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.
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