An Unbiased Search for Bible Codes
This page contains an article I first posted here on March 27, 2001, detailing a possible way to search for real Bible codes in an unbiased way. Note that I have not had time to conduct this search, mainly because my career as a novelist has taken off and I've been busy writing novels, helping my publishers market them, and (occasionally) winning awards for them. I still think the results of the experiment described here would be interesting. Hope it gives you some food for thought!
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March 27, 2001: On this page, I'm posting the details of a new search for Bible codes which I've recently proposed. The idea is to do an objective search for very long ELSs and report the results. As many of you know, I'm skeptical of the Bible code. I haven't yet seen a code that meets my standards of objectivity and scientific merit. My friends at Bible Code Digest, led by Ed Sherman, are a bit easier to please--they do believe that some ELSs are scientifically defensible. One of these is a long (22 letters long) ELS which they published in the November, 2000 issue of their newsletter. (If you don't subscribe to this newsletter, you can sign up at www.biblecodedigest.com).
When I read Ed Sherman's claim that the ELS they had discovered had such tiny odds of occurring by chance (about 1 in 14 trillion), I felt pretty sure that this probability had to be meaningless. But how could I prove it? Alternatively, how could I compute the real probability that Ed meant to calculate? I quickly realized that there is a way to study these long ELSs objectively. I've written up a proposal, sent it to the Bible Code Digest team, and we are now making public the details of the proposed experiment. Click here for a PDF file with the complete details as they stand today, (March 27, 2001). Thanks also to Harold Gans, Roy Reinhold, Keith York, Mark Perakh, and Brendan McKay for looking over the proposal and making some suggestions. The final experiment will be better, thanks to your comments.
You may be asking: What's different about this experiment? The answer is very simple: The experiment should be completely objective, and it should be able to detect the presence of very long ELSs (tens of letters long). If we don't find any long ELSs, that won't prove there are no Bible codes, of course. It'll just be another failure in a long list of previous failures. And if we do find codes? Well, the proposed experiment is awfully objective. If we find codes, I'll say so. Right here on this page. As always, I don't advise that you hold your breath, but you can if you like.
So keep an eye on this space. I'll soon be writing the software and then we'll run the experiment. We'll post the results here, along with my software and the source code.
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Note added, January 15, 2004: As noted above, I've simply not had time to do this search. I note with interest that Ed Sherman and his crew at BibleCodeDigest have taken to heart some of the ideas discussed in the proposal. Notably, they have looked for long ELSs in a text other than the Bible, namely, the Hebrew text of War and Peace. You can read the longish multi-part article by clicking here. And they found, as expected, that very long ELSs occur there. So Ed no longer claims that the odds of finding his 22-letter ELS in the Bible are 1 in 14 trillion. In fact, he admits the following:
"If the frequency of extended ELSs in Ezekiel 37 had conformed to that from War & Peace, we would expect to find 5.95 ELSs consisting of three or more extensions (and having 25 or more total letters)."
This is a rather extraordinary confession. What it means is that Sherman's experiments on the Hebrew text of War and Peace convinced him of what I had argued privately with him years earlier -- that the odds were quite high of finding a number of long ELSs. In a section of War and Peace as long as Ezekiel 37, Sherman would expect to find nearly 6 ELSs with more than 25 letters! So much for his claims from a few years ago of "1 in 14 trillion" for his 22-letter ELS!
One of Sherman's key findings is the following, stated in his own words:
"Longer ELSs can be "discovered," even in ordinary texts, with a fair degree of frequency. This affirms the claim of code skeptics that "codes" can be found in any book."
However, Sherman still believes that the long ELSs he finds in the Bible are real. His reasoning is that he "knows" from his study of War and Peace how many long ELSs to expect in a given chunk of Hebrew text. Since he finds more in the Bible than in War and Peace, he concludes a miracle.
But why should the Bible have the same linguistic properties as War and Peace? In fact, it does not, as I showed in the calculations for my book Who Wrote The Bible Code? The various Hebrew letters occur with significantly different frequencies in the two books. It is not valid to calibrate the experiment on War and Peace and then use the results to study the Bible. Sherman should have done his calibration experiments on randomized texts of the Bible. It's an elementary fact that every algebra teacher drills into their students -- you have to compare apples to apples, not apples to oranges. I explained all this in my book and also in the proposal Sherman signed jointly with me on a truly objective search for long ELSs.
It would be interesting to see a correct experiment along these lines. But I haven't seen one yet.
