What do you think about the idea of "Bible Code"?

Question

I was reading this after researching something else about the bible and curious on what you think? Please answer only if you actually know or have researched about this before.. What are your thoughts on this ?

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Bible Code
The Bible Code is the title of a book by Michael Drosnin in which he claims that there is a code embedded in the Bible by God. The code is revealed by searching for equidistant letter sequences (ELS). The code is called the Bible Code or the Torah Code. For example, start with any letter ("L") and read every nth letter ("N") thereafter in the book, not counting spaces. If an entire book such as Genesis is searched, the result is a long string of letters. Using different values for L and N, one can generate many strings of letters. Imagine wrapping the string of letters around a cylinder in such a way that all the letters can be displayed. Flatten the cylinder to reveal several rows with columns of equal

equal length, except perhaps the last column, which might be shorter than all the rest. Now search for meaningful names in proximity to dates. Search horizontally, vertically, diagonally, any which way. A group of Israeli mathematicians did just this and claimed that when they searched for names in close proximity to birth or death dates (as published in the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel) they found many matches, for example, the date of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was in close proximity to letters spelling out his name. Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg (1994) published their findings under the title of "On Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis." The editor of the journal commented:

When the authors used a randomization test to see how rarely the patterns they found might arise by chance alone they obtained a highly significant result, with the probability p=0.000016. Our referees were baffled: their prior beliefs made them think

the Book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern-day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks the effect persisted.

That is, the probability of getting the results they did was 16 out of one million or 1 out of 62,500. The authors state: "Randomization analysis shows that the effect is significant at the level of 0.00002 [and] the proximity of ELS's with related meanings in the Book of Genesis is not due to chance." Harold Gans, a former cryptologist at the US Defense Department, replicated the work of the Israeli team and agreed with their conclusion. Witztum later claimed that, according to one measure, the probability of getting these results by chance is 1 in 4 million. He has apparently changed his mind and now claims that the probability p = 0.00000019 (1 out of 5.3 million).

As further evidence of the statistical significance of their results, the Israeli team analyzed the Hebrew version of the Book of I

As further evidence of the statistical significance of their results, the Israeli team analyzed the Hebrew version of the Book of Isaiah and the first 78,064 characters of a Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace. They found many names in close proximity to birth or death dates, but the results were statistically insignificant. (The book of Genesis used in their study, the Koren version, has 78,064 characters.)

What does this all mean? To some it means that the patterns in Genesis are intentional and that God is the ultimate author of the code. If so, should the Book of Isaiah, and any other book in the Bible that fails the ELS test, be dumped? Should we conclude that these statistics verify the claim that the Jews are the chosen people of God, or that no more names should be added to list of Great Men in Israel unless they pass the ELS test? Unless other religions can duplicate such statistically improbable results, the mathematically minded supernaturalist might well

What does this all mean? To some it means that the patterns in Genesis are intentional and that God is the ultimate author of the code. If so, should the Book of Isaiah, and any other book in the Bible that fails the ELS test, be dumped? Should we conclude that these statistics verify the claim that the Jews are the chosen people of God, or that no more names should be added to list of Great Men in Israel unless they pass the ELS test? Unless other religions can duplicate such statistically improbable results, the mathematically minded supernaturalist might well consider them to be imposters. Should we translate all the sacred books of all the religions of the world into Hebrew and see how many great men of Israel are encoded there?

Can a computer really read the mind of God? Apparently. For on this theory God dictated in His favorite language, Hebrew, a set of words that are more or less intelligible if taken at face value, containing stories of creation, floods, fratricide, wars

There's more but if you have read this far you get the gist.. if you would like to have the whole article send me a message and I will send it to you :)

Answer 1

Considering the largest ELS matrix so far found, and the most detailed, pertaining to Princess Diana's death in the car crash in france...

was found in Moby Dick...

I think nothing of it.

Also, I've personally done research where I found the letter occurance ratios of English texts (ie, e happens some 5% of the time where as z happens almost never...) and wrote a simple little program to spit out large amounts of english-ratio letters (ie, e happened often, z happened rarely). I was able to find ELS's that were personally significant and relevant to my own life and to events in the past.

So, if a random bunch of letters can contain ELS, so what if Moby Dick and the Torah do?

Further, no one tells you that with the way Hebrew is written, it's possible to write a person's name multiple ways. This means that you can 'nudge' the text towards a name if you can find something sufficiently similar.

So, my verdict, based on personal research and documented research?

Bumpkiss. AKA hogwash. AKA bogus. AKA, as Penn and Teller so lovingly put it, Bull$#!+.

Answer 2

OK aside from your equidistant letter sequence there are other codes that are in the bible i like the exodus chapter 19 code. if you wrap the Hebrew of the chapter so that its only 3 lines and every letter stands over another letter then you will see that the names of 72 angels (the angels on the rungs of Jacob's ladder) short the eh or el. all angels have that distinction (most commonly el like Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, etc.i am pretty sure that in Hebrew the el is a representation of (a face of god) now for some more interesting code facts. all code stems from the Hebrew kabbalah. which is Jewish witchcraft in nature. there are 3 primary code techniques. notquarion (which turns a phrase into a word (amen is an example of a phrase that said lord faithful king)
temurah which i am not at this time familiar with. and gematria which is to understand the Hebrew language mathematically (remember that the Hebrew letters are also their numbers and words represent mathematical numbers.) the 666 number is found using gematria. and that all these codes are most commonly found in moses's books (first 5 of bible and Torah) and that the new testament has no codes. i think that wizards like moses hid special magick in these books and they can be found if you find the correct decode tool.
hope this helps
mournyngwolf
solitary practitioner of Wicca and wizardry

Answer 3

did you know that in ONLY 1 page of typed text, there are about 1,000,000 "secret combinations" of letters that you can make by going backwords, diagonal in 4 directsions, ever 4th letter, etc?

The probablitity of p=0.000016. is meaninless once you take into account the number of comparisons made to arrive at a code.

Typical Bonferroni correction for significance values makes that p value above meaningless and non-significant.

If you don't know what I am talking about, then no offense, you have no business making any claims about statistics and the bible code.


PS: another researcher did the same thing with the bible and found something like 6 instances of "Bible Code Fraud" showing up in the bible.
given the # of ways you can shake those numbers, you can find any words you want in the bible, including asshat and fucknuts.

Answer 4

Sir Isaac Newton spent almost half of his life studying the code's hidden in the bible!

It is equal distant code, that is skipping a number of letters to find a meaning.

say start at Gen 1:1 starting with the letter I in "In the beginning) and skip oh say 22 letters and see what comes up!

1. you have to know what you want to spell, like a name, or event
2. It only works in hebrew
3. It only works in the Old testement
4. It seems to work best only in the first 5 books!

but a lot of very interesting thing come up!

Answer 5

NEW YORK Sep 10 -- An international team of statisticians is debunking the controversial "Bible code," which claims the Old Testament has hidden references to 20th century events that can be revealed by a computer.

Proponents of the code claim that names and events were hidden in the Bible as written thousands of years ago and can be found through computer searches of the Hebrew text. Television documentaries, fast-selling books and numerous articles have popularized the theory, first published in the academic journal Statistical Science.

Now the same journal, published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics based in Hayward, Calif., is offering an article challenging the technique it reported in 1994. The article will be published in the quarterly next week.

Believers in the "Bible code" theory treat the Hebrew Bible as a string of letters without spaces, looking for words formed by equidistant letter sequences. For instance, computers might select every ninth Hebrew letter and register a "hit" when a "coded word" intersects with a Bible verse containing related words.

Five years ago, three Israeli scholars published the results of their search in the journal. As they explained, they took names of famous rabbis from a reference dictionary, applied letter sequences and found the names near the rabbis' dates of birth or death.

Using the same technique, others have claimed the Bible contains secret predictions, including everything from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 to a Los Angeles earthquake in 2010.

Major Bible scholars ignore the code because, they note, no one has a letter-by-letter version of the Bible as originally written. The oldest surviving manuscripts include slight variations, any of which would throw off computer test results.

In the upcoming edition of Statistical Science, the new study's authors -- Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel and Gil Kalai, professors at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, and Brendan McKay of the Australian National University -- combine expertise in mathematics and computer science to debunk the theory.

Using other spellings and assumptions, they ran hundreds of tests that repeated the experiment with different variations and applied it to more biblical books.

"Despite a considerable amount of effort," they write, "we have been unable to detect the codes."

This is significant, Bar-Natan said in a Thursday interview, because "truth in science is never based on the results of a single experiment. A significant requirement is repeatability."

Their results were no more successful with the Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Such letter configurations can be found in any long text, they say. The trick is to find letters in close proximity that form significant words more often than by chance.

But Eliyahu Rips, an Israeli mathematics professor who was co-author of the 1994 article, said in a statement that evidence for the code is "stronger than ever" and said a detailed reply to the new criticism would appear soon.

His ally Michael Drosnin, author of "The Bible Code," said the critics "told a lie."

Robert Kass, head of the statistics department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, edited the journal when it published the first article and said it was reviewed by other experts. He is disturbed that people perceived publication as "a stamp of scientific approval." That first article, he said, merely presented a puzzle -- one that has now been explained.

"The new study shows there were many, many choices, particularly for things like the names of the rabbis, that involved a lot of latitude. It was only for special sources that the results appeared," he said Thursday.

He said such studies must avoid statistical "tuning," just as medical research projects follow strict protocol.

Bar-Natan says that procedures in the 1994 project had "enough wiggle room to produce whatever you want."

Authors of the earlier article could not be reached for comment.

Answer 6

I've seen programs on it, and I think it's false knowledge. Dangerous in that those who claim to have broken the code can tell you anything they want. Since God didn't write the Bible and it was written over hundreds of years by a multitude of authors, it makes no sense. It was written in different languages, yet this is supposed to work? If it does, then the translators put it in, and therefore would be more suspect than ever. I think it's malarky.

Answer 7

The Bible Codes and the codes found in Moby Dick are proof that we live in a multidimensional, holographic universe. ALL information can be found in ANY sufficiently large sample of text created through the process of Mind. The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine.

Answer 8

I have studied the Bible for 30+ years - this is just something to lead people away from the truith.

There is no hidden meaning in the Bible - those who read will understand.

Good question.

Answer 9

Kind of silly fun you find all around. You can see he's trying to sell a book.

It's like the enourmous set of coincedences with the number 13 and 9/11.

It's fun to develop alternate theories.

But that's all they are.

Answer 10

This book and its "science" have been thoroughly discredited. One can run ANY book through this huckster's algorithms and come up with the same "mystical" sequences, etc..

This kind of stuff is only good for seperating the gullible from their cash.