The Bible Code

The Bible Code is a best-selling controversial book by Michael Drosnin[?], first published in 1997, that describes what it claims are hidden messages encoded in the Torah. The purported messages are supposed to be hidden in the Torah by placing their letters at wide intervals in the text. His book is based on the technique described in the paper "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" by Eliyahu Rips[?] of the Hebrew University in Israel. A sequel, The Bible Code II, was published in 2002 and also reached best-seller status.

"Equidistant letter sequences" are known to cryptographers as acrostic codes[?]. These acrostics are located by brute-force search using simple software and a machine-readable Hebrew language source text.

Critics of The Bible Code claim that its messages are neither surprising nor statistically significant. They claim that almost any text can give similar results, given the vast scope for choice in selecting possible repeat patterns and offsets, and the vast range of possibilities for what is considered to be a "significant message". The first objection is cryptographic, and the second is statistical:

Cryptographers have standard techniques for detecting "hidden" messages, based on statistical properties of texts in a language. For example, one can take a text in some language--any language will do--and put it alongside another text in the same language (or perhaps the same text shifted some distance to the right or left), and count the number of times the same letter appears side-by-side in each text. The number of "coincidences" will be dramatically larger when same-language texts are used, than when different-language texts or streams of gibberish are used. Some authors have applied this test to "equidistant sequences" in the Hebrew Bible, and claim that the results prove that such sequences do not contain linguistic information. (See also counting coincidences[?] and polyalphabetic ciphers[?].)

The second argument is a more subtle one from the field of statistics. Proponents of the "Bible Code" argue that the words and phrases they find are statistically very unlikely to occur by chance, and that this is evidence that they are present by design. Some statisticians point out that the torah was searched for meaningful phrases, and once one was found, the odds of THAT ONE occurring by chance were calculated. In this situation, they argue, even extremely low odds do not provide evidence of a hidden code: this is the prosecutor's fallacy. The appropriate odds to use would be the probability of finding the phrases that were in the torah, given that the torah was searched for many more phrases. In fact, meaningful phrases can be found in other books using the same techniques, and the same low odds of that phrase occurring can be calculated after the fact. The low odds would be convincing evidence only if expected phrases had been stated beforehand, without looking at the torah, and then the phrases had been located in the torah "against all odds".

References

• Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg. Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis. Statistical Science, Vol. 9 (1994) 429-438.
• Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai. Solving the Bible Code Puzzle. Statistical Science 14-2 (1999) 150-173, online version (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/StatSci/)

External links

• Hidden Messages and The Bible Code (http://www.csicop.org/si/9711/bible-code)
• "Scientific Refutation of the Bible Codes" (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah) by Brendan McKay and others
• Dror Bar-Natan's Bible Code page (http://www.math.toronto.edu/~drorbn/Codes/)