When the Bible Code first became notorious, the claim was made that ‘no other book contains these codes." The bible was unique. However, as time as gone by, this claim of uniqueness has been completely disproved. Amazing codes have been found in War and Peace (in the Hebrew translation) and in Moby Dick (in the English translation) and even in the text on cereal boxes. This really does indicate that a person should always listen to two sides of any debate if you want to make an informed decision. Codes are found in any piece of writing, in any language, and, yes, even the most fantastic and unbelievable predictions of the future are found everywhere and anywhere. This claim of Biblical exclusiveness was false from the start. The codes that were found in the Bible could not be found in any other book, or any version of the Biblical text other than the 10th century Masoretic version of the Hebrew text for the simple reason that changing even a letter changes the displacement of every other letter in the crossword grid pattern used to search for coded messages. We were left with the impression that ‘no other book has these codes' which is true, but rather disingenuous, since every other book on the planet has its codes. The codes, while they look fantastic and highly improbable, are actually just the random result of placing thousands of letters into a matrix. The matrix can also have many different dimensions, and the possible combinations of letters one can make is very large. Most of what the matrix produces will be garbage (junk like ‘xopeqwrut', which is not a meaningful word). It is inevitable that the matrix will produce many words, and, as hard as it might be for people to accept, the matrix will also produce astonishing combinations of words in close proximity. This is as true of War and Peace or Moby Dick, as it is of the Masoretic text of the Bible. As an example, the famous rabbis experiment performed equally well in War and Peace as it did in Genesis. Versions of the experiment using the names of the rabbis and their place of birth and other variations, also produced astonishing results. Mathematicians explain that these results are just artifacts of the process of arranging letters into innumerable matrix patterns. These experiments produce DAZZLING results, and phrases such as ‘one in a million chance' tend to impress people, but when you have millions and billions and billions of permutations it is just pure chance that a list of rabbis will be found in close proximity to the name of their birth place, or that assassinations will be found ‘predicted'. The mathematical probabilities can be increased exponentially simply by choosing a different size matrix into which to place the letters, and when you have hundreds of thousands of letters and many thousands of matrix sizes, the odds of finding anything you might want to search for increases by many orders of magnitude. If you want to read a discussion of the mathematics of the Bible code check out this site. The disingenuous way the Bible code was promoted left people (including myself) with the impression that these predictions were peculiar to the Bible, when, in truth, only the codes of the Bible are peculiar to the Bible. This is to be expected since the matrix patterns that can be formed from the 10th century Masoretic text are the matrix patterns that can be formed from this text and no other. Nevertheless, people were left with the impression that ‘these codes can be found in no other book,' an assertion which is true, as far as it goes, but the way the argument was presented we were led to believe that the phenomena was unique to the Jewish Testament, which is utterly false. Indeed, researchers would have known this to be true right from the start. (However with Christian apologetics being what it is, this presentation can be justified on two grounds. First, you really do have to get people to convert, come hell or high water. Second, claims will be made that the prophecies in the Hebrew text are 'unique' based on 'proximity' as defined mathematically-but this claim is not true either as the rabbis experiment in War and Peace produced results comparable to Genesis. As well, the results achieved in the rabbis experiment, among others, have proved to be impossible to duplicate (see the mathematics site quoted above) which means that there are also serious problems of methodology that must be addressed.) You might recall some of the famous ‘Jesus' predictions that were touted. Once again, on examination, this presentation proved to be disingenuous as well, and once again, the promoters should have been aware of this from the start. While it is true that the text contains crossword puzzle patterns that tout Jesus as Messiah, there are also what one might call the ‘Satanic codes of the Bible'. If the positive Jesus crosswords prove that the Bible was authenticated by God then these negative Jesus and God references also prove that the book was endorsed by Satan the Devil. The Bible code tells us that there is no God, that God is evil, that Jesus is a devil, among other interesting things. All any researcher would have to do is type in ‘Jesus', and then, it would seem, discard all the ‘Satanic codes' that would inevitably be produced, no doubt rationalizing such dishonest practices by claiming that such results are ‘obviously' just some more of the junk that any experiment of this type is bound to produce. Those passages useful for propaganda purposes and evangelization could be strained out and presented to the public as evidence that the Bible was a truly remarkable book. If this affair demonstrates anything, it is that when it comes to the fervently religious you really cannot believe what you hear because, when it comes to propaganda, anything goes. Anything goes, and all is fair in the struggle for conversions. The end justifies the means. From the beginning I always suspected that something was amiss with this propaganda. The Bible Code was supposed to have ‘proven' the infallible nature of scripture. Now if this was the case, I thought, then surely the code proved the infallibility of, for example, the prophet Jeremiah (and the other prophets). Jeremiah condemned the Torah: "Thus says YAHWEH of hosts, the God of Israel, "Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat flesh. For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices.But this is what I commanded them, saying, ‘Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you will be My people; and you will walk in all the way which I command you, that it may be well with you.’ Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and in the stubbornness of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward." (Jeremiah 7:21) "My people do not know The ordinance of YAHWEH. How can you say, ‘We are wise, And the law of YAHWEH is with us’? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes Has made it into a lie. The wise men are put to shame, They are dismayed and caught; Behold, they have rejected the word of YAHWEH, And what kind of wisdom do they have?" (Jeremiah 8:7) As just one more example of the same thing, consider an equally explicit passage found in Isaiah. Note that all the practices he condemned are advocated over and over again in the law books of the Torah: "But he who kills an ox is like one who slays a man; He who sacrifices a lamb is like the one who breaks a dog’s neck; He who offers a grain offering is like one who offers swine’s blood; He who burns incense is like the one who blesses an idol. These people have chosen their own ways and their souls revel in their abominations." (Isaiah 66:3) Now if the Bible Code was authentic, an endorsement by God of scripture, then God endorsed Jeremiah. Now Jeremiah condemned the Torah, and Isaiah called the Torah practices ‘abominations'. Therefore, the Bible Code, by endorsing scripture, proved beyond doubt that the prophets were correct. Therefore, the book contained forgeries, as Jeremiah protested, and therefore was not endorsed by God. Well, you can see the problem in reasoning this caused for me when I first heard of it, but, then again, as they said, these crossword puzzles could not be found in any other book, so I was left to wrestle with an inherently contradictory proposition (but then, has this not always been the case with matters involving religion). How to make sense out of something so inconsistent and contradictory... In retrospect it all seems pretty clear now. Lesson learned - NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER EVER trust any argument or position placed before you by religious zealots focused on conversion. You simply cannot trust them. Anything goes. Nothing is more important than 'the salvation of souls' and even truth itself can be thrown by the wayside. Whatever it takes. The second thing I learned from this particular imbroglio is that I really should trust my instincts and my own reason and common sense, both of which have been justified in this case. The contradictory and illogical nature of the Bible Code argument when considered in the light of the Bible itself was evidence from the start that something was fishy. Codes are found everywhere, and mathematics being what they are, this is what you would expect. For example, here are the results of a search for Jesus as the Son of Man within the text of Genesis in the words of the researcher: "The result was very disappointing for Christians: 171,518 out of a million. We had to conclude that we had found no evidence for Jesus being encoded in the Book of Genesis." Now consider the results of the same search in the beginning section of War And Peace ((the first 78064 letters, the length of Genesis): "The experiment on War and Peace gave a result of one in a million." Perhaps even more remarkable are the predictions of the future found in other literature when the same mathematical matrix technique is applied to the text. The following information was taken from a page titled "Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick!" "The following challenge was made by Michael Drosnin: ‘When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them.' (Newsweek, Jun 9, 1997)
...without further ado, we present our answer to Mr Drosnin's challenge."
The following assassinations were predicted by Moby (you can view the grids yourself by surfing over to the site).
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
President Rene Moawad (incredibly the Moby Dick code reads ‘an exploding bomb' which is how he actually died)
Leon Trotsky (Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick. The Codes read, ice, hammer, executed, the steel head of the lance.)
Martin Luther King (to be killed by them, prepare for death, gun, agents deed)
Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (gun, Wien, assassination of a good fellow ... Dollfuss was shot by a gun in Wien, another prediction right on the nose, courtesy of Moby)
Sirhan Sirhan (the murderer of Robert Kennedy, a very complex set of codes, surf over to see it yourself).
John F. Kennedy (among other things the code mentions that Kennedy was shot in the head by rifle used by a concealed assassin)
Much was made of the Rabin assassination prediction in the Bible Code. The Moby Dick code also predicts this assassination and puts the extremely simple Torah version to shame when compared to the complexity of the Moby Dick prediction of the same event. As the author wrote:
"Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead on November 4, 1995. Hisassassin was Igal Amir, who fired three shots of which one hit Rabin fatally in thechest. Amir was a student at Bar-Ilan University, and associated with anunderground group Eyal which modeled itself on a historical terrorist group calledLehi. Amir was angered by Rabin's role in the "Peace Process" and especially bythe Oslo accords."
Moby Dick, of course, spells out it all out in crossword puzzle fashion. Check out the Moby grids yourself, and compare the simple Bible Code version of the same prediction, and see what conclusions you come to.
And, speaking of complex codes, the prediction of the death of Princess Diana by Moby Dick is one of the most amazing mathematical artifacts I have ever seen. It is the most complex matrix crossword predicting a future event that I have yet seen.
The summation of the Moby Dick assassination page reads (the italics are mine) :
Note: a reader of this page sent in a link to a page on a Yahoo club, that contains links to even more pages which critique the Bible Code ..."It has come to my attention that some people have taken this page as claiming thatMoby Dick really predicted the assassinations of famous people. Please beassured that none of these patterns happened by other than pure random chance.
"No laws of probability are violated here, or even stretched a little. That is alsotrue of Drosnin's book, which is the whole point of this page. Once you learnDrosnin's rules (none) and the method (a bit of messy programming) you can findthings like this anywhere. The reason it looks amazing is that the number ofpossible things to look for, and the number of places to look, is much greater thanyou imagine."