Cracking the Bible Code
A Review Of: Cracking the Bible Code, by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D.
Jeffrey Satinover, M.D., has written one of the best books available in English on the Bible code. Satinover's book will tell you everything you want to know about the Bible code from the believers' point of view.
The book isn't perfect, of course. It has plenty of flaws, and we'll get into those. But Satinover presents the mainstream research in support of the Bible code in an interesting way with lots of history and plenty of personal anecdotes about many of the key players in the Bible code movement. Satinover believes in the Bible code, mostly. That is, he says, he wants to believe. To him, the evidence looks pretty good. He does his best to explain why.
By the way, everybody is allowed to change their mind. In recent years, Satinover has apparently done so. I'm told he now considers the codes to be bogus. But that's beside the point for purposes of this review.
The story begins in the prologue with Harold Gans, a National Security Agency mathematician, pacing the floor of his office as he waits for his wife to call him with the results of nineteen days of continuous calculations on his home computer. Gans expects to find the flaw in a computer experiment first run by three Israeli researchers. The phone rings. Gans picks it up. He is shocked to learn that the Israeli experiment is correct. The codes, apparently, are real. It's a good story, as Satinover tells it, although I've heard Gans tell it in person and I got a slightly different take on things. One gets the idea, reading Satinover, that this incident brought Gans back into the fold of Orthodox Judaism. In fact, Harold Gans has always been an Orthodox Jew. Furthermore, Gans has said in a public lecture that at the time of the experiment, he expected to confirm the Israeli experiment. So Satinover's version is a little misleading.
The tale then moves on. Much of it revolves around the work of the three Israeli researchers, Eliyahu Rips, Doron Witztum, and Yoav Rosenberg. Rips is a former atheist, a mathematics professor who joined the burgeoning Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem, partly as a result of his delving into the hidden codes said to be found in the Hebrew text of the Bible. Witztum is a former graduate student in physics who quit physics to study Torah. Rosenberg was at the time studying computer science at the Jerusalem College of Technology.
These three researchers published an article in the American journal Statistical Science that shows evidence that the author of Genesis encoded information about the lives of certain rabbis who lived and died many centuries after Genesis was written.
If true, this is an astounding result. But how and why did these three scientists ever bother to look in such an unlikely place for such unlikely information?
Satinover steps back in time to explain the logical sequence of events that led to this discovery. An ancient Jewish legend tells that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, were dictated to Moses all at one time on Mount Sinai in a precise sequence of letters of black fire on a white background, without punctuation or spaces. Furthermore, Jewish tradition holds that enormous quantities of information are contained in the Torah. Quoting the great eighteenth century rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo (commonly called "the Vilna Gaon" in Jewish circles):
"All that was, is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible."
(Mathematically, of course, this is in fact possible, although it would presumably require superhuman intelligence to do so.)
Here, the story gets a bit more complex, in Satinover's telling. The tale jumps between past and present, now the fourteenth century, now the late twentieth, now back in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. It's an engaging story, if just a bit confusing at times. For those too young to remember the Holocaust, Satinover does a hair-raising job of bringing the horror vividly into focus.
And he sees a pattern in it all. Just as the codes are being discovered by the Czech rabbi Michael ber Weissmandl, the Nazi war machine swings into action to crush European Jewry (and with it, the rabbi's Bible code discoveries). Weissmandl leaps for his life from the train taking him to Auschwitz, and escapes to the West. Meanwhile, the Americans and British are developing computers to break the Nazi codes, and thereby turn the tide of war. After the war, Weissmandl passes the torch of the codes on to his students. And the mathematical methods and computers that beat the Nazis turn out to be instrumental in unlocking those very codes that the Nazis nearly destroyed.
It's may be just a bit too cloak-and-daggerish for some readers, a bit too much like a conspiracy theory. Never mind that. Maybe the story of the Bible code really is a cosmic battle, and maybe it isn't. There's no sure way for us mortals to know.
What is clear is that the Bible code has a lot more meat in it than you might think if you'd only read the sensationalist book The Bible Code, by Michael Drosnin. The "Aharon" code (in English, the "Aaron" code) described in Chapter 3 is particularly interesting, and Satinover explains it in great detail. This is one of his stronger pieces of evidence.
The strongest piece, of course, is the Great Rabbis Experiment of Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg. (Everybody calls this experiment something different. Satinover calls it the Great Sages Experiment. Others name it the Famous Rabbis Experiment. It really doesn't matter what you call it.) Satinover discusses this experiment in Chapter 12, but relegates most of the technical details to an appendix. I would have preferred that he put more in the main text. This is supposed to be the good stuff! If the Bible code is real, this is the strongest evidence for it. The chapter seems much too short. But there's always the appendix, for those of us interested in details.
Let's be clear about one thing: Satinover presents the Great Rabbis Experiment in the best possible light he can. This experiment has a number of serious weaknesses, which Brendan McKay, Barry Simon, Dror Bar-Natan, and several others have spent years exposing. Most recently, McKay and several Israeli scientists published their own article in Statistical Science showing the many technical flaws in the Great Rabbis Experiment. Satinover dances, leaps, and twirls past all of these with barely a nod. Of course, some of this came out after his book was published, so he couldn't have responded to the most recent evidence. But much of the case against the codes was already known well before his book came out. The case Satinover presents is much weaker than he lets on. (For a thousand technical details, see the recent Statistical Science article by McKay, et. al. Barry Simon's Web site contains an easier to read article, The Case Against the Codes. Chapter 4 of my book is even easier to read, but I left out most of the technical stuff.)
Cracking the Bible Code has other weaknesses. Satinover presents his evidence without much regard for which codes are most convincing and which are least. He shows us many of the same kinds of codes that Michael Drosnin and Grant Jeffrey present, and with hardly more discernment. The "Garden of Eden" codes, the "Sadat" code, the "AIDS" code, the "Hanukkah" code -- all these are familiar to codes aficionados, but none of them are very convincing to scientists. Satinover isn't writing only for scientists, of course. But he doesn't ask the kind of critical questions that most scientists would ask of these codes. Questions about probability, coincidence, and rigorous experiments using testable hypotheses. As a physicist, those are the kinds of questions I would be asking.
Another very serious problem is his presentation of the evidence that the current Hebrew text of the Torah is very close to the original (only nine letter-variations in the text!). This is a very weak case, but he makes it sound watertight. I'm sure he believes what he says, but very few Biblical scholars would agree with him. At least Satinover avoids Drosnin's garish hype. That's something.
A minor problem is his use of language. Satinover favors flowery expressions. Some of his sentences get fairly convoluted. He's an educated guy, and it shows. His logic is better than Drosnin's. But his prose is a bit thicker going than Drosnin's lean sentences and simple vocabulary.
For another thing, the book is misnamed. The Bible code is not cracked here. A more accurate title would be Cheerleading the Bible Code. Satinover doesn't live up to his title. Blame his publisher's marketing department.
One last quibble: Satinover has a fondness for going off on tangents. Some of these are very interesting -- the history of code-breaking, computing, quantum computing, the spiritual wasteland of the twentieth century. But they add length to the book, and are probably more than many readers want to know.
All in all, though, a pretty good book. If you want to read the best possible case for the Bible code, read Satinover's book. (Then go read mine to see how and why the case collapses.)
Browse on Amazon: Cracking the Bible Code, by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D.
