The Horizon documentary on BBC2 tonight stopped short of saying that the Bible code is complete hokum, so I’ll make the leap for you. The Bible code is complete hokum.
In case you missed it, the idea is that by turning the original hebrew version of the Bible into a giant word search and finding words made from equidistant letters that intersect each other, you can predict future events. So, for instance, since the word “Kennedy” intersects the phrase, “assasin who will assinate”, we can predict that Kennedy will be assasinated. Presumably God or the aliens who wrote the Bible inserted the messages for some reason or another.
The code was discovered by three Israelis, including Eliyahu Rips, who published a paper on it. They found that the names of famous rabbis intersected with their dates of birth, and came up with a method of measuring the probablility that this could happen by chance. This probability was very low: 1 in 65,000. What they didn’t mention was that there were numerous ways to spell the rabbis’ names, presumably helped out by the fact that the Bible as written in Hebrew contains no vowels (something the Horizon programme didn’t mention). When the experiment was repeated with alternative spellings it failed. The probability came out at somewhere between 1 in 2 and 2 in 3, indicating that the names were selected by Rips and co. to get the wanted results.
Cue Michael Drosnin who, thoroughly taken in by Rips, published a book or two on the subject. He was spurred on by his prediction that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin would be assasinated, and now thinks there will be a nuclear war in 2006 unless he can get to George W first and stop it. This is slightly scary because W is a religious loony and will soon be making major policy decisions from Bible codes if Drosnin gets his way.
Drosnin once challenged the skeptics to find predictions in Moby Dick. Statistician Brendan McKay, whose website contains much detailed information, did. He points out that the problem with Drosnin’s method of making predictions is that he looks for a name, and then looks for anything interesting that appears near that name. Given the lack of vowels in the Hebrew, and enough controversy over just how you spell “Tony Blair” in Hebrew anyway, and, well, you can see…
I thought this post might turn into a rant about how biased the Horizon programme was in favour of Drosnin. He did get much more air-time than the skeptics. But the weakness of his argument, essentially just repeating how unlikely were these combinations of words he’d chosen to be found near each other, was so obvious that he did most of the skeptics’ work for them. Couple that with Rips’ hopeless attempt to make out that a few accidental errors could cause the results of a follow-up experiment to be out by four orders of magnitude, and it’s quite clear who won the documentary.
me thinks you’re being a bit disingenous when you accuse some that
maintain the validity of the code of embelishing the signifcance of the statistics they find. one of the men you’ve mentioned (a retired cryptologist for the u.s. dept of defence) was on record venomously denouncing the code and those sophmoric enough to consider it valid. his eventual acceptance of the code was not an exercise non-critical thought but a full plate of humble pie eaten in the presence of those he had previously mocked.
peace-out bro
This Bible Code stuff is very interesting to me. I think anyone who has researched this should statistically conclude that it probably real. Also, I found something very interesting on a blog by a guy – I guess s/he is a guy – who calls himself Father UFO and he is claiming to have found something in the Dead Sea connected with the Bible Code prophecy. Hard to believe, but it seems possible and he seems like he has nothing to gain by what he’s saying. Well. at any rate, I suppose in the end we’ll all know the truth.