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Mathematician critical of 'Bible Code' bestseller
June 4, 1997
Web posted at: 11:55 p.m. EDT (0355 GMT)(CNN) -- Michael Drosnin's new book "The Bible Code" offers the thesis that the Old Testament correctly predicted -- via a hidden code -- several events in history, including the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Holocaust.
The book soared onto bestseller lists in the United States by attracting legions of readers with its provocative prophecies, such as a "cataclysmic" earthquake in Los Angeles in 2010.
But some of the book's conclusions are being challenged by the Israeli mathematician who led a research team that discovered what he says is the hidden code in the Hebrew Bible, or Torah, on which the book is based.
Orthodox Jews call the first five books of the Bible the Torah.
Eliyahu Rips of Hebrew University says it is true that the Bible has predicted various historical events that have come to pass. But he disagrees that the code can be used to predict future events.
"The central claim that you will find in Michael Drosnin's book, and really the whole basis for the book, is ... the idea of him predicting Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and the implication is that you can use this idea, the hidden code in the Torah, to make predictions of the future," Rips said Wednesday through a translator.
"It is literally impossible to make future predictions based on codes. Mr. Drosnin's book does have some examples of codes that are statistically significant, and some that aren't, and the problem is that any layman reading that book will have no way of making a distinction."
Drosnin, speaking on CNN, defended his work.
"I am not saying that 'The Bible Code' is a crystal ball. You can not say 'Bible, please tell me the future' and find out anything. You have to know what you are looking for to find anything at all.
"And none of us, neither Dr. Rips nor his colleagues, would claim to know the code well enough, to understand it completely enough, that we can be certain about what it says about the future."
Drosnin, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, met with Rips after he heard about his work and did some of his own analysis of the code before completing his book, which is published by Simon & Schuster.
To find the code, Rips first eliminated all spaces between words and turned the original version of the Bible into one continuous strand, 304,805 letters long.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Related story:
- Book: Coded clues in Bible predict future - May 31, 1997
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