History Channel's "The Bible Code" (Longish, but a fast read, I hope)

Great Debates
1

On the History Channel last night (9/13/03). They ran a program called The Bible Code.

Some Rabbinical scholars say they have cracked an Old Testament code, which enables them to find hidden messages in the Torah. I’ll try to hit the highlights, but please understand I have no axe to grind. I am not trying to prove or disprove the Bible (Old Testament, Torah), or the Scholars’ theory. Just telling what I saw.

First off, the Rabbinical scholars downloaded the Torah - in Hebrew - into the computer. Then using “Equidistant Letter Sequencing (or Skips)” and a search program, they ran searches on a word or phrase. The search then takes them to a matrix - a section of the Torah in which that search term appears. In that same matrix they find clusters of words, phrases, sentences, which I will call ‘descriptives’ and are related to the search word.

The matrix is very much like those Find A Word puzzles in which you have a block of seemingly jumbled letters, but if you look closely you can find and encircle genuine words.

Example: Search word using one-letter sequencing or skips:

  1. SxHxAxKxExSxPxExAxRxE.

Let’s say Shakespeare is found on a given page of the Torah dealing with the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. We call the text surrounding the search word, a “matrix”.

(The scholars don’t seem to care where in the Bible the matrix is found. Their only concern is to find the search words and the descriptives around them.)

So, we find SHAKESPEARE. We then look in the immediate vicinity for the relevant descriptives in that matrix, and we find three of them:

Presented on stage, Macbeth, Hamlet

I am using all CAPS for the search word(s) and boldface upper/lower case for the descriptives.
Any of these words can appear horizontally (left to right, right to left), vertically (upward and downward) and diagonally.

This, BTW, was a real search performed by the scholars, but I don’t know what the skips were for the bard’s name - one letter, two, three? They don’t say, but the three ‘relevant’ terms were all clustered around SHAKESPEARE.

Here are some more search terms (numbered) with the descriptives in upper and lower case (beneath).

  1. WRIGHT BROTHERS
    Airplane

  2. APOLLO 11
    Man on the moon, Spaceship

  3. NAPOLEON
    France, Waterloo. Elba

  4. EDISON
    Electricity, Light bulb

  5. EINSTEIN
    Science, He overshadowed present reality

  6. NEWTON (Isaac, of course)
    Gravity

Newton, incidentally, learned Hebrew to study the Torah for biblical codes. He didn’t seem to enjoy any success.

  1. THE DEPRESSION
    1929, Stocks, Economic collapse

  2. AMERICAN REVOLUTION
    1776

10 REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA
1917

  1. WORLD WAR II
    United States, Germany, Russia, England, France, Japan

  2. HITLER
    Nazi and enemy, Evil man, Slaughter

  3. JAPANESE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR
    It will strike them, To destroy, To annihilate

    …and from other searches on the Japanese factor we get

World war, Atomic holocaust, Japan, 1945

  1. From JFK ASSASSINATION (I assume this is the search term), we get 3 “formations” (I don’t know from formations. Just roll with it, please):

(1)President, Kennedy, Dallas, To die

(2) Oswald, Marksman, Name of assassin who will assassinate

(3) Oswald, Ruby, He will kill the assassin

There was also a search on

  1. ROBERT KENNEDY that yielded
    S. Sirhan, Second ruler killed

The Bible scholars’ main thesis seems to be that the Old Testament makes coded predictions. We simply have to be bright enough to find them.

For example, when Itsak (spelling?) Rabin was still alive the Rabbis ran a search on his name and got

Assassin will assassinate, Itsak Rabin

Alarmed, these scholars sent a warning to Rabin’s people, but to no avail. He was killed just the same.

And in case you were wondering, there is no mention in the hour-long program of any search on Jesus Christ, Simon Peter, or anyone, for that matter, in the New Testament.

  1. SEPTEMBER 11 yielded
    Twin Towers, Airplane, Two times, Names of the hijackers (says the narrator, however, he doesn’t utter their names), Buildings melting, Buildings falling

Bin Ladin, The twin terror attack, Terror incident, Thousands of people

  1. For the recent shuttle disaster on 2/1/03…
    Spaceship Columbia, They will mourn, Spaceship consumed by fire.

(In the matrix, there’s even a crude outline of a spaceship with the left wing in red - i.e., on fire. Don’t ask me where the color came from.)

  1. A Gulf War II search yielded
    Saddam Hussein, Destroyed

  2. for Los Angeles earthquake…
    Great Earthquake 1994, (and, apparently. another to come in) 2012.

And if that’s not enough for you,

  1. EARTH DEVASTATION generated
    Earth Annihilated, Comet, 2012

On a hopeful note…

A skeptic, one Brian McKay a professor in an Australian University used a tome, similar in size to the Bible, “Moby Dick” to see what he could dig up for assassination predictions. I assume he searched with same software the Rabbis used.
Here’s what McKay’s assassination searches brought in

Indira Ghandi, Martin Luther king, Leon Trotsky,

John Kennedy, He shall be killed, In cars

McKay says this Bible Code business “…is a lot of nonsense.” I hope so. 2012 isn’t that far away.

That’s it. If you have questions I’ll respond, but keep in mind, this program is my very first exposure to The Bible Code.

Antiochus

Presented on stage, Macbeth, Hamlet

2

What’s the debate? If you’re asking about the veracity of the Bible Code it is easily debunkable and has been debunked several times on this board (search “Bible Code”). I have to go to work so I don’t have time to post lineks (I’m sure someone else will). The short answer is that the methodology is compromised (the “decoders” cheated certain words and phrases to make them fit better) and that virtually any written text will produce the same results when that text is transliterated in Hebrew letters.
Someone else can go into more detail, I’ve got to run.

3

Lots of info available from Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), whose sacred mission is to debunk stuff like this. Please see http://www.csicop.org/si/9711/bible-code.html, among the other many references on the SDMB.

4

Straight Dope Staff Column: What’s Up with the Bible Code?

Good column by Dex.

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I’d REALLY, REALLY like to see a Cite for that Rabin thing. Every time I hear people say the Bible Code predicted something, it’s been post hoc.
For example, they might say you can find “Nixon” and “resign” in the same matrix. “The Bible predicted Watergate!” the believers shout. But nobody noticed it until 1999, meaning it’s not prophecy at all. (This is a hypothetical, but I do remember someone claiming that Nixon did in deed appear in this code.)

I think Dex’s staff report takes care of this junk nicely. Be sure to check the links at the bottom, especially the link that finds similar ‘eerie prophecies’ as the Bible, but using Melville’s Moby Dick. Note also that the Bible Code is actually easier to do in Hebrew than it is in English because Hebrew doesn’t have distinct characters for vowels.

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It’s worse than that - Hebrew DOES have some characters that can be used as vowels, but their usage in modern Hebrew is highly irregular (i.e., stick in a vowel if it sounds right… - sort of like medieval English). This makes the job of finding “words” in the “text” all the easier - if at first you don’t succeed, try spelling it differently… :wink:

7

Sorry.

I should have known enough to have searched before positing what turns out to be old news.

Went to History Channel’s website hoping to find a cite for the Rabin thing. No luck.

Thank you for your patience and inputs.

8

Here’s proof of the stupidity of the Bible Code:
I was browsing a bookstore, picked up a copy of the Bible Code–and Bingo! I disproved it! Without even trying!
There was an example using Al Gore’s name, which was criss-crossed diagonally with some junk about losing elections.Supposedly this proved the “prophecy” of Bush’s election. But here’s the joke —the SAME WORDS (“Al Gore”) also criss-crossed horizontally on the same page with the Hebrew word for “General” (i.e. Commander-in-chief).So if Gore had won, you could have proved the “prophecy” of the Bible Code.

If you’re willing to ignore enough facts, you can prove anything you really want to.

Also, there is a basic stupidity in the whole concept of using even-numbered “skips”. We humans like to count by two’s, by fives, by tens, etc. So some idiots programmed a computer pick the letters in the same way.

But if you’re gonna use a computer, why limit it to human-like counting (even two’s fives, etc.) Why not use a more complicated seqence–say,picking two skips of two letters, followed by 3 skips of 3, 4 skips of four, 10 skips of ten, etc.? And then repeat it all, counting backwards from ten to one? The computer would calculate this “complex” sequence as easy as an even-numbered sequence. And you could make up an infinite number of complex sequences, so you could find any word you want, criss-crossed with any other word you want.

(simple example: the Hebrew word for “praise God” is “Halleluyah”-spelled with 5 letters in Hebrew(HLLYH), which are the 5th, 12th, 12th and 5th letters of in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. So why not use “skips” of a pattern such as 5,12,12,5? Then, you could take all kinds of sacred phrases, translate them into complex sequences of skips, and “prove” anything you want.

Like the old joke about giving a typewriter to a chimpanzee, and eventually he will type out proper English.

9

Before starting a thread, Antiochus, it’s a good idea to see if someone else already has one on the topic. Avoids duplication.

Guess what! Jeff Olsen already started one on Fox & the Bible Code yesterday!

Nevertheless, my lack of surprise at the “predictions” or “astonishing” elements of Bible Code proponents is because I know a little bit about mathematics and probability, and it appears many are ignorant in that department.

In probability theory, when you take a VERY large number of items, and compare each item in the list to another (or the same) VERY large list of items, the possibility of finding things that seem to go together is VERY great. It becomes even greater if the subjective human mind allows for a VERY wide range of possible coincidences.

For example, how many words can you think of that, if seen in proximity of the word, “Kennedy”, would look like an assassination prediction? How about these: Dallas, gun, rifle, motorcade, Oswald, Ruby, shot, Zapruder, knoll, parade, November, sacrifice, president, book, blood, death, wound, etc.? And that’s just the short list.

Code proponents are fond of giving the odds against finding two words together as being in the millions. But that’s AFTER they have already found them, which really makes the odds 1:1. To illustrate, deal a random poker hand from a shuffled deck right now.

I’ll wait.

Dah, dah, dee, dah…OK, so your hand was:[ul][li]10 of Diamonds[]3 of Clubs[]King of Spades[]Ace of Spades[]5 of Hearts[/ul][/li]Now calculate the odds of one deal coming up exactly that way. Astonomical! (Actually 2,598,960:1, but who’s counting) But you just dealt it, didn’t you? That’s what happens when you calculate odds AFTER the event. The odds of dealing ANY poker hand are unity (One to One), and that’s exactly what you just did.

Probability is what makes casinos rich and “Bible Code”-type coincidences occur all over the place, such as the Moby Dick search. They are not remarkable at all. Fun to play with, maybe, but nothing more.

An additional factor: the ambiguity of the Hebrew language, which, compared to many others, allows for another coincidence multiplier, as Marley23 and Noone Special have pointed out.

Other things that you need to understand are the psychology of wishful thinking, pattern recognition in the human mind, the Barnum or Forer effect, and selective thinking, just to mention a few. All of these can be looked up in The Skeptic’s Dictionary, a very good resource.

So, Antiochus, study up a bit on these items, then come back and tell us if you are still impressed by Drosnin et al.

10

I never understood how this crap theory ever got the amount of press it did in the first place. I watched that History Channel program the other day and was just stupified.

11

It’s entertainment, KidCharlemagne, not science. Apparently nonsense is more entertaining.

12

I didn’t see the show. Did it present any counter-arguments or debunkers at all or did it just play right along with the premise?

13

pretty much- they did have a bit of the Moby Dick thing, but it mostly gave the impression that there is a Bible Code and it was either made by God or extraterrestrials. They basically said it was impossible for it to be just a coincidence or not feasible at all (i hope i’m using the right word).

14

Can anyone tell me about software to simultaneously solve the Bible code and those pesky word-search puzzles that seem to keep me uup at night?

15

You would have assumed they would have consulted mathematicians and statisticians on this claim. If they had, they would have found that there was big document signed by such experts from all over the world basically saying that the phenomenon is bullpocky.

The thing is, you can explain the math, but people just won’t get it. However, when you were to point out that the OT also contains phrases like “Jesus is the false lord” “Koresh is lord” “allah is the one true lord”… well I think people’s interest in the validity of the codes would fade. Which, actually, tells you more about their bias than the validity of the codes, but whatever.

(note, I don’t know that it contains those exact phrases, but I remember reading a refutation of the code that found similar phrases. They also found a prediction of the Roswell landings. :slight_smile:

16

Thank God he’s not on the board of governors any longer…