Secrets of the Bible Code Invented

by Brendan McKay

In 1998, Grizzly Adams Productions released a 90-minute special Secrets of the Bible Code Revealed. It included some material from sceptics (including this writer) as well as pro-codes material. This document is a brief review.

The Genre

We are all familiar with television specials that take the apparent form of "documentaries" on such subjects as astral projection, aliens live amongst us, the planets affect our love lives, and Marilyn Monroe was killed by the Knights Templar. Invariably such programs have a fine professional gloss and look to an ignorant and uncritical viewer just like the result of careful investigative work by qualified people, but just as invariably are nothing of the kind. Secrets of the Bible Code Revealed is a fine example of this genre.

The Slant

The program had an extreme bias towards the pro-codes viewpoint, and a secondary bias in the American Christian Right direction. It was based largely on books by Michael Drosnin and Grant Jeffrey, neither of whom have any relevant qualifications, and both of whom are notorious for wild inaccuracy. Even though there were some sceptics shown on the program, they received a very small amount of time and were allowed to show very little of the large amount of evidence that they have. Moreover, each small snippet from a sceptic (usually one or two sentences without any detail) was inevitably followed by a much longer "refutation" from some codes "expert". We were even shown "refutations" of arguments which the sceptics had not been allowed to mention! By contrast, codes proponents were allowed to make whatever wild assertions (and, in some cases, blatant lies) they liked without any challenge from either the presenter or the sceptics.

Put simply, the sceptics were set up as strawmen (and women) purely for the purpose of affecting a sham of balance. The technique is a standard item in the propagandist's toolkit: show a quick clip of the sceptic making some negative statements then give an "expert" ample time to refute them. The audience is given the impression that the sceptic took his/her best shot and was defeated, and has no way to know that the sceptic has ample proof which the "refutation" didn't actually address.

The Distortion

Here we will list just a few of the very many distortions that appeared on the program. We will not attempt to present the case against the codes here, except in passing, but merely to demonstrate the appalling propagandistic nature of the program.

The program presents the standard myth about Harold Gans, that he ran his own experiment to try to disprove the codes. However, by his own admission, Gans became a believer in the codes, and even worked as a codes lecturer for Aish HaTorah, long before he ran any programs.
Author Chuck Missler is quoted as saying that archaeology supports the tradition that Hebrew was originally written without words separated. In fact, the archaelogical evidence indicates exactly the opposite. See Naveh, Israel Exploration Journal 23 (1973) 206-208. In any case, the issue is entirely irrelevant.
One of the worse (and completely deliberate) biases shown by the program was to repeatedly show Bible word clusters but not once show the similar word clusters that appear in all texts, even in English. They had lots of such clusters on film, but probably decided that viewers would have difficulty seeing the difference between the Bible clusters and the non-Bible clusters. This fear was justified, because there isn't any difference. Instead, without showing a single example, they produced Gans calling the non-Bible clusters "counterfeit" and Drosnin calling them "fake". Neither gentleman was asked to justify his claim. More humourously, the program forgot to tell us that Gans also regards Drosnin's word clusters as worthless!
Continuing on the latter theme, another blatant distortion perpetrated by the program was the failure to mention that their "experts" are at loggerheads with each other. This is especially true of Gans, who is totally opposed to Drosnin, Jeffrey, and Rambsel. It is impossible to believe that Gans failed to tell them, but even though the narrator mentioned that "some experts" don't agree with Drosnin, Jeffrey and Rambsel, they failed to tell us that their very own Harold Gans was one of them. Nor did they mention that both Rips and Witztum have also publically denounced Drosnin's book.
The program repeatedly referred the claims back to the "scientific evidence" published in the paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg. The deep knowledge the producers had of these gentlemen was well illustrated when they showed us a picture of Rabbi Moshe Zeldman and told us it was Yoav Rosenberg! All the while the program went on endlessly about the support the codes had from the scientific community but only managed to find two working scientists in apparent support. One was the computer scientist at the Jerusalem College of Technology, and the other was Professor Robert Aumann. The latter in fact never tires of telling everyone that he is undecided.
The very long treatment of Weissmandel's "Torah" example omitted all the unpleasant facts. Such as that the skips are not all the same. Such as that the codes in Numbers and Deuteronomy are not placed like those in Genesis and Exodus. Perhaps they thought the viewers would object to being told that a perfect God could make codes that are only approximately perfect. As for Michelson's "1 in 3 million" probability, it was nothing but an embarrassing error.
In the description of the great rabbis experiment, the presenter said "All 34 names were there, encoded into the text along with their date of birth or death". Probably this was copied from Jeffrey's book (a good example of it's trustworthiness). Every insider (including Gans) could have told them that this claim is false. Many of the names don't appear at all, let alone close to the date, and of those that do occur all but a few appear closer to incorrect dates than to the correct dates. This is a simple fact that can be confirmed by anyone with the right computer program.
Another likely example of blind trust in Jeffrey was the "statement of five prominent scientists" supposedly issued after the publication of the Statistical Science paper. There was no such statement. The origin of this story was a preface of guarded support that appeared in a 1989 book of Witztum, five years earlier, signed by four (not five) mathematicians. In the meantime, two of the four have retracted even that weak support. (The other two are not making statements of any sort.) One of those who has retracted was included in those Drosnin claimed support from, but (as Drosnin well knows) he adamantly denies ever telling Drosnin that "the codes are real".
The standard quotation from Robert Kass was trotted out in order to trick the viewers into believing that Statistical Science (of which Kass was editor) gave its stamp of approval to the paper. I don't believe the producers are unaware that Kass has repeatedly and publically denounced that interpretation, but why spoil a good story with the facts?
Gans was given the task of mentioning the public statement made by 45 (now 53) mathematicians and statisticians about the codes. He described the statement as one of "not believing" in the codes. This is a serious distortion, as the statement does not express belief or disbelief in the codes. Rather, these experts stated that they had examined the evidence and were unconvinced, moreover that much of the evidence is faulty, in their opinion. This is an entirely different thing. Then Gans went on to claim that science is never done "by petition". While it is true that public statements like this are rare, science always proceeds by consensus. The life's work of a scientist consists of production and presentation of evidence in an effort to convince other scientists. Look in any scientific journal.
Gans was given almost as much time to discuss his "cities" experiment as the sceptics were given altogether. Somehow though, despite all this time, Gans failed to mention that all he did was to run the computer programs. The data (which is the important thing) was fed to him by a friend of Doron Witztum. So much for its independence. Not only that, but there is no paper trail of how the exceedingly complicated rules that define the data were developed, or how they were applied. If the data is taken exactly as it appears in the encyclopedias that Gans names, the experiment totally fails. To make the experiment succeed, one must manipulate it. As always.
Another peculiar aspect of Gans' description of his cities experiment was his failure to mention that he has temporarily retracted it, or that an Israeli committee is engaged in trying to run it again because of grave doubts that it was run properly. (Here and elsewhere, we are assuming that the program gave a fair report of Gans' testimony. As we shall see below, this assumption is on very shaky ground.)
On the matter of Drosnin's "prediction" of the comet collision with Jupiter, made two months in advance, surely the producers know that the date of the collision was publically announced by astronomers even earlier? Why didn't they ask Drosnin why he calls this a "prediction"? By the way, Drosnin got the date wrong after all that, apparently through ignorance of the Jewish calendar. Since the producers have studied my web site they know these facts, but that didn't stop them allowing Drosnin to spout his rubbish unchallenged. (An amusing aside: Witztum claims that Drosnin spelt the name of the comet incorrectly.)
The program uncritically repeated Drosnin's claim that Isaac Newton believed in a secret code in the Bible. However, the quoted source (Newton's biography by John Maynard Keynes) reveals nothing of the sort. Newton in his youth was obsessed with magic, and spent a great amount of his time studying the occult, especially alchemy. He also wrote on religious matters including Biblical prophesy, but there is nothing in Keynes' biography about a code in the Bible or anything even close to it. Several books about Newton's religious writings that we consulted also contained no such claims. It seems this whole story is a Drosnin fantasy, lapped up without checking by the producers of this TV show.
Drosnin referred several times to "the software developed by Dr. Rips". The actual author of the software Drosnin used, Yochanan Spielberg, is in the process of suing Drosnin for a very large amount of money. Spielberg charges that Drosnin promised to credit Spielberg's program in his book, and that Drosnin's failure to do so cost him considerable lost income.
A clear and accurate statement by a Bible Studies Professor was shown, to the effect that the original text of the Bible is not known. As "refutation" of this well-established fact, two people were produced. The first was a computer scientist who quoted from the Talmud (but not from the part that explicitly says that the exact text of the Torah is unknown). The second was a famous scholar, Prof. Mordechai Breuer, who was egregiously misquoted. Everything he said on the program was in reference to the transmission of the Masoretic text over the past 1000 years or so, and nothing to do with earlier times. Contacted in Israel on Dec 9, Prof. Breuer expressed anger at the way his testimony was misused. He said that he had made it absolutely clear to the interviewers that he was only referring to the recent history of the text. As with all scientific experts on the Bible text that we have asked, Prof. Breuer believes that the Bible codes are "complete nonsense". See the articles of Professors Cohen and Tigay for the consensus view, to which Prof. Breuer generally subscribes.
This episode is a serious indictment of the TV program. As we noted above, the program style was to follow each sceptical statement by an expert "refutation". In this case they couldn't find an expert who disagreed with the sceptic, so they pretended Breuer was one.
Not to be outdone, Gans named the Septuagint as evidence that the Torah has been in its "present form" for over 2000 years. He might have mentioned that the differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text are much greater than any ELS codes could possibly have survived.
A lot of time was given to Roy Reinhold, who is also named as a "technical advisor" in the program credits. Roy fancies himself as a codes expert. He has a web site showing some pretty word clusters. We will mention two.
One cluster involves Rabbi Teomim, who appeared in the great rabbis experiment of Witztum et al. (Including him at all was a violation of the rules, but that's another story.) Roy's first attempt showed Rav Teomim's death date as "DY Iyyar", which Roy claimed to mean 14th Iyyar. However, 14 is written YD, not DY. Apparently Roy got the date from a book with a typo in it: Satinover's book has "14th Iyyar" in English, but (consistently with the great rabbis experiment) "4th Iyyar" in Hebrew. When informed of these problems, Roy replaced the matrix by a much better matrix using "4th Iyyar". This just demonstrates yet again that one can make a matrix for just about anything, even wrong data, but that's not the really funny part. Here's the punchline: Rav Teomim actually died on the 10th of Iyyar.

The other word cluster of Roy we will mention is his Nairobi bombing cluster. Roy is fond of claiming that nobody can match his Tanach clusters in other texts, but when we look at the cluster we see that it is enormously big, 7790 letters. Suppose we take the Lady Diana cluster in Moby Dick and expand it to be the same size as Roy's Nairobi cluster. Here is a partial list of the words we can find. The superscripts indicate the number of times each word is encoded (if more than one).
- Lady Diana (as a single ELS).
- Diana⁶, Henri⁵, Paul¹⁸
- Dodi⁶², Fayed, fiance, lover, Saudi³
- royalty, royal², regal³, Wales⁵
- Paris², August, l'Alma²
- road⁹³, skid¹⁴, speed⁵, velocity, haste¹⁶, fastest, chase³, crash², Merc²⁶, blood, bleed⁴, death¹², to die⁹, hearse, grave, photo
- Hotel¹¹, Ritz³
- Will²⁰, Henry³
- secret, codes, encode
All of that was found without any adjustment of the picture except to make it the same size as Roy's picture. There is probably more, as the computer found 6934 English words or names of four or more letters encoded in the picture and we did not have the patience to look at all of them. Also note that we don't have the flexibility of spelling that Hebrew has (well exercised by all codes proponents including Roy). This is worth a factor of about 50% in the number of words that can be found in a picture. Even without taking that into account, the Moby Dick picture is more successful than the Bible picture.
Another aspect of Roy's pictures that the TV program failed to tell us is that he completely ignores the rules made by Witztum and Rips about minimal skip. Without these rules, Witztum's "scientific evidence" disappears, but with them Roy's word clusters disappear. Which are the real "codes"? Finding good word clusters that use minimum skip is significantly harder, but the best that have ever been found are in War and Peace.
Yaacov Rambsel is famous for the creativity of his Hebrew translations. A good example is HXRK AWT ShLB, shown on the program. Several Israelis I showed this phrase to described it as gibberish. A professional translator prodded into trying to translate it anyway suggested "Does it require a formative letter?", "Does it require a sign of being joined?" and "It requires a sign of irresponsibility", amongst other possibilities. Rambsel's translation is "the lattice work of equidistance letter sequence", a true linguistic masterpiece. Incidentally, Gans could have torn Rambsel's work (and Jeffrey's) to pieces if he had been given the chance. I'm sure he is very happy to have been co-opted for the Christian cause.
Let us return to the testimony of Harold Gans. In reference to the many scientific experiments that failed to find any codes, he said the experiments used "data which is extremely questionable; data that was left out because of the fact that it was questionable". That is a blatant lie, and Gans knows it. As always, nobody asked him to justify his claim. In fact, most of the independent experiments used data on topics that nobody else admits having done experiments on, so how could the data have been rejected already?
Last place is reserved for the "experiment" that Gans claimed to provide the best scientific evidence so far. This is the "ten sons of Haman" example of Alex Rotenberg. Gans' description of it was (to be generous) thoroughly misleading. If the data is analysed by the method always used before, it fails completely. So, the "a priori" experiment, the only valid experiment, fails. However, rather than accepting the result, they went on a fishing expedition for a different analysis method. This violates all the rules for correct experiments. The best they could find only gave a mediocre result (Gans says 1 in 400) for the data he mentioned on the program. The "incredibly small probability" that Gans proudly touted cannot be obtained using the data he mentioned. It requires stacking the cards by adding additional arbitrary data that he did not mention. In other words, this example that Gans claims to have no "wiggle room" is a perfect example of how wiggle room can be used to cook an experiment.

The Sequel

A second, somewhat shorter, video Bible Code: The Future and Beyond has been produced by the same company. In a sense it is better, in that the pretense of objectivity has been cast aside and the "Christian" objectives largely behind the scenes in the first video are openly expressed. The message of this video is that the codes prove Jesus to be the Messiah, nothing less.

Having now run out of nice things to say about it, we can note that quite a few of the scenes were simply copied from the first video. Yoav Rosenberg still wears the face of Moshe Zeldman. The small amount of new material is, if such is possible, even more ridiculous. An irrelevant, apocryphal, story about Einstein replaces the previous nonsense about Newton, and some new word arrays are produced (though still without informing the viewers that similar arrays have been found in secular texts).

I have to say, though, that my favorite scene was the one that showed a photo of codes expert Professor Maya Bar-Hillel, who was alleged to have the following statement at a public seminar: "Regardless of the evidence, the codes phenomenon obviously cannot be valid because that would mean that God wrote the Torah." Although the producers of this video did not invent this particular lie, the fact that they uncritically accepted that a senior scientist would make such an inane statement, in public besides, attests to their profound ignorance. A brief phone call to Professor Bar-Hillel would have uncovered the fact that not only does the "quote" contradict her opinion, but that there is a recording of the afore-mentioned lecture in which, surprise, surprise, she does not make the alleged statement.

Summary

These programs are excellent material for the study of human gullibility. They are also a nice example of religious propaganda. Otherwise, they are completely worthless.

None of this will be suprising to anyone who knows the background of producers Charles Sellier and David Balsiger as dedicated enemies of science. It turns out that the "Bible Code" is not the first hoax these guys have taken under their wings. More background on these two can be found with the aid of any of the standard Internet search engines.