I hope that none of my readers were taken in by the "Bible Code" hoax. I suspect that this book is an unconscious fraud, and that its author believes in his methods. But that's only because he's a mathematical illiterate.

 

The trick is this: Take, say, every fifth letter from a text, string the letters together, and see if you can make sense of the result. What you get is mostly gibberish, but a real word will pop up every now and then. The rules as to what constitutes a message are loose, words that appear in the same vicinity can be taken as a message, and the messages can be very skimpy. In the book, the Hebrew word "rabin" and the Hebrew word for "assassin" appear near each other, and the author took this as showing that the Bible made a prediction that Israeli prime minister Rabin would be assassinated. Of course, it could be taken to mean that Rabin was an assassin - and if Rabin had assassinated someone, that's how the message would have been interpreted.

 

The Bible Code method allows you to try different spacings between letters for selecting the letters you want to see, and you can keep trying until you get something that looks useful.

 

Using the methods of the book, you can get amazing messages from almost any text. My son wrote a little program that runs on my web site (www.cfcl.com/jef) and you can try it yourself. Paste in any text you have lying around, you should have at least 5 pages (the longer the better), run the program, and interpret away.

 

This scheme works even better in Hebrew than in English because, in Hebrew, only the consonants are written down (for the most part), and you usually can supply whatever vowels you wish to help the results make sense. It is as if the letters

 

SR

 

could be interpreted as soar, seer, sear, sere, sir, sorry, surrey, eyesore, and so on.

The message

 

BRD SR

 

could be read; birds soar, the bard was a seer, breed an eyesore, or, the board was sorry (probably the board of directors at Mitsubishi, if you want to link the "prediction" to a current event).

 

Like numerology or astrology, the methods in the book are flexible enough to get any result you want, and to allow you to explain away any results that don't seem promising - remember, you can ignore as much of the output as you wish. As for predicting the future, the method fails utterly because you don't know what to look for without already knowing the future. Would "rabin" have meant anything to someone using this method a hundred years ago? Not a chance. Say that you see a word "Kropnic" and a few lines later you see the word "rules". Does that tell us that a future leader of Russia (or some other country) named Kropnic will come into power, or will someone of that name write a new set of rules for the game of chess? Or is "Kropnic" just a bunch of random letters and not a name at all. If a Hollywood movie titled "Playing by Kropnic's Rules" comes out in a few years, do you then claim you had a prognostication, or is that just hindsight?

 

Have fun. But don't believe a word of it.