The BIBLE CODE

Rating:
Summary: Good...Unsure...Not Bad...Interesting...Confusing
Review: That's how I would describe this book. At first, I was amazed at the predictions found in the Bible, according to Drosnin. Then, I began to question exactly HOW these predictions were found. Drosnin does tell us but I would have preferred a much more detailed scientific explanation than what was offered. However, I must say that all of the predictions were quite stunning and one has to wonder if this is all true.

It's similar to the UFO/Alien debate. There are lots of compelling reasons to believe in UFOs and aliens and then there are lots of books to dispute the topic. The same with the Bible Code. I did read an excellent refutation printed by Scientific American. After reading this article, I began to question whether the Bible code predictions were valid.

Nevertheless, if you keep an open mind, the book is not that bad. If you read the reviews which disprove Drosnin's theory, you may not like the book. Read the book first then read the negative reviews.

Shortly after reading this book, I was stunned when I heard there was an earthquake in Japan (September, 2003). Drosnin's book said that another, major earthquake was going to strike Japan between 2000 and 2006. So, I don't know what to think!

Rating:
Summary: Good Read - But weak science.
Review: .
Summary:

This is an area that can produce great fruit, but unfortunately, Drosnin really does the entire study a great disservice with his poor research, explanations and examples.

Drosnin does make the subject interesting and readable, while portraying himself as an objective observer trying to help many others with this "unquestionably correct" information. But, he really is very subjective and ill informed.

If one ever read a newspaper story about an incident that one knows about, somehow newspaper writers only get the straight forward facts about 60% correct; with their conclusions generally fully deficient. Well, Drosnin is a good newspaper reporter and does not disappoint those statistics!

Background:

Rabbi Eliyahu Rips published one of the most arduously peer reviewed statistical analyses of all time. (Rips, et al, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis," Statistical Science, The Institute of Mathematical Statistics, August, 1994.)

This publication revealed that the TORAH (the first 5 books of Moses - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) had the property to be analyzed via recent computer technology to reveal significant information that is very highly improbable.

Note: These properties have not really been proven for the rest of the bible, although the other books have some extra-ordinary and unique properties that are well beyond chance.

There is no question of the stats. They exist and have been fully accepted by experts who really could not accept the premise. Unfortunately, (or, fortunately) the premise and statistics are correct, and those experts (including some hefty cryptographers) readily acceded that in wonderment.

In my own quest to test the subject, I purchased the software and found some interesting things. And, found the items demonstrated by Rips and others, proving that they did not just make this up. But, I am not a statistician, so I simply accept the profound conclusions presented by the experts in that journals publication.

Book Review:

Thus, when I got the book as a gift, I was excited. I found it interesting, but if I did not do my other research, I would have concluded that this entire area is very weak and somewhat full of baloney.

And, that is the problem with Drosnin's book.

Thus while it is interesting and easy to read and understand, he doesn't back anything up. I tried to pursue some of his findings, but could not obtain them. It would have been great if he gave more information so these things could be confirmed beyond his repeated statement that Rabbi Rips declares the finding to be highly unique and improbably.

FYI: To date, I have never found anything written, or presented by Rips to confirm Drosnin's persistent relationship and testing. But that does not mean it did not exist.

Drosnin could have shared some very specific information:

Specifically what software did he use?
Where did he find these specific codes?
What process did he use to find the conjoined hidden codes?
What bible text did he use? Etc.

Recommendation:

If you question this subject, but want to find the truth, go someplace else. Read Missler's book on "Cosmic Codes" It has much more explanation, research and basis. You can substantiate his presentations (with just a little effort).

If you have already done you homework on this subject, then get this book because it is interesting.

If you got this book, or are getting it, and want to read it, but wanted to find truth, then, please take Drosnin's work with a grain of salt as you would in reading any New York Times article. He is just a reporter, and by far NOT an expert!

Finally, if you are like Drosnin, don't try to interpret and explain the bible without reading it. That is just plain ignorant and dangerous.

Rating:
Summary: Part Story, Part Nonfiction, Part farfetched
Review: Michael Drosnin, former writer for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, has found a code in the Bible, with the help of a Jewish quantum physicist name Dr. Eliyahu Rips that may hold the key to the very existence of mankind now and in the future. The question is...will what is written come true, or are we being warned in the attempt to save ourselves from ourselves?

Drosnin's 2 year journey in which the book takes place is written in two forms: A well written non-fiction novel, and a slightly less easy to swallow "End of Days" warning. While the former is really interesting to read, having to deal with issues of assaination attempts, personal struggle, proponents and opponents, and a misunderstanding and unsure feeling about the code in general, the latter causes the book to spiral into the realm of an "End of Days" melodrama, siting instances in the bible where it is said the world will come to an end and the exact date. While I'm in no position to voice my own opinions on this issue, I've heard enough "Book of Revelations" theories (from fellow students to Professors to Religious ministers of both Jewish and Christian schools of thought) to take it all with a grain of salt. And while he clearly states that he is still torn on whether or not he believes the bible code to be "The be all and end all", his writing does not illustrate that. It just reads as morbid and foolish, even with all of the data being produced with it.

In my honest opinion, what will make or break this book for the reader is how you approach it. If you approach it with a liberal view and a multi-sided view, you will enjoy it much more because you will take away what you want from it...what you believe and what you don't. However, I DO NOT recommend this book if you have issues with end of the world theory and religious/scientific rhetoric...because there is pleanty (dealing with both Christian and Jewish ideology on the future and the "end of days" theory). And trust me, the bible code is not going to tell you if you're going to get that end of the year bonus or not, so don't even think about it. Enjoy, my fellow readers!

`Revu

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but not very convincing
Review: I had been meaning to read this controversial book for some time now, but only recently did I pick The Bible Code up to see just what all the brouhaha was really about. This is certainly an interesting subject, but I was a little disappointed in the theory, arguments, and proofs presented here. As the book progressed, the open mind I began the book with started to shrink, as Drosnin began to backpedal and hurt his own case. I don't doubt the author's faith in the method and results of his work, but this book falls way short of convincing me that the Bible Code exists and, if so, that its existence is even meaningful. The book has a number of weaknesses. First of all, Drosnin is a former reporter working outside of his trained field; The Bible Code is supposedly built on a sophisticated mathematical model, and its interpretation requires significant knowledge of the Hebrew language in its original form - the original language of the first five books of the Bible. He presents us with printout after printout of data, but all I can do is stare at the Hebrew letters; the actual scientific paper that first delved into this mathematical issue is included in an appendix, but the math is way over my head. Drosnin says other mathematicians have verified that the model is correct, but I just have to take his word for it. I simply don't have any significant data upon which to form an opinion yea or nay about the Bible code. Drosnin may actually have done better to include no illustrations whatsoever; what I see are foreign letters marked in areas all over a given page; it's like a find-a-word puzzle, only the letters of your words don't even have to be connected directly. Odds of given terms "crossing" one another on one page are given, but I still don't know how these odds were determined. Drosnin also indicates that the same model was run against two other long books and showed no kind of code whatsoever, but two books alone seems to be a small sample set, and I have no idea how many attempted searches were done in these limited sample sets.

The "evidence" sounds pretty good at first. Drosnin constantly repeats the fact that the Bible Code predicted the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister Rabin, the collision of the comet Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter, the start of the first Gulf War, etc., all to the very day. Tell me more, you think to yourself. This is where Drosnin starts to slip, however. He spends most of his time talking about Armageddon, specifically how Jerusalem will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. He was certainly right in naming terrorist acquisition of weapons of mass destruction to be the greatest threat to the modern world, but prophesying trouble in the Middle East doesn't exactly require a Karnak. He predicts that then-Prime Minister Netanyahu will be assassinated and that Israel will be attacked in 1996. This book was published in 1997, completed after 1996 came and went. Suddenly we find Drosnin discovering that the word "delayed" just so happens to turn up alongside all of those dire predictions of his. He actually expresses the opinion that a delay in Netanyahu's visit to Jordan prevented the Armageddon he had predicted. The Bible Code, he now decides, must include eventualities, things that may come to pass, things that we can prevent from coming to pass. This back pedaling hurts his credibility quite a bit in my eyes.

In summary, I can't argue the mathematical validity of The Bible Code in any way, shape, or form, but Drosnin's arguments fail to convince me that he is right about this subject. He can barely find anything in his code until that "thing" has already happened, and it seems to me that finding a few related words after the fact on a sheet full of letters is no difficult feat. I do know that there is one definite error in the book, as Drosnin (and the Bible Code) shows that FDR declared war on Japan on December 7, 1941, when war was not declared until the following day, December 8. As for the predictions he did make about the future, he doesn't exactly go out on a limb. There will be strife in the Middle East and a series of earthquakes in Japan. These things happen every year, so these are hardly convincing prophetic tests of his code. I can't say The Bible Code does not exist the way Drosnin says it does, but it will take a whole lot more evidence to ever convince me of such a fact.

Rating:
Summary: The Bible Code: Chariots of the Gods (Part II)
Review: Those who seek to know the future by studying records of the past will surely be intrigued by Michael Drosnin's THE BIBLE CODE. Drosnin's thesis is that the Old Testament has buried within it a hidden code that foretells events that have ranged from documented occurrences from the New Testament to those of a general/historical/geopolitical nature which are yet to come. Drosnin, with help from Israeli mathematicians Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg, devised a mathematical computer program that reduced the entire original Hebrew text to individual characters minus vowels in a single continuous stream, which was then configured into a flexible series of arrays. They then used what is now known as an Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) to identify recognizable word patterns that can be read from left to right, right to left, angled left, angled right, and just about any straight line pattern imaginable. The ELS program would then "skip" a fixed number of letters to determine if there were indeed a "hidden" message in the Torah. When they added actual names, dates, and places into the matrix, the ELS program scanned the entire Torah and revealed "hits" within close proximity to each other. These hits were hailed as references to people, places, events that were in the future of the events described in the bible. When, for example, they entered the name "Yitzhak Rabin," the ELS indicated the following hidden words: assassinated, 1995. And right on schedule, Israeli Prime Minister was assassinated on November 4, 1995.

What Drosnin and his colleagues have done was to tap into the universal desire for humanity for an explanation that our world and life are not a random series of chaotic events. There is a built-in tendency for the uninitiated to believe with no more proof than what is set forth in Drosnin's book. It is up to legitimate science to apply the rigorous methods of proof before the majority of hard-nosed scientists will accept this astounding thesis. There are two general objections to Drosnin: the philosophical and the experimental.

Philosophically, to accept Drosnin's thesis, one must first accept that a higher power at some point intervened to dictate to Moses the entire first five books of the holy Torah. This, by itself, is no small obstacle in that even the majority of those who read and accept the validity of the bible also admit that the Old Testament was not written exclusively by Moses or any other individual. Rather, the accepted current belief is that it was written, re-written, and edited many times over the centuries, with many entire passages added then deleted before the King James version was finally agreed upon in the 17th century. Since so many anonymous writers worked at cross purposes in distant lands at varying times, it is most unlikely that they were in some sort of secret cabal to produce a text that needed modern day computers to decipher.

(...)Experimentally, other mathematicians, most notably Brendon McKay of Australia, have called the entire process ridiculous and invalid. Among McKay's objections are the following:
1) With so many billions of letter combinations possible, it is a certainty that if you were to look long enough and hard enough in several dimensions, you will indeed find recognizable word patterns.
2) Drosnin does not indicate how many matched pairs of target phrases failed to return a hit before the use of synonyms returned a hit.
3) McKay was able to use other long texts (Moby Dick) using the same ELS program to get similar results.
4) Since Drosnin's original program eliminated vowels, then adding or subtracting a vowel from the target word would affect the probability of getting a valid hit.

(...)What THE BIBLE CODE boils down to is a gussied up new way to sell snake oil. Until such time as reputable scientists can predict then verify future events, then most educated readers will relegate Drosnin's theories to those of Erich von Donnikan, who similarly thought that human history has been altered by extraterrestrial influence. Besides, even if we know that a prediction is likely to be valid, then we are still left with the paradox of altering its occurrence so that it need not occur at all. What then the use of Drosnin's bible code at all.

Rating:
Summary: A Waste of Effort
Review: As an historian and theologian, I approached this book with an open-mind, only to be bitterly disappointed. The premise is that as God dictated the first five books of the Old Testament, He enclosed prophecies in a skip code--that is, every fifth letter in a sentence forms a word. The trouble is, the Code is so divinely complex, you need a computer to find it.

First of all, how many people read Hebrew well enough to challenge this man's ideas? If you line up any series of sentences in a proper sequence, you can have it say anything you want.

Second, all of these prophecies were only found in this code after the fact. None of the future predictions have actually come true.

Finally, did the author, Michael Drosnin, actually predict Rabin's assassination a year before it happened? Ask yourself, how many Middle Eastern leaders actually died from natural deaths?

I would not recommend this book to anyone who wants to take the Bible seriously. The Bible is a book of faith and we don't need a computer to interpret it correctly.

Rating:
Summary: Torah codes - God's signature
Review: Drosnin, though he deserves no credit, is correct. The past, present and future is encoded in the Torah down to the minutest detail for every single thing that has ever happened, is happening now, or ever will happen. This has long been suspected by scientists and theologians down through the centuries and the search for the code formed a significant percentage of Isaac Newtons work. But it was not until the 80's/90's and the advent of the computer that it was finally possible to discover the Torah codes. In the early 90's a number of Jewish scientists and mathematicians carried out rigorous statistical tests on these codes and determined that they fell outside all the bounds of probability and thus were placed in the Torah by intelligent design. This is not a fantasy. This is scientifically proven. They published their findings in the prestigious mathematical periodical "Statistical Science" after the periodicals peer-review process found their logic to be flawless. The 2 main researchers were Eliyahu Rips, a mathematician, and Doron Witzum, a physicist. For a good understanding of the codes you should visit Witzum's website in which he clearly explains that yes the codes exist, and no, they cannot be used to predict future events. This is simply because you have to know what to bloody look for before you can look for it, and since it hasn't happened yet how the hell do you know what to look for? Get it? Simple aint it. For example, I have no idea how I'm gonna die, so I can't look for it in the codes because I wouldn't know what words to use. But after it has happened - lets say in a car crash, another researcher could come along and use these key words to find that it was in fact coded in the Torah all along. But you can't find it till after the event! Furthermore, when you discover words that are seemingly related to each other in close proximity you need to apply Rips's statistical technique to the result to find whether it is statisically improbable or not. So Drosnin's book is garbage, he has simply cashed in on a phenomenon he doesn't understand. The codes can't be used to predict the future. On the other hand the codes prove one thing to anyone with a mind: That whoever dictated the Torah knew the entire history of the Universe, down to the minutest detail, from beginning to end. Such a being by definition is Omniscient. In other words, the Torah codes prove one thing - GOD EXISTS.

Rating:
Summary: The BIBLE CODE
Review: Nothing but BUNK.... Back in 1995, five writers from Israel claimed that by performing statistical analyses of the Bible, they were able to uncover secret prophecies that predicted events in modern times, such as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. These writers claimed to use scientific statistical techniques, but all they really did was play the childish game of taking the Bible and taking letters out every so often, seeing what kinds of words might come out of the mix. They claimed that they found their prophecies as a result, and this book was written to explain them. How well do the claims of this book hold up to scrutiny? Not surprisingly, they're easily shown to be completely false. Don't take my word for it, though. Listen instead to the experts in statistics who exposed the Bible Code hoax. Researchers Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, Gil Kalai and Brendan McKay published an article in the journal Statistical Science, edited by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in which they proved the Bible Code to be non-existent. There is no single, agreed-upon original Bible. Even the oldest version of the Bible varies from one another. Therefore, any attempt to pick out, for example, every 5th word would be different for each Bible. Besides, even these versions of the Bible are not the original texts, but highly edited versions of more ancient works. - The procedures followed by the Bible Code team were not in compliance with scientific standards because they were repeatedly changed with the goal of finding a code. Such statistical tuning can eventually find a few apparently meaningful codes in any long book, but for every such coherent fragment there is a huge amount of gibberish. The focus on the tiny bit of apparent coherence to the detriment of the huge amount of nonsense is a biased attempt to interpret white noise into a supposedly divine message. Basically, what the researchers are saying is that if you let a two-year-old bang away on a keyboard for long enough, some words that appear to have meaning will be accidentally typed. That doesn't mean that there is any secret keyboard-banging code that the two-year-old was trying to get out. The Bible Code team started out trying to find patterns of certain kinds but not of others. For example, they tried to find the birth and death dates of famous rabbis, but didn't do the same for other figures in popular culture, like the Beatles. By starting out with the goal of forcing these particular names out of the text and not giving up until the goal was achieved, the Bible Code team missed a huge amount of other coincidental wordings that would by far drown out the supposed prophecy. With enough work, a person could find a so-called code to find prophecies about Big Bird and Snuffleupagus in the Bible. In sum, a huge majority of scientists and mathematicians agree that the Bible Code is nonsense. Why would you go out and buy this book knowing that it doesn't measure up to even the most basic professional standards of reason and logic? Well, it might be because you really want to believe that the Bible has some kind of secret divine message for you. That's telling, because it's exactly the same motivation that led the writers to concoct their ridiculous scheme. This book is an exercise in blind faith in religion. It's not science. If you want to read religion, go look in the religion section, but leave this piece of bunk where it belongs.

Rating:
Summary: your kidding me, right?
Review: I cannot believe anyone would buy this bullsh*t. It's a complete hoax created by a guy trying to get some easy cash off gullible morons who buy books like this. This is just conspiracy garbage, and belongs in the trash along with alien and JFK conspiracies.

Rating:
Summary: Dumber than dumb
Review: Anyone who knows the first thing about the history of the Bible would know that this idea is stupid. It is possible to create any pattern you want from any book of the bible's size. But you need an IQ in single figures to believe this nonsense.