-Caveat Lector-
'Bible Code' Debunked by Scholars
By RICHARD N. OSTLING
.c The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - An international team of statisticians is debunking the
controversial ``Bible code,'' which claims the Old Testament has hidden
references to 20th century events that can be revealed by a computer.
Proponents of the code claim that names and events were hidden in the Bible
as written thousands of years ago and can be found through computer searches
of the Hebrew text. Television documentaries, fast-selling books and numerous
articles have popularized the theory, first published in the academic journal
Statistical Science.
Now the same journal, published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
based in Hayward, Calif., is offering an article challenging the technique it
reported in 1994. The article will be published in the quarterly next week.
Believers in the ``Bible code'' theory treat the Hebrew Bible as a string of
letters without spaces, looking for words formed by equidistant letter
sequences. For instance, computers might select every ninth Hebrew letter and
register a ``hit'' when a ``coded word'' intersects with a Bible verse
containing related words.
Five years ago, three Israeli scholars published the results of their search
in the journal. As they explained, they took names of famous rabbis from a
reference dictionary, applied letter sequences and found the names near the
rabbis' dates of birth or death.
Using the same technique, others have claimed the Bible contains secret
predictions, including everything from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in
1995 to a Los Angeles earthquake in 2010.
Major Bible scholars ignore the code because, they note, no one has a
letter-by-letter version of the Bible as originally written. The oldest
surviving manuscripts include slight variations, any of which would throw off
computer test results.
In the upcoming edition of Statistical Science, the new study's authors -
Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel and Gil Kalai, professors at Jerusalem's
Hebrew University, and Brendan McKay of the Australian National University -
combine expertise in mathematics and computer science to debunk the theory.
Using other spellings and assumptions, they ran hundreds of tests that
repeated the experiment with different variations and applied it to more
biblical books.
``Despite a considerable amount of effort,'' they write, ``we have been
unable to detect the codes.''
This is significant, Bar-Natan said in a Thursday interview, because ``truth
in science is never based on the results of a single experiment. A
significant requirement is repeatability.''
Their results were no more successful with the Hebrew translation of
Tolstoy's ``War and Peace.'' Such letter configurations can be found in any
long text, they say. The trick is to find letters in close proximity that
form significant words more often than by chance.
Robert Kass, head of the statistics department at Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh, edited the journal when it published the first article and
said it was reviewed by other experts. He is disturbed that people perceived
publication as ``a stamp of scientific approval.'' That first article, he
said, merely presented a puzzle - one that has now been explained.
``The new study shows there were many, many choices, particularly for things
like the names of the rabbis, that involved a lot of latitude. It was only
for special sources that the results appeared,'' he said Thursday.
He said such studies must avoid statistical ``tuning,'' just as medical
research projects follow strict protocol.
Bar-Natan says that procedures in the 1994 project had ``enough wiggle room
to produce whatever you want.''
Authors of the earlier article could not be reached for comment.
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