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'Bible Code' debunked by statisticians
Hebrew version of any long text would be just as revealing
Saturday, September 11, 1999
By RICHARD OSTLING
NEW YORK -- An international team of statisticians is attacking "Bible code" theory, which claims the Old Testament contains secret references to 20th-century events.
Television documentaries, fast-selling books and numerous articles have popularized the idea, which originated with a 1994 article in the academic journal Statistical Science.
Next week the same journal, published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics based in Hayward, Calif., will publish a study by three researchers challenging the theory.
"Despite a considerable amount of effort, we have been unable to detect the codes," the study stated.
According to Bible code proponents, the Hebrew text of the Old Testament refers to events that were thousands of years away when the text was written.
The hidden references are revealed by turning the text into a string of letters without spaces and looking for words formed by equidistant letter sequences.
For instance, computers might select every ninth Hebrew letter and register a "hit" when a "coded" word intersects with a Bible verse containing related words.
The technique has been used to claim encoded biblical predictions of everything from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 to a Los Angeles earthquake in 2010.
The theory was put forward in a 1994 article in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, in which three Israeli scholars reported on tests using the Book of Genesis that produced intersections between names of famous rabbis and their birth or death dates.
That experiment is retested in the new article in the same journal, written by Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, who teach mathematics at Jerusalem's Hebrew University; Maya Bar-Hillel, a psychology professor at the same school; and Brendan McKay, a computer scientist at Australian National University.
Such letter configurations can be found in any long text, the article says.
They repeated the 1994 experiment, using other spellings and assumptions and applying the rabbis' names to other biblical books.
Comparison tests using the Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" were just as successful as those with the Bible.
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