The Bible Code
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Author: Michael Drosnin
Title: The Bible Code
Published by: Orion, 1997
ISBN: 0 75280 932 6 (paperback)
Main Topics: The Bible; The Christian God; Sacred Science.
You know those popular word search grids, where you take a grid of, say, 50 rows of 50 letters and try and find the words hidden in it? Like, for example, names of cities or composers or whatever. Well, imagine the bible in its original Hebrew form being written out like that with however many rows there would be of fifty letters per row.
Now, the odds are that in that grid you would find unintentional complete words, reading maybe down, or diagonally, or maybe on every other line. It would happen on any large document, statistically speaking. Now what would raise some eyebrows is if you could isolate one area of your gigantic word search, and find two or three words all related to each other - for example, Clancy, Grisham and King. Again, statistically speaking, it’s possible but not overly probable that these word formations would exist.
Now, imagine you have, in your one little section that’s fifty letters wide, the following words and phrases: ‘Yitzhak Rabin’; ‘ Name of assassin who will assassinate’; ‘Rabin assassination’; ‘Name of assassin’; ‘Amir’; ‘Tel Aviv’; ‘in 5756 / 1995-96’. The odds of these phrases appearing together in one little section start to look seriously high.
And yet all of these phrases do appear together in one little section of the Bible when written out in its original Hebrew as a letter grid as explained above.
On November 4, 1995, a man named Amir shot and killed the then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in the back, in Tel Aviv.
The key to working out the bible code is knowing how wide to make your grid; in other words, how many letters go in a row before starting a new one. Obviously a computer – a good one – is needed to do this, because otherwise you’ll have to rewrite the grid as many times as there are letters in the Bible. But a computer can do this quickly, and let you know when it finds something. And then when it’s found your key word, it can display the area immediately around it. So when the author searched, with hindsight, for the name Amir – Rabin’s killer – the computer displayed it in another grid, with the date and the phrases, ‘assassin who will assassinate’, ‘He struck, he killed the Prime Minister’ and ‘his killer, one of his people, the one who got close’. Your statistical odds are starting to soar at this point – odds of one in ten million are quoted*.
The phrases ‘Fire on January 18th, 1991’, ‘missile’, Saddam’, ‘Hussein picked a day’, ‘war’ and ‘enemy’ all appear together in similar fashion.
As do ‘economical collapse’, ‘stocks’, ‘depression’, and ‘1929’.
As do ‘Shoemaker-levy’, ‘will pound Jupiter’, and ‘July 16, 1994’.
As do ‘Shakespeare’, ‘presented on stage’, ‘MacBeth’ and ‘Hamlet’.
‘Wright Brothers’ and ‘airplane’ appear together, as does ‘Hitler’, ‘evil man’, ‘nazi and enemy’ and ‘slaughter’, and so do ‘Edison’, ‘Electricity’ and ‘Lightbulb’. Someone was a fan of Einstein, because in the area around his name appears ‘science’, ‘they prophesised a brainy person’, a new and excellent understanding’ and ‘he overturned present reality’.
From my page you can access an entry of mine simply entitled Alchemy. In it I make mention of the fact that Isaac Newton saw his work as a means of explaining God’s work. The majority of his prodigious literary output was concerned with topics such as alchemy, ground plans for Solomon’s temple, and the search for a code that he thought existed in the Bible but was never able to find. A search for the name of Newton in the bible shows two items in close proximity – ‘gravity’ and ‘bible code’.
By this time in Drosnin’s 200+ page book, you’ve got to page 33 – all grids are lovingly reproduced for readers to check themselves.
I have to admit I get a strange feeling when I read this book. I don’t know for certain how true it is – the grids displayed in the book could be gibberish, as my ancient Hebrew is very sketchy! But I think if they had been, someone else would have noticed. I know there’s a companion book to this, I think it’s called The Bible Code Explained, but I’ve not read that so I will refrain from comment. The original experiment apparently passed all peer reviews in Nature magazine, so it would appear that the scientific community have found little to dispute with the methodology itself.
* See Equidistant Letter Spacing In The Book of Genesis, an experiment by Eli Rips and Doron Witztum, published in Nature magazine. The computer program and Hebrew Bible grid is available for any sceptics who wish to check the results, or the program itself.
