Questions

Question first appeared on January 18, 2004
The Bible is the “Book of Books,” as far as I am concerned. It is my Book and my life! Last year I read “Bible Code II” by Michael Drosnin and I am fascinated with it. The Baltimore Sun wrote, “The biggest news of the millennium! Maybe of all human history!” I agree with that. Your comments please.

Michael Drosnin wrote “The Bible Code” (1997) and followed up with “Bible Code II: The Countdown” (2002). I have read neither of these books, but I did a web search on them.

Drosnin claims that the Hebrew Bible contains a very complex code that reveals events that took place thousands of years after the Bible was written. He contends that some foretold events later happened exactly as predicted.

Drosnin bases his technique heavily on that of Eliyahu Rips of Hebrew University in Israel , who published an article entitled, “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis” (1994). Rips and Drosnin arrange the 304,805 Hebrew letters of the Bible into a large array. Spaces and punctuation marks are omitted, and words are run together one after another. A computer looks for matches to selected names or words by stepping to every nth letter in the array. One can scan forward or backward; and for each value of “step distance,” n, there are n different starting letters. Both Rips and Drosnin work with the original Hebrew characters, which are said to have been given by God to Moses one character at a time, with no spaces or punctuation, just as they appear in “the code.” The code is considered to exist only in the Hebrew Bible and not in translations or any other books.

When Rips and Drosnin find a name or word match for a given step value n, they then arrange the letters into a huge matrix. The matrix is n letters wide, and inside this puzzle, the letters for the “hidden message” line up together vertically, horizontally, diagonally, whatever, depending on how one programs the computer. Supposedly, using this type of technique, they have found key words such as “President Kennedy” along with the connecting word “ Dallas ” in such a search.

Drosnin, in a Newsweek article (1997) made the following challenge: “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I’ll believe them.” Taking the challenge, mathematician Brendan McKay of Australian National University and his colleagues, using the same techniques with a computer found assassination “predictions” in Moby Dick for Indira Ghandhi, Rene Moawad, Leon Trotsky, Rev. M. L. King, and Robert F. Kennedy.

Bible Code II: The Countdown supposedly reveals predictions of events leading to the Second Coming in a few years. I’ll believe it when I see it! Every century has those who claim to have finally “solved,” “de-coded,” “interpreted,” the real message of God’s Word. Don’t worry about it! Jesus said, “Do this and you will live.” (Luke 10:28) Do what? Love God and your neighbor as yourself!