Introduction

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to avoid The Bible Code (Simon & Schuster, 1997), by former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporter Michael Drosnin, with its Nostradamus-like warnings about earthquakes in Los Angeles and nuclear annihilation—all embedded within the Hebrew text of the Bible through a secret code.

Drosnin’s claims are an extension of the work of two Israelis, mathematician Eliyahu Rips and Doron Witztum. As previously described in these pages (see Jeffrey B. Satinover, “Divine Authorship?” BR 11:05), Rips and Witztum published a paper in the journal Statistical Science about a computer program they created to search for words hidden in the traditional Hebrew text of Genesis. They were looking to see what would happen if they treated the text as a string of letters with no breaks between words: Would they find the names of famous medieval rabbis spelled out by letters an equal number of letters apart? Not only did they find such names, Rips and Witztum reported, but they also found the rabbis’ death dates (indicated by letters in Hebrew) near where the names appear.^a The authors claimed that the number of matches found was much greater than what could be expected by chance alone.