Is there a Hidden Code in the Bible?

In 1997, Michael Drosnin's bookThe Bible Code claimed that the Hebrew Bible contains a complex code that had predicted events which occurred thousands of years after the ancient texts were first written.

Drosnin's book was based on the work of Dr. Eliyahu Rips, an Israeli mathematician, who discovered the codes along with Doron Witzman and Yoav Rosenberg. The mathematicians first arranged the 304,805 Hebrew letters of the Bible into a large array, removing all spaces and punctuation and running the words together one after another. Then a computer searched for matches in all directions for names, words, and hidden phrases. According to Rips, only the Hebrew Bible may be used, because God gave the Hebrew characters to Moses one at a time, with no spaces or punctuation. The colleagues published a peer reviewed paper in the Statistical Science Journal in 1994 regarding their findings when they applied the code to the book of Genesis. Since then, research has indicated that the hidden code exists throughout all the books of the Tanakh in the original Hebrew.

Rips and his associates tested the book of Genesis to see if the code could pick out the names of the 66 Rabbis who had the longest entries in various Jewish annals. The Bible code revealed all 66 names, together with either the Rabbis' birth date or death date. In test after test, the Bible code found people, places, and inventions that did not come into being until 3,000 years after the ancient Hebrew texts had been recorded.

Drosnin, an agnostic, states that his belief in the Bible code was confirmed when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995. Drosnin states that he had seen the forecast in the code a year earlier and even warned Rabin of the danger.

While Drosnin is reluctant to state that the Bible code proves that God is its author, others have firmly stated their belief that God guided the ancient scribes and directed them to place the prophecies within the texts.

To test the claims of the Bible code, skeptical mathematicians have downloaded the texts of the Hebrew Bible and the King James Version. In the opinion of these researchers, hidden messages and prophetic statements made about famous politicians, inventors, military men, musicians, and so forth can also be located.

Sources:

drosnin, michael. the bible code. new york: simon & schuster, 1997.

thomas, david e. "hidden messages and the bible code." skeptical inquirer, november 1997. http://www.csicop.org/si/9711/bible-code.html. 11 october 2001.

wiztum, doron, eliyahu rips, and yaov rosenburg. "equidistant letter sequences in the book of genesis." statistical science journal 1994, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 429–438.