Rating: 
Summary: What a load of twaddle
Review: I read this book ages back and like all books that try to predict the future it's nothing but a load of twaddle! Let me begin, as soon as I read the first chapter of the book I knew straight away I was on a bummer. The code is hiding in ancient hebrew text and of course that means very very few people will have the ability or chance to ever put the claims that this book makes into practise. How convient for the author. Another little irk is that all claims in the book are post prediction - starting with the World wars, moving on to kennedy and now lo and behold princess Diana! Yet looking back the book failed to predict the balkans crisis, the intense and violent israeli-palestinian conflict and of course September the 11th. Oh, I'm sure they're there some where in the ancient hebrew text - yeah whatever. Finally the book is very carefull when making predictions that happen in the future. They are very general and are left wide open to interpetation. There is only one thing that I can console myself with is the fact that I never actually bought this book,I got it from my local library.
Rating: 
Summary: Cracking The Code
Review: While Drosnin presents a useful idea interpreting the "Bible Code", his argument is difficult to follow. The main problem lies in the fact that if you don't speak Hebrew, then you can't really understand what is going on. Sure, Drosnin tells the readers the translations and illustrates his findings in the text, but you can't really verify anything. The idea itself is very interesting and probably worthy of further investigation, but until you add speaking Hebrew to your resume, it's pretty tough to know if he's really full of it or not.
Rating:
Summary: Written for the agnostic/non-religious reader
Review: If you're not religious, Drosnin is writing this book as a scientific proof to conclude that God exists, and that you should start believing now. That's the premise of this whole book--it's not about whether the predictions come true or not (there is much conflict over the "delaying" of certain predictions)--it's about how Drosnin has made a discovery that is too holy, too sacred, and too creepy for words. It reads much like this one book for non-Christians, "Resurrection Factor", which sets out to prove that Jesus Christ really did rise from the tomb, using all sorts of hypothetical situations and scientific theories as proof. Drosnin's findings, although fascinating at first, grow weary as he excitedly repeats the same info over and over throughout the entire book, trying to make the reader BELIEVE. Now, if you're religious (I'm Christian), you don't need to be convinced that the Lord exists. You already know, so you don't need Drosnin's book to really tell you anything new. Do I think the Bible Code is real? perhaps, yes. We all know the saying, "The Lord works in mysterious ways" and the code is quite uncanny. But it is the sacred "sealed book" mentioned in Revelations, that is the end-all, be-all, for humankind, as Drosnin purports? I'm not sure. I'm not sure the Lord would want computer scientists to reveal "how to be saved" by having society crack codes via keyboard. That would be too easy, wouldn't it?
Rating:
Summary: Irrational Prattle
Review: "The Bible Code" aims its gun at the ignorant, looking to shoot down common sense by confusing the reader with mathematical mojo. What Michael Drosnin has concocted is something to tease those who would rather read about the Bible than the Bible itself to believe that Scripture, with the help of math and a sophisticated algorhythm functioned on a computer, is effectively a Nostredomus-like prophet. I do not recommend "The Bible Code," because it is more fanciful than fact. Anthony Trendl
Rating: 
Summary: Amazing
Review: I read this book some time a ago, amazing if true, zero stars for this book if the author is pulling a fast one.
Rating: 
Summary: Bible Believer First
Review: I think I would have liked this book better if I were in the same situation as Mr. Drosnin....and by that I mean being non-religious. But I have read the Bible through....and recently took up studying the prophecies in the Bible and the book of Revalation...and I cannot bring myself to agree with much of anything he said in the book.
Up to about page 100, I was really enjoying the book....it was interesting enough, and was definitely persuading me to at least find out more....
BUT...when I read the words "the Bible code is the 'sealed book'" and "the Bible code is the 'secret scroll'", that's when it started going downhill.
Anyone who has read the book of Revelation knows that God and ONLY God knows when the End of Days begins....and He is the one who will ultimately begin it.
Mr. Drosnin also tries to show that we must be closing in on the End of Days now...(or as he was writing this book, which was 1997).....and it clearly states in the book of Revelation that the signing of a treaty between Antichrist and Israel will signal the "beginning of the end."
Overall....the book is interesting........but I found it hard to enjoy, #1, because I have different beliefs than that of the author...(STRONG differences...) and #2-I am no math genius...so it was hard to understand how "breaking" the code worked. To me, despite whatever the odds are, it looks as if you could do this with any group of letters.
Is it real? Does it predict future events? Who knows???? All I know is it made my faith stronger, which means I don't have to worry one way or the other.
Rating:
Summary: This book really taught me something
Review: THE BIBLE CODE initially impressed me with its claims of a code in the Torah. Sure, Drosnin's writing style was a little boring, but his references convinced me. He referred to top mathematicians (from Harvard, etc.) who made statements like, "The Bible Code is simply a fact." He presented Rips's findings as so unlikely due to chance that skepticism seemed almost foolish. To say the least, the book's implications excited me. Author Drosnin makes a statement like, "if you look in a Hebrew translation of WAR AND PEACE you will find no encoding, but it is overwhelmingly present in the Old Testament." Apparently this statement, along with many others in THE BIBLE CODE is an outright lie.
Such misrepresentation of facts is disgusting, and COULD be considered as the work of either: A)a bold liar and a whore, or; B)an imbecile. Take the time, as I eventually did (I read the book the first day I bought it, looked up related info on the Internet the next day) to be skeptical about this book. There are several websites that cast some serious doubt on the book's claims. If the claims in THE BIBLE CODE were true, they would excite me tremendously.
But instead of teaching me about the true nature of the Bible, this book taught me the following lesson:
Don't be so overeager to identify with something that you
end up being a sheep. At first, this book elated me. Two days later it makes me want to vomit. I feel like a fool but at least I really learned something. Don't make the same mistake I did.
Rating:
Summary: Bizarre
Review:
This book contains the original bible code paper as an appendix, but does little to explain or critique it. Of course Drosnin is not a mathematician.
The tone is sensationalistic and reads much like the tabloid press. If you are looking for an interesting speculative work, without any real scientific foundation, you might like this book.
Unlike the Jewish religious zealots who introduced the bible code, Drosnin is not religious, and his book won't necessarily give comfort to people who are looking for some kind of support for their supernatural beliefs.
Unfortunately there are no books on the market which seriously examine the bible code controversy from the standpoint of a qualified mathematician. The best material along these lines is available from various web sites. The only book that comes close is by Ingermanson, but his book leaves much to be desired.
Rather than waste time reading bible code books, I recommend you study some basic statistics so you will be able to see through false statistical claims by bible code advocates and others, including politicians. As the saying goes, there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics".
Rating:
Summary: C'mon people, let's THINK here!
Review: A christian friend of mine challenged me to read this book. Apparently, he thought I would run straight to church upon completing it. Well, I skipped over the boring parts (which was most of it) and went straight to Drosnin's amazing discovery. I knew there was something wrong with Drosnin's code, but not being a mathematician or statistician, I was unable to quite put my finger on it. It seemed to me as if the people using the code were manipulating it to yield the results they wanted. Like a street hustler would in a shell game.
So, I used the same computer technology that "enabled" Drosnin to discover the extant of the "prophetic" powers of his code to find rational antidotes to this obvious hogwash. I got on the world wide web and found several good and rational refutations of Drosnin. Keith Devlin, Dean of Science at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California was the nicest and most generous of Drosnin's opponents. Despite the fact that Drosnin has claimed that mathematicians have verified that he is onto something he cannot name one. I then tried to prove his point for him and found nothing to support this claim. To the contrary, what I found was mathematicians who said that it is no surprise that the Hebrew Bible spells words when you use a rather rudimentary and common encryption technique known as the "equal letter skip" It works like so: you start at the letter skip a fixed number of letters until you spell a word. Start with the first occurance of the letter "t" (rather the hebrew equivilant) in genesis, skip 49 letters and you come to an "o", skip another 49 letters and you come up with the letter t another 49 and you get h. Marvel of marvels you have the Hebrew word for Torah spelled out in the Hebrew bible. Suprising? Not really. In fact, it is to be expected. Just as mathematical probability says that if you flip a coin enough times, you are going to get 3 heads in a row, or 4 tails in a row. It just isn't surprising or even interesting: when you are allowed to pick the number of letters you can skip and you search through all of the thousands of verses of the Bible for pronouncable words, you are far MORE likely to find words, by several orders of magnitude, than you are to NOT find words. The paragraph above is paraphrased from Devlin's interview on NPR the year after The Bible Code came out. According to Devlin, the odds are "extremely high" that Drosnin would find apparent messages in the OT, just as he and other mathematicians found the exact same messages imbedded in Moby Dick and War and Peace. An engineer friend of mine (you may be aware that engineers have to take math and stats classes ad nauseum) said that the only way that this would be a newsworthy event is if they DIDN'T find pronouncable words and phrases in the Torah. In that case, they would have beaten astronomical odds. Drosnin wrecked his credibility by challenging skeptics to find seemingly prophetic words in other works of literature, and they did. Moby Dick revealed all of the same things, and other things that the Bible did not. They used Drosnin's software on an issue of the Wall Street Journal in which the word "Torah" appeared over 15,000 times. They also ran the Old Testament through Drosnin's software and found that the Bible states that the "CODE IS BUNK" and "DROSNIN FRAUD". The Hebrew Torah also yeilded "DARWIN WAS RIGHT" (my personal favorite). The final nail was hammered into the coffin of Drosnin's credibilty when he appeared on NPR saying that he didn't even believe in God, but rather believed that extraterrestrial aliens put the encoded predictions and prophecies in the Hebrew Bible. Please. Addendum: Code proponents--> I have encrypted a message in this review. See if you can figure it out. Does it mean that I am God?
Rating:
Summary: PUUUUUUULLLEEEEEZZZZE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: A fraud, a joke or greed to make some cash off naive and easily suckered people?Answer:ALL of the above.That this thing could even get published is a testament to religion as a business and the publishing business as something beneath a street whore(there are some things even whores won't do to make money).This cynical book deserves to be burned(...)
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