The Wall Street Journal The Code Cracks by David Murray June 9, 2000 "God does not play dice with the universe," Einstein famously remarked. But he didn't rule out numerical puzzles. The Bible Code, a 1997 bestseller by Michael Drosnin, argued that hidden messages are embedded in the biblical text. Similar books soon followed; a movie was even made on this theme ("The Omega Code"). The popular press, no doubt intimidated by the code's statistical complexity, wrote about it with cautious respect. To this day, there is the lingering impression that, no matter how far-fetched it seems, a code may be buried in the Bible for a computer to discover. This impression is badly misguided. Recent analysis has done a great deal to refute the whole idea. Mr. Drosnin's inspiration was a 1994 article in the prestigious journal Statistical Science. Eliyahu Rips of Hebrew University, with some of his colleagues, reported meaningful sequences of widely spaced letters in the Hebrew text of Genesis, revealing the names of famous, post-biblical-era rabbis near references to the seasons of their birth or death. The odds of chance alone providing the results were said to be only one in 50,000. Robert Kass, the editor of Statistical Science, wrote at the time that the "baffling" paper was published in the hope that "someone would be motivated to . . . figure out what was going on." But for many, the article was treated as the last word. The theological premise behind such credulity is that the Torah -- the five books of Moses -- contains all truth. All information is "in there," past, present and future, waiting to be unlocked. Enter Mr. Drosnin, finding predictions of current events. Using a computer, he found, for instance, "Yitzhak Rabin" in Genesis close to "assassination." The names of other prime ministers and leaders were discovered, conceptually linked to words suggesting real-world events. How did he do this? The Bible code is based on searching for equidistant letter sequences (ELS). For example, starting with the initial letter, one skips to the sixth, 12th and 18th and then determines whether the four-letter sequence constitutes a word -- say, "Newt." For the search, the 304,805 Hebrew letter-appearances in the Torah were arrayed without spaces or punctuation marks. A computer looked for matches by "stepping" to every nth letter in the array, going either forward or backward or even diagonally. Mr. Drosnin's match for "Yitzhak Rabin" had a "step value" of 4,772. That is, 4,771 letters separated the spelling sequence of Rabin's name. In a sense, the code "works," but how? In the November 1999 issue of Statistical Science, Brendan McKay of Australian National University and colleagues from Hebrew University argue that the original paper was "fatally defective," the results an artifact of the experiment's design. One problem is the wiggle room for "reading" the text. In biblical Hebrew, vowels have to be imputed from context, and syntax is potentially ambiguous. And there are several variants of the Hebrew Bible: Different texts produce different orderings of the letters, with devastating effect on the code. In short, a researcher can format and sift until he hits upon an amenable sequence. What's more, Hebrew spellings weren't standardized until the 16th century. Is it Moses Ben Maimon or Maimonides? Yitchak? Or Yitzhak? Or Itzak? Wiggle, wiggle. It is true that finding linked pairs is wildly improbable if you have only one opportunity to make the match. But the computer's sleepless sifting provides millions of opportunities and settles for "close" results. As physicist David Thomas suggests in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, it's like buying a million lottery tickets to improve your odds of winning $5. At the time of the Bible-code craze, it was said that finding clusters of "meaningful" words in the Torah was wildly improbable. Hence the Great Cryptographer. But the probabilities were not calculated properly, since the textual sequences are not really independent events, like flipping a coin. Rather, the pattern-finding was "tuned" to the text, which has regularities that skew the probabilities. When Mr. Thomas looked for the sequence "Nazi" in a text by Isaac Asimov, he found an improbable number of hits. That's because Asimov was writing about science and the noun "geNerAliZatIon" appeared often. Critical researchers also found "meaningful" sequences in "War and Peace" and "Moby Dick." Given the capacities of computers to automate the search, and given sufficient license to construe a "goal," the wonder is not that we find hidden messages in the Bible or any other book but that we should ever fail. Those who wish to find meaning in the Bible may prefer to rely on their heads and hearts, not a computer. Mr. Murray heads the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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