDTHSB
TNLRGRSNSWCNNTDDCTWCNNTCNSCRTWCNNTHLLWTHSGRNDTHBRVMNLVNGNDDDWHSTRG
GLDHRHVCNSCRTDTFRBVRPRPWRTDDRDTRCTTHWRLDWLLLTTLNTNRLNGRMMBRWHTWSYH
RBTTCNNVRFRGTWHTTHYDDHRTSFRSTHLVNGRTHRTBDDCTDHRTTHNFNSHDWRKWHCHTHY
WHFGHTHRHVTHSFRSNBLYDVNCDTSRTHRFRSTBHRDDCTDTTHGRTTSKRMNNGBFRSTHTFR
MTHSHNRDDDWTKNCRSDDVTNTTHTCSFRWHCHTHYGVTHLSTFLLMSRFDVTNTHTWHRHGHLY
RSLVTHTTHSDDSHLLNTHVDDNVNTHTTHSNTNNDRGDSHLLHVNWBRTHFFRDMNDTHTGVRNM
NTFTHPPLBYTHPPLFRTHPPLSHLLNTPRSHFRMTHRTH
Figure
2. Gettysburg Address (No Vowels)
and
Civil War Prophecy
Booth's name appears
above and behind Lincoln at the top of the figure, just as he did in the
Presidential box of Ford's Theatre that fateful night. Lincoln is shot and falls prone
(stretched out LNCN crossing original upright LNCN in the middle of the
picture). Booth, jumping from the
box, falls awkwardly to the stage (upside down BTH below prone LNCN). Booth escapes the scene (BTH going off
to the left in our picture). Not
only is the fate of Lincoln prophetically sketched for us in his address, but
the outcome of the war itself is seen in the pairing by the left margin. Grant (GRNT) and Lee (GNRL) are
crossed, with Lee descending and Grant remaining on the level, hinting at the
campaign of attrition which brought the war to a close.
Is
this really in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address? Yes, in the sense that all the letters are there in the
locations shown. But all of
Shakespeare is in Webster's Dictionary!
The locating of the words, and especially their assembly and
presentation is my work C human manipulation.
Let's
try another example, this time with the text of the Gettysburg Address without
the vowels removed.
FOURSCOREANDSEVEN
YEARSAGOOURFATHERSBROUGHTFORTHONTHISCONTINENTANEWN
ATIONCONCEIVEDINLIBERTYANDDEDICATEDTOTHEPROPOSITIO
NTHATALLMENARECREATEDEQUALNOWWEAREENGAGEDINAGREATC
IVILWARTESTINGWHETHERTHATNATIONORANYNATIONSOCONCEI
VEDANDSODEDICATEDCANLONGENDUREWEAREMETONAGREATBATT
LEFIELDOFTHATWARWEHAVECOMETODEDICATEAPORTIONOFTHAT
FIELDASAFINALRESTINGPLACEFORTHOSEWHOHEREGAVETHEIRL
IVESTHATTHATNATIONMIGHTLIVEITISALTOGETHERFITTINGAN
DPROPERTHATWESHOULDDOTHISBUTINALARGERSENSEWECANNOT
DEDICATEWECANNOTCONSECRATEWECANNOTHALLOWTHISGROUND
THEBRAVEMENLIVINGANDDEADWHOSTRUGGLEDHEREHAVECONSEC
RATEDITFARABOVEOURPOORPOWERTOADDORDETRACTTHEWORLDW
ILLLITTLENOTENORLONGREMEMBERWHATWESAYHEREBUTITCANN
EVERFORGETWHATTHEYDIDHEREITISFORUSTHELIVINGRATHERT
OBEDEDICATEDHERETOTHEUNFINISHEDWORKWHICHTHEYWHOFOU
GHTHEREHAVETHUSFARSONOBLYADVANCEDITISRATHERFORUSTO
BEHEREDEDICATEDTOTHEGREATTASKREMAININGBEFOREUSTHAT
FROMTHESEHONOREDDEADWETAKEINCREASEDDEVOTIONTOTHATC
AUSEFORWHICHTHEYGAVETHELASTFULLMEASUREOFDEVOTIONTH
ATWEHEREHIGHLYRESOLVETHATTHESEDEADSHALLNOTHAVEDIED
INVAINTHATTHISNATIONUNDERGODSHALLHAVEANEWBIRTHOFFR
EEDOMANDTHATGOVERNMENTOFTHEPEOPLEBYTHEPEOPLEFORTHE
PEOPLESHALLNOTPERISHFROMTHEEARTH
Figure
3. Gettysburg Address (With Vowels)
and
Lincoln's Death Prophesied
Though
"Lincoln" does not appear in this version, "Abe" occurs
frequently. We have selected 4 of
the 65 occurrences we found, the three that are vertical with the 50-letter
line length we decided to use, plus the one match of closest spacing, with only
2 letters between each. Two of the
vertical ABEs share B in common, and are located in the fourth column from the
left. The other vertical ABE is in
the ninth column from the right.
The horizontal ABE begins one line below and five columns to the right
of the shared B in the two lefthand ABEs.
BOOTH occurs only once in this text. The B is the sixth line, four letters from the right end,
and the word angles back in the 7 o'clock direction, with each succeeding
letter one line down and eight letters to the left of the previous, the H
located three lines directly above the E in the horizontal ABE. Further searches located DIED four
times, of which we have used two; SHOT nine times (we used one); GUN nine times
(used two); and FORD once.
Interestingly, the final D in one of the DIEDs we chose is also the
final D in FORD, and coincides with the first D in the regular text HONORED
DEAD. DIED, FORD, BOOTH, GUN, and
SHOT all angle downward in the general direction of this regular text phrase,
and SHOT even pierces the horizontal ABE.
I leave to your imagination the patter that a clever presenter could
make out of all this. There were,
of course, plenty of relevant search words which we could not find in the text.
Conclusions
We
have provided a brief tour of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the statistics
for word matching both here and in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. It appears that nothing particularly
unusual has been found in the alleged "Bible Code" that cannot be
explained by common probability and human manipulation. Certainly, the level of prediction in
the Bible Code would be
impressive if it were the work of an ancient human, but it would be just about
right for a modern interpreter, and rather lousy for the God who knows the end
from the beginning and who will do all that He purposes. I conclude that there is no reason to
believe that God has hidden such material in the Bible.
It
appears to me that if we put a great deal of trust in this sort of material, we
will be led away from the details and standards of biblical prophecy into the
very divergent details and standards of occult prophecy. That would be a fearful thing, an
example of rejecting God's living water to dig for ourselves cisterns that
won't hold any water. May God
protect us from this error!
References
Other Resources on Bible Codes
Gary S. Cohen, "The Bible Code Examined," Zion's
Fire 8:6 (Nov/Dec 97): 16-21.
Michael Drosnin, The Bible Code. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Lori Eldridge, Torah Codes Archive website, www.prophezine.com/tcode/
index.html.
Grant Jeffrey, The Signature of God
Frontier Research, 1997.
Brendan McKay, In Search of Mathematical Miracles website,
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html.
John
Winston Moore, "Bible Codes, or Matrix of Deception?" SCP
Newsletter 22:2 and 22:3 (Autumn
97): 1,4, 8, 14, 16 and (Winter 97/98): 1, 4, 8, 13-14, 16.
Jeffrey Satinover, Cracking the Bible Code.
William Morrow, 1997.
[i]. Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and
Yoav Rosenberg, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of
Genesis," Statistical Science 9 (1994): 429-438.
Reprinted as an appendix in Drosnin, The Bible Code, below.
[ii]. Michael Drosnin, The Bible
Code (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).
[iii]. The Hebrew for "Yitzhaq
Rabin," mentioned below, for instance, has a spacing of 4772 letters
between each of its eight letters; Bible Code, p 27.
[iv]. Bible Code, chapter 1.
[v]. Bible Code, pp 157-165.
[vi]. Frances Rolleston, Mazzaroth,
or the Constellations (Keswick, England, 1863); Ethelbert W. Bullinger, Witness of the
Stars (1893;
Grand Rapids: Kregel 1967 reprint); Joseph A. Seiss, The Gospel in the Stars (c1882; Grand Rapids: Kregel,
c1972 reprint).
[vii]. See also Jer 18:1-11 and Ezk
33:1-11, in which it is clear that prophecies of judgement are calls to
repentance.
[viii]. Bible Code, pp 157-165.
[ix]. Bible Code, pp 164-68.
[x]. See, e.g., Robert C. Newman, ed., The Evidence of
Prophecy: Fulfilled Prediction as
a Testimony to the Truth of Christianity (Hatfield, PA:
Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, 1988); Kenny Barfield, The
Prophet Motive: Examining the
Reliability of the Biblical Prophets (Nashville, TN:
Gospel Advocate, 1995).
[xi]. See Alan Millard, "Were
Words Separated in Ancient Hebrew Writing?" Bible Review (June 1992):44-47, where it is
noted that, to date, all known ancient Hebrew manuscripts and inscriptions have
spacing between words except for legends on coins.
[xii]. Text of the Gettysburg Address
from TIME 1990 Almanac on CD-ROM.
[xiii]. Robert C. Newman, program DECODE
in QuickBasic 4.5.
[xiv]. Bible Code, chap 1.
[xv]. My training was in astrophysics
rather than accounting. Banks do
not generally appreciate these sorts of estimates!
[xvi]. These and the following numbers
are doubtless somewhat high, as they don't take into account those prospective
matches that never occur because there is not enough space at the end of the
text. For simplicity, we make no
attempt to take this into account.
[xvii]. Norman Henry Snaith, ed., Hebrew
Old Testament
(London: British and Foreign Bible
Society, reprinted 1966).
[xviii]. I spent a couple of hours on the following, which encodes
the first two lines of the nursery rhyme "Mary had a little lamb...":
"Many that cover a story with the media will admit that they like
spin. Good tales at times lend a
real wallop to making a moral.
About this same time it seems a fearful shame easier events can never
just work that way. As we show
what the tale is about, we'll bend details to set the story in that world we
want to." The text is a
little awkward, mainly because the coded letters are only six places apart, but
a coded text of 41 letters was hidden in a plain text of 246 with relatively
little trouble.
[xix]. Bible Code, p 113.
[xx]. Bible Code, p 134.
[xxi]. Bible Code, p 99.
[xxii]. Bible Code, p 96.