 Torah! Torah! Torah!
Plug 'N Play Bible Codes: 304,805 Letters Later
 Like a bad summer code, or a bad pun, it always takes longer than one expects for the annoyance to subside. This summer's bestselling "The Bible Code" by Michael Drosnin, and the accompanying hoopla in the media is beginning to slack off just in time for back to school. Don't worry, Warners Brothers has bought the rights to the book, ("The Bible - That's All Folks!") and while they haven't yet announced plans for adapting the book, expect a flurry of computer code thrillers based on prophetic ancient texts in the near future.
But who can fail to be impressed by this premillenial emergence of Pop-Kabbalahism. Or should I say Mom-and-Pop Kabbalahism, since the Bible Code promises to become a minor cottage industry thanks to the proliferation of desktop software for run-at-home decryption of God's Word.
Most people are comfortable with the use of the prefix "Pop", but "Kabbalah" isn't in everyone's spell checker, at least not yet. The Kabbalah (or Kabala, Cabala) is a form of Jewish mysticism dating from, at least, the medieval era. The use of Equidistant Letter Sequences, or ELS, by statisticians, mathematicians, and amateur Bible Coders alike, is just one of 84 coding schemes that the Kabbalists employed in looking for encrypted messages in the Torah.
The original statistical research, done by three Israeli mathematicians and presented as a "challenging puzzle" in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science, reduced the Book of Genesis to a single continous text string without spaces or vowels, 304,805 characters long. Using ELS, they tested for a list of 32 famous Jewish scholars and calculated probablities of their names occurring near the day and month of their birth or death. An odd puzzle, but no prophecy. It was the discovery of their work by Drosnin, a journalist/biographer, that made the "famous mathematicians" prove the Bible predicts the future.
"Seek and Ye Shall Find"
The application of ELS to other, less divinely authored texts, was inspired by Drosnin's challenge, "When my critics find a message about the assasination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe it." The Australian mathematician Brendan McKay, celebrated by Yahoo! Internet Life as "the man who cracked the 'Bible Code,'" (and a combinatorics expert, no less) found a list of assasinations foretold in Moby Dick.
C|NET's Don Steinberg took up the challenge and found prophecies foretold in the Microsoft Access Developers Toolkit 2.0 license agreement.
Yahoo! Internet Life further offers an illustrated Bible Code Tour to hunt out encrypted references to Bill Gates in the Book of Revelation.
Author! Author!
The "authors" of code are mysterious indeed. Drosnin blankly states, "There is code, therefore there is encoder." Which makes Tolstoy worth re-reading, at least in the Hebrew translation. McKay applied ELS to "War and Peace" and and made an amazing discovery: the Chanukah story! The "author" of Tolstoy's classic, originally written in Russian, embedded this incredible message in such a way that it would only appear when it was translated into Hebrew. Tolstoy was good, but this "author" required superhuman abilities.
The Amazing Randi, through his James Randi Educational Foundation site, offers this same prophectic "War and Peace" for online ELS searches. You select the letter interval, the initial offset, and the direction of the search, and receive an easy-to-read, left-to-right text. Randi invites you to share any meaning found in the resulting gibberish.
"God doesn't play Dice," but here's betting his slots are loose
The popularity of Bible Codes, like that of its "satanic" cousin "chaos theory", a few years back, relies to a great degree on the widespread use of cheap and powerful desktop computers. Traditional pattern-seeking impulses, backed by a digitally empowered literalist obsession, and the impending millenium "conspire" like Drosnin's "author" to produce what has been described by "Why People Believe Weird
Things" (W. H. Freeman, May, 1997) author Michael Shermer as "nothing more than New Age numerology."
Drosnin himself, in a CNN online chat, claims that the "author" of the Bible "wrote" the code to be discovered by a computer, "It had a kind a kind of time-lock on it. It could not be found until the computer was invented."
Undisputed Proof That ELS Is A Home Business Opportunity!
While these books might not be next to Drosnin's on the New York Time's Bestsellers List, they represent the exciting opportunities that exists for desktop theology and home-based pattern prophecy.
Grant R. Jeffrey's book "The Signature Of God" promises "Scientific and Computer-aided Proof That God Is Real, the Bible Is Truth." Grant ascribes quality control, "God's hand on the scribes" for preventing ANY mistakes from cropping into the Old Testament during copying and proofreading over the centuries and allowing for ELS to remain intact today. A table of contents and annotated index of the "The Signature of God" is available at Proof's site, which also offers "Automatic fundraising: Earn monthly checks for your group all year with just one fundraising event."
"God's best kept secret" is revealed by the Portland, Oregon based Theomatics Research. "THEOMATICS is an extremely complex, profound, and intellectual subject. Yet the basic fundamentals of how it operates, are quite simple and easy to understand." Assigning number values to letters, manipulating multiple alphabets, adding phrases and word clusters, crunching massive databases. Why it's the desktop equivalent of home brewing!
 Finally, why program your own ELS searches when you can use software right off the shelf? Haifa, Israel based Torah Educational Software offers two packages of Bible or Torah Code programs for both Windows and Mac. Print crosswords from the Torah or create your own Gematria (Kabalist) Dictionary!
Numinous Numbers and Numerical Miracles
The current crop of Bible decoders are distinguished from numerologists and other number-letter coders by their use of "skip codes," or ELS. Brendan McKay and J. Katz maintain exhaustive resource sites on The Search for Mathematical Miracles and Religion and Numerics.
For a "Computer Proof That God, The Creator of All Things, Did (In Fact) Write the 66 Books of the Holy Bible," visit San Jose Computers for Christ.
"Numerology: I've Got Your Number" has a "Numerology and Religion" list of resources as well as "Numerology and Business" and "Adult Numerology" pages. Yes, THAT kind of Adult. Mildly titillating descriptions and partially clad women illuminate your "Life Path Number" and guide your over-18 love life.
And don't miss a sincere plan to avoid Atomic Holocaust using a "Universal Science Based On The Ultimate Energy."
Binary is actually the real language of the Torah and of the creation of the whole universe... We will have to forsee the unbelievable implications of this new universal language which like electricity could throw light in our brains and in our minds.
All it takes is a simple understanding of the numerical values of a few Hebrew letters. Syntax is apparently borrowed from Ed Wood, Jr. The text is available in English and French
Other Resources:
This Week in Fashion Prophecy
Adult Christianity's own Miss Poppy Dixon lifts the cloak on the season's latest fashion truths while fabricating a new meaning for pattern prophecy ("...go ahead and mix patterns and plaids.")
Official Torah Codes home page
"Official Torah Codes only deals with claims that have met the rigorous analysis of peer-reviewed scientific journals. We also have refutations of non-scientific claims that have been publicized by the media, books and the internet."
Check out an extensive bibliography of Christianity and Mathematics, 1910-1983
Read up on the ontology of mathematical objects,
dangers in computer modeling, and quantification as a "category mistake".
Harold Gans, a retired Department of Defense cryptologician offers an analysis of the techniques employed by the original researchers.
Disinformation, the subculture search engine, has more resources listed in their End of the World News dossier.
Benjamin Wittes original Slate article on Bible Codes written BEFORE the Michael Drosnin book.
Prophezine Discussion Board
discusses biblical prophecy in general:
PropheZine does not condone or support prophetic date-setting claimed to be revelation from God. No attempt to stifle individual views and opinions concerning future events is intended by this policy statement. But it is comparing scripture with scripture which is authoritative; not dreams, visions or revelations claimed to be 'messages from God'.
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