In the example chosen above, an argument might be made that since it is a text dealing with Isaac pretending that Rebecca was his sister and not his wife, that this trick was a kind of pretense or “code.”
Although such a claim might be rejected as immediately fantastic and unbelievable, the modern computer has allowed Code supporters to order the ELS and matrix arrays of displaying the Hebrew words in such an infinite variety of ways that critics claim it is possible to find many “significant” and “hidden” coincidences.
The publication of a paper on the principles of the Code, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" in 1994 in the scientific journal
Statistical Science caused an uproar and major controversy. Authors
Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and
Yoav Rosenberg claimed to present strong statistical evidence that biographical information (names, dates and places of birth) about famous rabbis was “encoded” in the text of the Bible, many centuries before those rabbis lived.
However, the great controversy over a “secret code” exploded into a world-wide phenomenon with the “prediction” by Michael Drosnin of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he had written to the Israeli government warning of the event, revealing “facts” that he “discovered” to be “encoded” in the “appropriate places.” His subsequent best-selling book “The Bible Code” became a runaway hit whose devoted readers fast became a cult. Since then, many devotees have learned Biblical Hebrew and use special high powered search engines to locate ELSs of other potential “events” to make further awesome and startling predictions.
Who is Michael Drosnin? He is an American journalist and author, who worked as a journalist for the Washington Post (1966-1968) and The Wall Street Journal (1969-1970). Drosnin began researching the Bible Code in 1992 after meeting the mathematician Eliyahu Rips in Israel. Although not an observant Jew like Rips, Drosnin became convinced of the validity of the Code after finding what he believed was a reference to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and duly “warning him.”
In his book, Drosnin implies that “extraterrestrials” delivered the message of the Bible encoded with the prophesies revealed by the Code. All the original investigators, Witzum, Rips and Rosenberg distanced themselves from Drosnin’s claims and still conduct research into finding encoded messages but reject any ability to “predict the future.” Strong support for Drosnin’s theories characterizes various non-conformist or non-traditional religious groups including messianic Jews, some Evangelicals and the Orthodox Jewish outreach group Aish-HaTorah.
As a translator and teacher of Hebrew, I am all too aware of the general lack of familiarity with the language of the Old Testament by most Jews in the Diaspora. If the providential hand of God is indeed behind the Bible Code, the reason must be the encouragement of an interest in learning the language and restoring it to its past exalted status (see
Hebrew’s Exalted Status, New English Review, October, 2009). A more sober analysis is certainly necessary to better understand and appreciate how Biblical Hebrew has lent itself to the statistical manipulations of would be modern day soothsayers.
As any advanced student of Hebrew can confirm, the probability of generating meaningful words and even full sentences on the basis of randomly generated ELSs is infinitely greater in Hebrew than in English or other Indo-European languages. This is due both to the paucity of the Biblical vocabulary and the omission of letters that serve as vowels, the freedom to unite many prepositions represented by a single letter with the following words, the regularity of verb conjugations and special grammatical constructions that make only a few letters potentially significant.
As a former translator of foreign language films for which I provided Hebrew subtitles, I was always capable of expressing much more in the limited 32 character set of letters and spaces that comprised the subtitles. A full sentence with subject, verb and object can be represented in Hebrew with three or two or even one word. For example, in the sentenced, “I bought it”, one could translate this as Ani kaniti oto, or Kaniti oto or simply Kanitiv. For these reasons, English language translations of Hebrew texts usually emerge from 30 to 40% longer in length.
Without the aid of the special vowel symbols known as nikud, many words in Hebrew can have various translations indicating the active, passive or reflexive cases. Drosnin makes a case for the prediction he “found” that President Nixon would resign. He rests his interpretation on the Hebrew letters that are the consonants ”G-R-SH”. This three letter root signifies to separate, expel, or exile in the active case with the vowel pattern known as the “pual” representing the passive case (the pronunciation of which is GuRaSH). He indeed translated word this as “was expelled” (i.e. was forced to resign) but, had he decided instead that the vowels should represent the “piel” active case, pronounced GiReSH, it would have signified that Richard Nixon forced someone else (his wife Pat for instance) to separate or be expelled by him (i.e. he would divorce her).
Imagine if the English language had a few of the same properties as Hebrew and we decided to search for “prophecies regarding President Bush and selected some every combination of the Letters bet (B) followed by shin (SH) spelling “Bush” (i.e. President Bush) and it turned out that of the many thousands of ELS possibilities of B followed by SH, we found this name embedded vertically in the surface text (without vowels).
In the original Old Testament text, vowels called nikud which are represented by dot and dash symbols below, above or within certain letters were not originally written but were only added more than a thousand years after the original text by learned scholars.
………….……..…….B……………………………....
……..thewndnhsSHhusdtthbttrtrp………..
A follower of an English variant of the Bible Code might decide that the surface text should be read either as …..
The wind in his soul was due to the bitter trip OR…
The wound in his seal was due to the butter trap OR…
The wand in his soil was due to the better troop
This “encoded message” (BUSH) might be interpreted to relate to his presidency, life, certain events and interpreted so that for example ….. “the wind in his soul” was a metaphor for his being depressed and that this was the result of a “bitter trip” he made and a new search would begin to find destinations as spelled in Hebrew and “encoded “ in near proximity to the text.
All this may begin to resemble sheer nonsense but given enough will to search for Biblical parables and allusions, some ultimate sense might be read into them.
Moreover, Drosnin made no attempt to explain the liberties he took with his translations of Hebrew terms, including modern day abbreviations such as the letters rosh heh mem (R H M – the accepted abbreviation today for the Hebrew term “Rosh HaMemshala” (Head of State), thus straining credulity even further that whoever implanted the code also knew the direction that modern day journalistic Hebrew would take.
The same applies to modern day terms invented during the past few decades such as hallalit (spaceship), based on the Biblical word hallal for outer space. When it suits Drosnin, he uses a word derived from a non-Hebrew source, for example the name of the planet Jupiter we derived from Latin, rather than the ancient Hebrew term for the planet (Tzedek).
Drosnin’s most spectacular claim of predicting the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin fails to explain that the prediction was based on a very long ELS resulting in resh-bet-yod-nun R-B-Y-N (Rabin’s name in Hebrew – see matrix below with Yitzhak Rabin’s full name in Hebrew letters spelled out as indicated by the circles). The surface text in the matrix upon which the letters of spelling YTZHK RBYN is displayed is Deutoronomy 4:41-43 that reads in the authorized King James version…..
Then Moses severed three cities on this side of the Jordan toward the sunrising: That the slayer might flee thither, which should kill his neighbor unawares, and hated him not in times past and that fleeing unto one of these cities he might live:
This is translated according to Drosnin ….”The assassin will assassinate” (this is the surface text shown by the letters marked by squares) although the meaning indicates that the slayer (assassin according to Drosnin) is one who has “unintentionally killed his neighbor” and that such individuals had the right to seek shelter in three protected Levite cities on this side of the Jordan River. The crime referred to is therefore, one of manslaughter, and not assassination (murder) and the circumstances considerably lessen the impact of the implied prediction. The name of the assassin (Amir) was found encoded backwards by an ELS computation (letters marked by the diamond shape) and found “in proximity” to the phrase about the killer. It was determined to be “encoded” AFTER the fact of the crime and the alleged killer’s name were known.
The very long skip of 4,722 letters arranged diagonally (encircled in the chart below) to spell out Y-TZ-H-K-R-B-Y-N (in Hebrew, the letter Y is both a vowel and consonant) is masked by truncating the matrix to make it look much more compact.
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