With reviewers and experts not allowed an advance look, a book was published around the world this week claiming that the Old Testament contains a secret code that 3,000 years ago foretold the Holocaust and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.The book says the code, found in the Bible by an Israeli computer expert, also foretold many other of history's major events and warns of an atomic war that could bring the end of the world in 2000 or 2006.
Trumpeted with full page advertisements in publications such as the New York Times, The Bible Code has been snapped up in Hollywood by Warner Brothers, which sees it as a perfect vehicle for those who like their Raiders of the Lost Ark flavored with large doses of Nostradamus-style predictions.
Experts were caught off guard by the book, which was kept secret until copies were in stores on Thursday, the sort of treatment publishers give works they think will generate news.
Its author, Michael Drosnin, a former reporter who wrote a best-selling biography of Howard Hughes, told Reuters he expected a full debate over his work and was not afraid to confront critics, some of whom are already complaining.
Critics say the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, which religious Jews believe was dictated by God to Moses, is Holy Writ and not to be used like a Ouija board.
I am afraid people will think you can use computers and mathematics to do anything. This is not the way to apprach religion, said a Jewish scholar who asked not to be named.
But Drosnin insists his is a serious project based on five years of research and the work of Eliyahu Rips, a respected Israeli mathematican and computer expert who has previously published his findings in a respected scientific journal.
Rips has no financial stake in the project and disagrees with Drosnin on some of his conclusions, especially on whether the code forecasts a possible atomic war destroying first Israel and then the rest of the world.
Drosnin said he did not really believe in the code until the day Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.
I had found his murder encoded in the Bible more than a year before it happened and I flew to Israel to warn the prime minister. I gave a letter warning of this to a close friend who gave it to Rabin, he said.
Then on Nov. 4, 1995, I was at a train station talking to a friend on a pay phone. He told me Rabin had been murdered. I slid to the floor, the air went out of me. Up to then I thought the code was real intellectually, but then I knew it in my heart.
Rips took all the words in the Torah and eliminated the spaces between them, turning them into one continuous strand, 304,805 letters long. This is the way the sages say Moses received the Bible from God.
Using a computer, he then searched the strand for names and phrases using a skip code that adds every fourth or 12th or 50th letter to form a word. He said he found a hidden network of words and phrases, verified by several experts.
Drosnin said the code brought together interlocking information -- for example with the word Hitler came the word Nazi, with Kennedy came Dallas.
The Holocaust is encoded, so is Pearl Harbor, an extraordinary array of history is there and maybe the future, Drosnin said. I found references to atomic war and Holocaust and Israel for the year 2000 and 2006.
He said that as a check, Rips did the same sort of tests on a Hebrew translation of War and Peace but could not find a hidden code locked inside the great Russian novel.
But Drosnin concluded that the code is not a crystal ball. I see this as a warning, not a prediction, he said.
July 16, 1997
Source: NewswireReturn to: Religious Articles Archives