Introduction To The Bible Code

What is the Bible Code?

For a very thorough book explaining the Bible code, its history, and how it all works in great detail, see Jeffrey Satinover's book, Cracking the Bible Code, reviewed on this web site. In this introductory article, I can't possibly cover all the details. Instead, I'll be brief and hit only the high points.

The Bible code was discovered by Orthodox Jewish mathematicians, who found words embedded in the text of the Hebrew Bible at fixed intervals. Of course, you can find words in most texts. Here's an example.

The word "AMY" is contained in the English alphabet at an interval of 12 letters, starting with letter number 1:

AbcdefghijklMnopqrstuvwxYz

It's a little easier to see this if you display the alphabet in lines 12 characters long. Then all you have to do is read down the first column:

Abcdefghijkl

Mnopqrstuvwx

Yz..........

So what? You may think this doesn't mean anything. Maybe it doesn't to you, but it does to me. My youngest daughter's name is Amy, and her birthday is January 12. In the U.S., this date is abbreviated 1/12. Now isn't that interesting? Amy's name is found beginning at letter number 1 and skipping every 12 letters. So her name and her birthdate are encoded together!

That's a remarkable coincidence, but most people would agree that it doesn't mean a thing.

The text of the Hebrew Bible has a huge number of words similarly embedded at many different skips. At first glance, most people would simply assume that any such words are there by random chance -- they don't mean anything.

However, a group of Jewish scientists have found a large number of apparently meaningful words at various intervals in the Hebrew Bible. The central claim is that certain patterns appear that are extremely unlikely to have occurred by random chance; therefore, they were intentionally encoded by some superhuman intelligence. It's convenient to call this intelligence "God," although it might conceivably be a supersmart space alien.

To most people, the whole idea looks loony at first sight. But not so fast! It's important to note that several mathematicians and physicists have signed their names to this thing. We can't simply dismiss the idea right off the bat. The question has to be studied on its own merits. These scientists have found what they say is hard, cold experimental evidence for God.

If they are correct, then they have found something earthshaking. If they are wrong, then life goes on pretty much as before. Either way, it's important to solve this mystery.

My goal when I wrote my book, Who Wrote the Bible Code?, was to answer two central questions:

Is the Bible code real?
If so, then who wrote the Bible code?

The Players

First, let's talk about who's been doing the main work on this subject.

Bible coders like to point to certain rabbis from earlier centuries who made comments that appear to imply some knowledge of the Bible code. The quotes they come up with look a bit ambiguous to me. But it's very clear that Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, a Czech Talmudic scholar born early in the twentieth century, was the first to do any serious work on the Bible code. Unfortunately, much of his work was lost in the Holocaust. Though he survived the war years, he published nothing on the subject.

His students, however, kept alive his ideas. In the early 1980s, as personal computers became cheap and easy to use, a number of Orthodox Jewish scholars began pursuing the subject on the computer.

The first big name is Professor Eliyahu Rips, who teaches mathematics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Rips is a prominent mathematician, and he didn't believe in God when he first got involved with this work. Over the course of several years, he found just too many "coincidences" to explain away. He's now an active member of the Orthodox community in Jerusalem. He's one of the two most influential people in the Bible code movement.
The other one is Doron Witztum. Witztum was a graduate student in physics in the middle 1980s. He left graduate school to study Talmud, and then began working with Rips on the Bible code. He contributed a physicist's understanding of "distance" to the analysis, a concept which turned out to be key. Together with Rips and a computer science student named Yoav Rosenberg, Witztum began a series of computer experiments that led to an extraordinary-looking result.
In August of 1994, Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg published an article in the journal Statistical Science. The article had taken six years to get past the referees. It claimed to present evidence that information was encoded in the Hebrew text of Genesis predicting events that would occur many centuries after Genesis was written. This experiment is generally called the Great Rabbis Experiment, (or the Famous Rabbis Experiment, or something similar). The first impulse of the skeptical reader is to assume that these results are simply the product of random chance. Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg have estimated the odds of a chance occurrence at 1 in 62,500. If they are correct, then this is pretty remarkable.
Another mathematician who backs the Bible code is Harold Gans. When Gans learned of the Bible code, he was working as a senior cryptologic mathematician for the National Security Agency. He reproduced the work of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg on his own computer, and then ran another experiment (using data provided by Zvi Inbal) that showed equally stunning results.
Several prominent mathematicians have looked at this work and made positive remarks. Some of them have simply asserted that this is serious work, though they stop short of saying that they're convinced. Others at least accept the possibility that the Bible code might be real. Very few mathematicians have outright endorsed the code.
One of the very few top-notch technical people who believe in the Bible code is Professor Robert Haralick, one of the world's leading experts in machine vision. Haralick is also Orthodox Jewish and I consider him the leading codes researcher in the U.S.
But skeptics abound. Of these, the most prolific in pure word count is Professor Brendan McKay, an Australian mathematician who has a lot of talent at debunking anything debunkable. McKay has posted a number of articles on his web site that claim to poke holes in the Bible code. He also posts the responses of Witztum and Rips to his work, along with his counter-responses, their counter-counter-responses, and so on, ad nauseum. Neither side seems ready to admit defeat. The arguments turn on some very technical questions in Hebrew orthography, the history of rabbinic scholars, and other esoterica. Read it if you can; it's tough plowing. Part of the problem is that the two sides don't really agree on a common set of ground rules, so they seem to be talking past each other.
Another mathematician skeptical of the Bible code is Professor Barry Simon, an Orthodox Jewish mathematician at Caltech. Dr. Simon has a web site with some articles discussing the issue. His article, The Case Against the Codes, has been quite influential. Dr. Simon attributes the "success" of the Bible coders to what he calls "wiggle room." It's easy to assume that he means cheating, but that isn't what he means. In fact, he says explicitly that he does not accuse Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg of dishonesty; he only claims that their experiment has enough subjectivity in it that the results are invalid. Simon's article doesn't seem to have convinced any of the major Bible code proponents.
If you're a technical type, check out the web site of Dr. Mark Perakh, a retired physics professor with quite an extensive (and growing) array of mathematical articles. Several of these were written in collaboration with Brendan McKay. Perakh and McKay have done some very interesting analysis of texts written in 12 languages, including Czech, Russian, Hebrew, English, and on and on.
For an extensive list of other players in the Bible code arena, see Satinover's book. See also my list of other web sites.

Books on the Bible Code

A number of authors have written books on the Bible code. Here, I will only mention those that have gained national prominence. For detailed reviews, see my book review section on this web site.

In June of 1997, Michael Drosnin published his book, The Bible Code. Drosnin is a journalist who doesn't believe in God but does believe in the Bible code. (He believes space aliens wrote the Bible. Yes, really! These literary green men inserted a Bible code to warn us of numerous Very Bad Things in the coming decade.) Drosnin's sensationalistic book reached number 3 on the New York Times bestseller list and sold very well through the summer of 1997. Whether you love him or hate him, Drosnin put the Bible code on the map. His second book on the subject, The Bible Code II, was more of the same.
Four months later, in October of 1997, Jeffrey Satinover's book Cracking the Bible Code appeared. Satinover writes from a religious Jewish perspective. He believes that God revealed the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, to Moses on Mount Sinai, in one long string of characters, without spaces or punctuation. To validate His authorship in this modern skeptical age, God inserted the Bible code. This view is pretty much the conventional view of most Bible coders. Satinover's book carries far more intellectual weight than Drosnin's. Maybe that's why it didn't sell as well. My understanding is that Satinover no longer sees any reason to believe in the Bible code, but his book is still widely quoted with favor by codes proponents.

The Main Issues

The Bible code raises a number of interesting issues, which I'll deal with at length in the analysis section of this web site. Some questions are exceptionally knotty; others are more straightforward. Here is a sampling of the types of questions that need to be answered (although I don't claim to know the answers to all of them):

Who cares whether there's a secret code in the Bible?
Did God really reveal the whole Torah on Mount Sinai?
How close is our current text of the Hebrew Bible to the original?
How objective is the Great Rabbis Experiment?
Why would God put a code in the Bible?
Even if the Bible code exists, does that prove God wrote it?
If space aliens wrote the Bible code, why did they bother?
How meaningful are those probabilities people keep quoting?
Do the Yeshua codes prove Jesus is the Messiah?
What about the alleged codes in the New Testament?

The Ground Rules

I'm a physicist, so I prefer to tackle this issue scientifically -- that is, experimentally. It is unacceptable to start out with some foreordained conclusion and then go fishing for whatever evidence supports that conclusion. Here are my rules. Some of the articles in the analysis section of this web site will explain the reasons for these ground rules in more detail. You don't have to like 'em, but here they are:

The Bible code might be real.
The Bible code might be a hoax.
The only way to decide is by way of rigorous and careful experiments.
A good experiment defines what it is looking for in advance.
Any observation not defined in advance is suspect and not to be trusted.

That's all I have to say in this introduction to the Bible code. I recommend that you go next to either my book review page or my analysis page, depending on your interests. Or you can check out my book, which has the full story from my point of view.