Snake Oil for Sale

The recent massive publicity surrounding Michael Drosnin’s book The Bible Code has aroused, alas, a great deal of interest in the patently ridiculous idea that future events were encoded in the “original Hebrew” text of the Bible—and done in such a way that they could only be decoded in our day with computers.

The key to the code is the idea of equidistant letter sequences (ELS), whereby you search for a name or phrase in the Hebrew text of the Bible by skipping an unspecified but fixed number of letters. For example, you might print out every tenth letter and hope that something significant appears. Or every 11th letter. And so on, until you find something. All spaces between words are ignored.

To see how this scam works, let us examine Drosnin’s most outrageous claim—that the Bible predicted the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The computer found that if you skip every 4,772 letters, the name Yitzhak Rabin is embedded in the biblical text. In other words, there is a yod, the first letter of Yitzhak, followed 4,772 letters later by the second letter of his name, and so on. This means that if you print out the letters of the Hebrew Pentateuch (using the Koren edition) in rows 4,772 letters wide, the name Yitzhak Rabin will appear in a vertical column. Of course, no piece of paper is wide enough to print out 4,772 letters that are visible to the human eye. So Drosnin provides a detail—a rectangular matrix of 38 by 18 letters—containing the region where Rabin’s name appears (see chart). The matrix is designed to create the false impression that this is the shape of a standard portion of the Bible.