The Bible code (, ), also known as the Torah code, is a purported set of encoded words within a Hebrew text of the Torah that, according to proponents, has predicted significant historical events. The statistical likelihood of the Bible code arising by chance has been thoroughly researched, and it is now widely considered to be statistically insignificant, as similar phenomena can be observed in any sufficiently lengthy text. Although Bible codes have been postulated and studied for centuries, the subject has been popularized in modern times by Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code and the movie The Omega Code.
Some tests purportedly showing statistically significant codes in the Bible were published as a "challenging puzzle" in a peer-reviewed academic journal in 1994, which was pronounced "solved" in a subsequent 1999 paper published in the same journal.
Overview
Contemporary discussion and controversy around one specific steganographic method became widespread in 1994 when Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg published a paper, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", in the scientific journal Statistical Science. The paper, which was presented by the journal as a "challenging puzzle", presented what appeared to be strong statistical evidence that biographical information about famous rabbis was encoded in the text of the Book of Genesis, centuries before those rabbis lived.
Since then the term "Bible codes" has been popularly used to refer specifically to information encrypted via this ELS method.
Equidistant Letter Sequence method
The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS), also referred to as (, ). Letters are selected based on a starting point and counting every nth letter based on a given 'skip number' in a given direction. For example, taking every fourth letter in the phrase "his entnce its n EL", when read backwards and ignoring spaces, derives the word 'Safest'.
In some cases, multiple terms may be derived from an 'ELS letter array' (text in a grid, with the same number of letters in each line). In the example provided, part of the King James Version's rendering of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 21 letters per line, showing ELSs for "Bible" and "code".
Although the example shown uses English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. Most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy), as it is believed to have been revealed directly to Moses.
ELS extensions
Once a specific word has been found using the ELS method, other words are sought based on the same letter spacing. Code proponents Haralick and Rips have published an example of a longer, extended ELS, which reads, "Destruction I will call you; cursed is Bin Laden and revenge is to the Messiah".
Proponents claim that such ELS extensions that form phrases or sentences have statistical significance, maintaining that the longer the extended ELS, the less likely it is to be the result of chance. Critics reply, as in the Skeptical Inquirer deconstruction of 1997, that the longer ELS is in fact effectively nothing more than further increased number of permutations, employing a massive application of the look-elsewhere effect.
History
Early history
Jewish culture has a long tradition of interpretation, annotation, and commentary regarding the Bible, leading to both exegesis and eisegesis (drawing meaning from and imposing meaning on the texts). The Bible code can be viewed as a part of this tradition, albeit one of the more controversial parts. Throughout history, many Jewish, and later Christian, scholars have attempted to find hidden or coded messages within the Bible's text, notably including Isaac Newton.
The 13th-century Spanish rabbi Bachya ben Asher may have been the first to describe an ELS in the Bible. His four-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Hebrew calendar. Over the following centuries there are hints that the ELS technique was known, e.g. in Pardes Rimonim of the 16th century mystic Moshe Cordovero, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known to only a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partners Doron Witztum and Alexander Rotenberg, among several others.