The Bible Code
A Review Of: The Bible Code, by Michael Drosnin
Michael Drosnin claims that space aliens wrote the Bible. In the Hebrew text, they embedded secret codes that can only be detected with modern computers. These codes allegedly predict today's front-page news: the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter, the Oklahoma City bombing, earthquakes in Japan and Los Angeles, and a nuclear holocaust in the coming decade. And much, much more.
Drosnin tells a pretty good story. He starts out with his biggest success -- his prediction of the assassination of Rabin. Drosnin discovered this "code" before the event, and in fact tried to warn Rabin. The cover of his book shows the evidence, a tableau in which the words "Yitzhak Rabin" actually cross Hebrew words which he translates "assassin that will assassinate."
That's where the trouble begins (though it doesn't end there).
The problem is that Drosnin's translation is strained, to say the least. The range of meanings for the Hebrew word "rotzeach" is fairly wide. Drosnin translates it "assassin," which is possible, but the word could just as well mean "killer" or "manslayer" or "avenger" or "murderer," depending on the context.
And what does the word mean here? We're lucky. Drosnin found this word in the plain text of the Bible, in Deuteronomy 4:42. Read any Bible you have handy. The context makes clear that the phrase means "manslayer who has accidentally killed someone." This passage provides for cities of refuge for one who has accidentally killed his neighbor "without malice aforethought." In these cities, the manslayer could live without fear of death at the hands of the blood avenger -- the relative of the one accidentally slain.
So Drosnin has screwed up royally here. The plain meaning of this "code" is either that Rabin accidentally killed someone or someone accidentally killed Rabin. The plain meaning of the code is wrong. Drosnin prefers a mistranslation of the code that at least agrees with the facts. But this is not much of a triumph. Even a broken clock is right twice a day -- but who cares?
Unfortunately, the book doesn't really get any more intellectually rigorous as the story unfolds. Drosnin tells about meeting Eliyahu Rips, an Israeli mathematician who introduced him to the Bible code. (Rips, by the way, has posted a notice on the web distancing himself from Drosnin. Rips does not believe that the Bible code can be used to predict the future.)
One of the main problems with Drosnin's book is that he gets so many facts wrong. Take this gem on page 31:
"The major scientists who actually examined the Bible code confirm it. The Pentagon code-breaker, the three referees at the math journal, the professors at Harvard, Yale, and Hebrew University all started out skeptics, and ended up believers."
This is shot full of errors. The "Pentagon code-breaker" is Harold Gans, who worked for the National Security Agency. Drosnin is correct in saying that Gans began as a skeptic and ended up a believer. But the referees of the "math journal" (Statistical Science) do not believe in the Bible code. The professors at Harvard, Yale, etc. (David Kazhdan, J. Bernstein, I. Piatetski-Shapiro, and H. Fuerstenberg) are not "believers." They did write a letter saying that Eliyahu Rips and his colleague Doron Witztum have done serious work worthy of close examination, but they do not say that the work is correct! More recent statements by Kazhdan make it clear that he is not convinced, and in fact, doubts the Bible code.
But worse than the outright errors is the wrong implication -- that the Bible code work allegedly confirmed by the "major scientists" is essentially similar to the codes Drosnin is finding. This is simply not true. Eliyahu Rips, Doron Witztum, and Yoav Rosenberg have in fact done some very interesting work, which appears to show that Genesis was encoded with information about a number of rabbis who lived and died during the last thousand years or so. Michael Drosnin's "findings" are a very different animal. The statistical significance of the work by Rips, et. al., is claimed to be remarkably good -- upwards of 60000 to 1. Drosnin makes no such extraordinary claims for his own findings; he rarely mentions probabilities at all, and then only in an offhand manner without any supporting explanation.
The litany of errors goes on and on. On page 38 of Drosnin's book, he claims that "every Hebrew Bible that now exists is the same letter for letter." Wrong! While the five books of Moses show remarkably little variation between texts, each has at least a few dozen letter variations. The rest of the books of the Bible have even more.
On page 94, Drosnin calls the Bible code a "mathematically proven fact that had been confirmed by every scientist who actually examined it." Wrong! Barry Simon's web site has a list of some fifty mathematicians who have each personally examined the Bible code and found it totally unconvincing. Certainly, some scientists have been convinced by the evidence, but the majority have not.
On page 98, Drosnin says that the Torah was first inscribed on tablets of stone. That's absurd. The Torah has more than 300000 Hebrew letters. Moses would have been crushed under the weight of stone tablets large enough to hold all that.
Besides the errors in fact, Drosnin also shows a remarkable ability to translate Hebrew in bizarre ways. For example, on page 80, Drosnin shows a tableau which includes part of the plain text of Genesis 25:11, which begins "after the death of Abraham." Drosnin strips out a few letters to change the meaning to "it will be after the death of the Prime Minister." Creative, but utterly bogus.
On page 101, Drosnin translates a piece of Genesis 41:45 as "The code will be added, you will decode it." Bizarre!
On page 175, Drosnin claims that the great Jewish scholar Adin Steinsaltz informed him that, "In the Bible time is reversed." Anyone who reads Biblical Hebrew knows what Steinsaltz must have actually said about the Hebrew perfect and imperfect tenses, but Drosnin clearly didn't understand what he was hearing.
Drosnin has met with many of the major players in the Bible code camp. Eliyahu Rips, Doron Witztum, and Yoav Rosenberg have put together some remarkable analysis which begs for explanation. But Drosnin seems unable to grasp the difference between their serious scientific work and his own crossword puzzle-like tableaux, bubbling and fizzing with creative mistranslations. None of his mentors believe that the Bible code can be used to predict the future, yet much of Drosnin's book is devoted to just such fortune-telling.
That, in fact, seems to be the main point of Drosnin's book. Earthquake, fire, famine, and nuclear war are headed our way. Then again, maybe not. Drosnin is unsure whether the Bible code predicts things that must happen or things that might happen. Perhaps the code was given to warn us? he conjectures. He's not sure.
What he is sure of is that numerous Very Bad Things might happen in the coming decade -- unless they don't happen! How profound. There might be an earthquake in L.A. Calif. (his translation again). There might be a nuclear holocaust in 2006. Then again, maybe it will be 2010. Or maybe not. He can't say for sure -- they're just probabilities.
Drosnin needs a Bible code to tell him that all these things might possibly happen? Why?
Summary: The book is entertaining. It tells a story in short, easily understood sentences. It gets a lot of facts wrong, and has a ton of logical errors and mistranslations. The predictions will scare the bejeebers out of you if you believe them. Which you shouldn't, even if you believe in the real Bible code. The appendix contains the full text of the famous Statistical Science article by Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg.
Read this book if you like fiction, or if you like "documentaries" about space-aliens, or if you simply must know what all the fuss is about, or if you just feel like making Michael Drosnin a little fatter in the wallet.
Otherwise, don't bother. Instead, read Jeffrey Satinover's book, which gets many more of the facts right and tells quite a bit more about the Great Rabbis Experiment of Rips, Witztum, and Rosenberg, into the bargain.
Browse on Amazon: The Bible Code, by Michael Drosnin
