Rating: 
Summary: Pseudo-science at its worst
Review: A highly repetitive and biased description of pseudo-science under cover of legitimate journalism. The so-called codes are entirely in the mind's eye of the author, and not very original at that. A huge problem, not even mentioned, is that biblical Hebrew has no vowels and thus can be manufactured into "modern" names and places simply by adding vowels to jumbles of otherwise meaningless consonant strings. This book was shipped to stores without the usual scrutiny by reviewers, and movie rights were sold in advance. About as realistic as a volcano in LA
Rating: 
Summary: Bunk!
Review: OK. Let's examine the facts: [A] The original mathematician who co-authored the paper which "inspired" the book has distanced himself from the book because of Drosnin's loose mixing of statistically significant finds with those not significant (look up the related story at CNN.COM) [B] Most English speakers don't understand the flexibility with which Hebrew words can be interpreted. Written Hebrew lacks the vowel sounds which make for a significant factor in "finding" encoded words. You could probably find instructions for changing a flat tire if you looked hard enough. [C] According to at least one Hebrew speaking person I know of who read the book, Drosnin took liberties with the sounds of the words. If a word sounded close enough to the real thing, it was good enough for a "prophesy". You increase your chance of finding, for example, "assassin" if you allow "asasin", "azazin", "assashin", etc. to count. Unless you speak Hebrew, examples in the book show only correct English spelling, not the "near matches" of the Hebrew version. [D] The claims that "prophesies" cannot be found in other works is bogus. Maybe specific phrases were not found in the Hebrew translation of "War and Peace", but I myself using a simple Pascal program have found several examples as "astonishing" as anything Drosnin presents in his work in an English segment of War & Peace (without the benefit of the Hebrew language's flexibility). (examples: The words "innews" "goat" and "clone" within four lines of each other; "Sadat", "asasins" and "dead" in the same general area -- Sadat was killed by multiple assassins. Spooky, huh? Again I only searched the first few thousand letters of W&P, not the whole book). Also, an australian combinatorics expert has found many examples of "predications" of assassinations in Melville's "Moby Dick" (see his page at http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html). This is in answer to Drosnin's direct challenge for someone to find any prediction of an assassination in Moby Dick, given in a Newsweek interview (June 9, 1997). [E] In interviews I've seen with Drosnin he says that the code can't be used to predict the future, but at other times he claims to have predicted the future and warned the Prime Minister of Israel, etc. He's not consistant. (Look up the cyberchat with Drosnin, again at CNN.com). [F] The original paper on the Bible code only used the first five books of the Bible which are traditionally agreed upon to be written by the same author. Drosnin sites many examples throughout the Bible. The entire Bible was written over a span of centuries by many authors. Did they all agree on a code? Also, if the author of, for example, the books of Kings & Chronicles were sophisticated enough to put in a code which could only be decyphered by computer, why did they recount the measurements of a "molten sea" in two different places which, if you do the math, imply that pi = 3 (I Kings vii, 23 and 2 Chronicles iv,2). [G] If this Bible Code is true, then it's the greatest discovery ever in the history of man, not just the subject of a book that will be discussed for a while then eventually retired to the "bargain table" at the warehouse bookstores. How many books have been written about the discovery of the atom? (Answer: innumerable) How many books have been written about the Bible Code? (Answer: 1) Conclusion, Michael Drosnin has given us something interesting to talk about, but it must be analyzed rationally. When this controversy came up I remembered reading Drosnin's book about Howard Hughs and that I had enjoyed it. I hope the fallout from this "quack" work does not stiffle a bonafied talent.
Rating:
Summary: Assasinations foretold in MOBY DICK
Review: Hola, im just spreading the word about assasinations foretold in MOBY DICK : (...). See for yourself and I'm glad I did a little research before jumping in and buying this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Want PROOF the Bible Codes are real?
Review: This is the first book to bring to the public attention THE FACT that there is a Bible Code in the Bible.Guess what, it's also in almost every written thing. Recently work has been done to prove THE CODE is REAL and it does in fact exist within almost every written thing since all things exist within "the creation". The FACT is someone is making a lot of noise on the Net using BIBLE CODES. He's using the New Testament as his source. He is SO ACCURATE the FBI has made him one of the most investigated people in the world due to his "warnings" that have all been based upon THE BIBLE CODES. Anyway, look up these words and see what a real EXPERT on Bible Codes is saying about the future using matrixes from BIBLE CODES. GODS BIBLE BODES is the book he wrote and his name is Sollog Skeptics say the codes are fake since they are in everything. When you see the person mentioned above using THE CODES to make hit after hit about the future, then you too will have seen THE PROOF the codes are real. Drosnin should get a huge reward for being the first to bring this story to the public. He's not an 'expert' on THE CODE like Sollog, but without Drosnin there would have been no Sollog Bible Codes. You start with Drosnin and then when you are ready you look for SOLLOG and GODS BIBLE CODES Then you'll know the future It's not pretty but it is PROOF the codes are real Let a skeptic tell you about the future from Moby Dick They can't
Rating:
Summary: Get the big picture!
Review: Alright enough debating folks, I may be a 20yr old punk but there is more to this than a solid prediction. Same thing goes for religion at all. There are to many religions for one to have it right. To many predictions for anyone to be correct. This is because this is all opinion, It is all choice. The whole point of the bible is to learn from it! Not to proove if it is true or false. People just take religion way to seriously. If god did create earth and humans and the animals then we were all created in his image, this would mean the god and heaven do exist but inside of us, all around us. from a morning cigarette and coffee to the air you breathe to the reason you smile. Either way it is your choice to be bad or good, have fun or be bored. It is your choice to enjoy life, it is your choice to destroy it. Same goes for laws and why people define insanity... everything is all opinion based and has been, so its time to form your own and not enforce it on someone else. Because there is no such thing as right or wrong. but everyone knows what it is. ponder that for awhile and quit debating a subject you cannot debate
Rating:
Summary: Snake Oil & Tonic Water
Review: These are two things that have a lot in common with the suppositions in this book. There's one GIANT premise at work here, and a false one I might add. And that is that the ancient Hebrews were a chosen people by the designing creator and that these selected members of his creation were asked to write down his thoughts. (An outstanding tribal, survival scheme)
Reams and reams of archeological evidence, manuscript evidence, historical evidence, etc., fail to support that supposition in any small way. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Needless to say, then, that the concept of a hidden mathematical code, placed there by our creator, hiding within ancient Hebrew manuscripts which, incidentally, borrowed greatly from the preexisting religeous texts in their region, is without basis in fact.
Dream on, a fantasy will work for you as well as the bible code.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting
Review: This is an interesting but not brilliant book. I have no qualms with the idea that some secret code may have been concealed in the Old Testament because its origin is clouded in mystery and there are definitely stranger things 'in heaven and earth'. A hidden code makes good sense because early writers often disguised their true feelings to protect their very lives from tyrannical rulers with power over life and death. The idea of gnostic or hidden intelligences at large is also credible for me.
Personally, I would prefer a more scholarly study on the subject as it seems the author is clutching at straws to some degree. For example, all his 'correct' predictions have been revealed in hindsight. If he had predicted some significant event beforehand and duly revealed it before it eventuated it would have made a more intelligent readership sit up and take better notice. No doubt this work is aimed at a popular audience- but is a worthwhile excercise nonetheless.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Topic, Mediocre Writing
Review: What is the code? The Torah (particularly Genesis) is examined in the original Hebrew. All spaces are removed between words. Interested parties then use a computer program to search for words that are formed from letters an equal distance apart. The stastical odds of certain information appearing in the Code the way it does are, in some cases, as great as 1 in 5 million.
Drosnin has written this book (and a sequel that also offers predictions of a great comet hitting the earth in the near future) in order to reveal the existence of the code to the world and to issue a warning about a potential worldwide atomic holocaust. Using this statistical peculiarity (which is admitedly intriguing) the way Drosnin does, as a kind of tarot deck for predicting the potential future, isn't much different than trying to apply the words of Revelation to modern day events in an attempt to predict the Apocalypse. There may be truth to Revelation, but people in every generation have applied the prophecies to their own times, and falsely perceived their ultimate fulfillment there. For example, Drosnin foresees in the Code an atomic attack in 1996, but when it doesn't materialize, he searches the code again and finds the word "delayed."
From a literary perspective, Drosnin's presentation seems fantastic. He is a journalist, not a scholar, and he writes like a modern journalist--a lot of spin and only a little substance. He doesn't spend much time explaining the details of the experiments that mathematicians have used to test the Bible code, nor does he divulge how far apart the ELS's are that he uses to find his significant words. He addresses some objections to the validity of the Bible code, but he does not do a thorough job. He does include in his appendix a scholarly article about the code, but it would have been nice to receive the same degree of detailed information in layman's terms. What little he tells us of the process of "decoding" the Torah leaves many unanswered questions.
One of the most amusing aspects of this book is Drosnin's attempt to explain how the Code--assuming it is real and is predictive--can possibly exist without God. For Drosnin is a secularist, and though he admits that the Bible could not have been encoded by a human intelligence, he will not call the intelligence that encoded it God. At one point, Drosnin seems to imply that alien beings with an advanced technology encoded the Bible for our benefit some 3,000 years ago, and that the Torah is itself a kind of super computer, a technology we do not yet have the power to comprehend and unlock fully.
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.
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