Tool Beta
The Fringe Files
Ancient aliens, lost civilisations and the occult, checked against what the sources actually say.
Is there a hidden code in the Hebrew text of the Torah that predicts modern events, as claimed in Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code?
The statistical method behind The Bible Code was rebutted in the same peer-reviewed journal that first published it, and critics reproduced comparable 'predictions' in Moby-Dick and in Drosnin's own book.
Equidistant letter sequencing (ELS) works by taking the unbroken string of Hebrew letters in a text, skipping a fixed number of letters at a time, and reading off whatever word or phrase results. In 1994 the journal Statistical Science published a paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg claiming that ELS searches in the Book of Genesis turned up the names of famous rabbis paired with their birth and death dates far more often than chance would predict. Journalist Michael Drosnin popularized the idea for a general audience in his 1997 bestseller The Bible Code, claiming the text encoded predictions of assassinations and other modern events.
Statistical Science itself published the fullest rebuttal. In 1999, statisticians Brendan McKay (Australian National University), Dror Bar-Natan (Hebrew University), Maya Bar-Hillel (Hebrew University), and Gil Kalai (Hebrew University) published 'Solving the Bible Code Puzzle,' identifying specific ways the original study's authors had freedom to choose which spellings, date formats, and word forms counted as a 'hit,' which let meaningful-looking patterns emerge from what was, statistically, noise. A second replication attempt, run jointly by a committee that included both supporters and skeptics of the original claim using data both sides agreed on in advance, found no significant pattern at all.
McKay and other critics also ran the same ELS technique on other long Hebrew texts and on English-language works, including Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and found comparably 'meaningful' clusters of words and dates, including, pointedly, predictions of assassinations, mirroring exactly the kind of finds Drosnin publicized. When a reporter challenged Drosnin to show the method meant something by finding a specific prediction in Moby-Dick, McKay's team did so within the text of that novel, which undercuts the idea that these patterns are unique to a divinely authored text rather than an artifact of long documents and generous search criteria.
For a Christian readership, the Torah codes phenomenon is also a poor fit for the actual claims of Scripture. Nothing in the Bible's own self-description (as a book meant to be read, heard, and understood in its plain sense by ordinary people) anticipates a hidden numerical cipher requiring a computer to unlock. Even conservative Hebrew Bible scholars who affirm the text's divine inspiration, including those writing for outlets like Probe Ministries, have rejected ELS codes as a modern statistical illusion rather than a genuine feature of the text.
