Hidden messages
Subliminal messages Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... A hidden message is information that is not immediately noticeable, and that must be discovered or uncovered and interpreted before it can be known. ... A subliminal message is a signal or message embedded in another object, designed to pass below the normal limits of perception. ... Audio Backmasking Reverse speech Numeric Numerology Theomatics Bible code Cryptography Visual Fnord Paranoiac-critical method Pareidolia Psychorama Sacred geometry Steganography See also Anagram Apophenia Easter egg (media) Clustering illusion Observer-expectancy effect Pattern recognition Unconscious mind
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Bible codes, originally known as Torah codes, are information patterns said to exist in encrypted or coded form in the text of the Bible, or, more specifically, in the Hebrew Torah, the first five books of Old Testament. The existence of these codes has been a topic of research by Old Testament scholars and students of Kabbalah for over a thousand years, and in more recent times have been a topic of study by modern mathematicians. In the mid-17th century influential mathematician Blaise Pascal, widely regarded as the "father of probability science" and "father of the modern computer" summarized his view in a one sentence assertion in his philosophical Pensées, concluding that "The Old Testament is a cipher." Backmasking (also known incorrectly as backward masking)[1] is a recording technique in which a sound or message is recorded backwards onto a track that is meant to be played forwards. ... This article is about the theory of reversed messages in normal speech. ... Numerology is any of many systems, traditions or beliefs in a mystical or esoteric relationship between numbers and physical objects or living things. ... Theomatics is a numerological study of the Greek and Hebrew text of the Christian Bible, based upon gematria and isopsephia, that its proponents assert demonstrates the direct intervention of God in the writing of Christian scripture. ... The German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II for encryption of very high-level general staff messages Cryptography (or cryptology; derived from Greek κρυπτός kryptós hidden, and the verb γράφω gráfo write or λεγειν legein to speak) is the study of message secrecy. ... Look up Fnord in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The Paranoiac-critical method is a surrealist technique developed by Salvador Dalí in the early 1930s, often employed in the production of paintings and other artworks. ... The term pareidolia (pronounced or ), referenced in 1994 by Steven Goldstein,[1] describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. ... Psychorama (or The Precon Process) is the act of communicating subliminal information through film—flashing images on the screen so quickly that they cannot be perceived by the conscious mind, but nonetheless leaving an unconscious imprint on the viewer. ... The Parthenons facade showing an interpretation of golden rectangles in its proportions. ... This article is about hidden messages. ... For the game, see Anagrams. ... Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. ... The first easter egg. ... The clustering illusion is the natural human tendency to see patterns where actually none exist. ... The observer-expectancy effect, in science, is a cognitive bias that occurs in science when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it. ... Pattern recognition is a field within the area of machine learning. ... This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... In communications, a code is a rule for converting a piece of information (for example, a letter, word, or phrase) into another form or representation, not necessarily of the same type. ... This Gutenberg Bible is displayed by the United States Library. ... Template:Jews and Jewdaism Template:The Holy Book Named TorRah The Torah () is the most valuable Holy Doctrine within Judaism,(and for muslims) revered as the first relenting Word of Ulllah, traditionally thought to have been revealed to Blessed Moosah, An Apostle of Ulllah. ... This article is about traditional Jewish Kabbalah. ... Blaise Pascal (pronounced ), (June 20 [[1624 // ]] – August 19, 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. ... The Pensées (literally, thoughts) represented an apology for the Christian religion by Blaise Pascal, the renowned 17th century philosopher and mathematician. ...

Overview

Contemporary discussion and controversy around one specific encryption method began in 1994 when Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg submitted their scientific paper, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" to the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science^[1]. After unexpectedly surviving an unprecedented three rounds of peer review, the paper was published by Statistical Science and the "ELS" phenomenon was "presented as a puzzle" to its readership. A storm of controversy immediately ensued. Eliyahu Rips is an Israeli mathematician known for his research in algebra and the controversial Bible codes. ...

Since then the term "Bible Codes" has been popularly used to refer specifically to information encrypted via the ELS method.

Since the Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR) paper was published, two conflicting schools of thought regarding the "Codes" have emerged among proponents. The traditional (WRR) view of the codes is based strictly on their applicability to the Torah, and asserts that any attempt to study the codes outside of this context is invalid. This is based on a belief that the Torah is unique among biblical texts in that it was given directly to mankind (via Moses) in exact letter-by-letter sequence and in the original Hebrew language. Moses with the Tablets, 1659, by Rembrandt This article is about the Biblical figure. ... Hebrew redirects here. ...

Religious Belief Foundations

Hebrew religious, Kabbalaistic and 'Hebraic Sacred Science' traditions hold that the text of the Torah was originally given to mankind in a single long string of 304,805 Hebrew characters. The spaces, punctuation, sentence, chapter and five-book structures were all added later to form the modern Pentateuch. This "Word" of the Creator was, according to this tradition, delivered to mankind in the form of a single 304,805 letter word. It is in this context that the Torah is uniquely, specifically and literally considered by believers to be "The Word". This article is about traditional Jewish Kabbalah. ... Look up Pentateuch in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

For this reason, Hebrew tradition dictates that Torah scribes must complete many years of training, much of which has to do with learning the proper meditative techniques, before being allowed to copy Torah scrolls.[1] The tradition holds that not a single "jot or tittle", nor one iota of the Torah must be added, changed or omitted from "The Word". For other senses of this word, see Meditation (disambiguation). ... Look up Ι, ι in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Believers in this tradition sometimes point to a purely literal interpretation of the first seventeen words of the Gospel of John from the New Testament as evidence for their belief:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God".

In summary, the exclusive application of Bible Codes techniques to the Torah "string" is based in the belief that at the most fundamental level, God is a "Living Word", essentially, an almost infinitely complex information structure that begets all that exists,^[2] that the Torah is an information structure analogous to the DNA structure of all creation.[2][3] Some more recent beliefs among various groups suggest that "the Word was made flesh" in a literal sense; that the physical body of Jesus Christ was manifested divinely, that his DNA was somehow perfectly derived from "The Word".^[3][4]. Researcher-spiritualist Gregg Braden and others have been exploring the human DNA string and claim to have discovered evidence of "The Word" in human DNA.

Since 1994, more recent (post WRR) views extend the analysis of biblical texts to include Old Testament texts outside the Torah and also to the New Testament, but these are rejected by Kabbalaistic tradition.

The traditional view of the codes further asserts that the "information" encoded in the Torah cannot be used to predict the future, and that at best the codes provide evidence of an all-knowing creator whose knowledge of the Universe and all of its possibilities spans both space and time. In this view, (from an information theoretical viewpoint) the letter-sequence of the Torah is to the Universe as the DNA sequence is to the human body, useful for understanding how the universe works on a macro scale, and illustrative of the "Grand Design" which encompasses all possible events, but nonetheless utterly unreliable for prediction of what specific combinations of micro-scale events will occur to create the 'reality' of human history.

The traditional view conflicts with the more recent and highly sensationalized views suggesting that the Codes may be valuable as tools of prediction. These views of the codes first emerged in popular culture with the book The Bible Code by journalist Michael Drosnin, which suggests that the codes can be analyzed by computer to provide warnings for the future. The Bible Code is a best-selling controversial book by Michael Drosnin, first published in 1997. ... Michael Drosnin (born January 31, 1946) is an American journalist and author, best known for his writings on the Bible code. ...

The traditional view can be compared to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Physics in which, at the quantum level, the very act of measuring an information system in a state of quantum uncertainty can cause that system to "collapse" into a certain state around the potentiality that the observer was looking for. According to this view, the very act of searching the code for one possible future outcome, such as an assassination, hence "measuring" the event that may happen in the future, can cause the event itself to happen. In that same paradoxical way that Schrödinger's cat is said to be both dead and alive, and neither dead nor alive until the measurement is made. Early twentieth century studies of the physics of very small-scale phenomena led to the Copenhagen interpretation. ... In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, sometimes called the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle, expresses a limitation on accuracy of (nearly) simultaneous measurement of observables such as the position and the momentum of a particle. ... The framework of quantum mechanics requires a careful definition of measurement, and a thorough discussion of its practical and philosophical implications. ... Schrödingers Cat: When the nucleus (bottom left) decays, the Geiger counter (bottom centre) may sense it and trigger the release of the gas. ...

A more nuanced and academic view of the Codes was presented in 1997 by Jeffrey Satinover in Cracking the Bible Code. Satinover attempted to present the 'puzzle' in broader historical, mathematical and theological contexts, but this work was overshadowed by the more sensational Drosnin works that fueled the controversy. Jeffrey Satinover, MD, is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author of five books. ...

ELS - Equidistant Letter Sequence method

The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS. With a skip of -4, and ignoring the spaces and punctuation, the word SAFEST is spelled out backwards.

Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each pair of adjacent lines. The King James or Authorized Version of the Bible is an English translation of the Christian Bible first published in 1611. ... Genesis (Greek: Γένεσις, having the meanings of birth, creation, cause, beginning, source and origin) is the first book of the Torah (five books of Moses) and hence the first book of the Tanakh, part of the Hebrew Bible; it is also the first book of the Christian Old Testament. ...

Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy). Image File history File links BibleCode. ... Hebrew redirects here. ... Template:Jews and Jewdaism Template:The Holy Book Named TorRah The Torah () is the most valuable Holy Doctrine within Judaism,(and for muslims) revered as the first relenting Word of Ulllah, traditionally thought to have been revealed to Blessed Moosah, An Apostle of Ulllah. ...

ELS Extensions

Once a specific word has been found as an ELS, it is natural to see if that word is part of a longer ELS consisting of multiple words.^[4] For example, in the middle of the right most column of the boxed matrix above is the ELS "he". After searching immediately above and below this ELS, we see another ELS ("toe") that is right below the "he" ELS. Code pioneers Haralick and Rips have published an example of a longer, extended ELS, which reads, "Destruction I will call you; cursed is Bin Laden and vengeance from the Moshiach." ^[5]

ELS extensions that form phrases or sentences are of interest. The longer the extended ELS, the less likely it is to be the result of chance.^[6]

History

In the last years of his life, French mathematician Blaise Pascal had concluded in his philosophical work Pensees that "The Old Testament is a cipher." ^[7] Blaise Pascal (pronounced ), (June 20 [[1624 // ]] – August 19, 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. ... The Pensées (literally, thoughts) represented an apology for the Christian religion by Blaise Pascal, the renowned 17th century philosopher and mathematician. ... The Pensées (literally, thoughts) represented an apology for the Christian religion by Blaise Pascal, the renowned 17th century philosopher and mathematician. ...

Shortly after Pascal's death, another early seeker of divinely encrypted messages was Isaac Newton, who, according to John Maynard Keynes believed^[8] that "the universe is a cryptogram set by the Almighty" and in the structure of the universe, Newton sought the answers to "a riddle of the Godhead of past and future events divinely fore-ordained". Sir Isaac Newton FRS (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) [ OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727][1] was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist. ... Keynes redirects here. ...

Newton eventually turned his attention to biblical prophecy and "the Revelation, with respect to the Scripture of Truth, which Daniel was commanded to shut up and seal, till the time of the end. Until that time comes, the Lamb is opening the seals." Some sources^[9] have attempted to connect Keynes' attribution of the "universe is a cryptogram" quote with Newton's later interest in biblical prophecy, even to the extent of re-wording the quote, substituting the word "Bible" for "universe", but there appears to be no evidence that Newton ever attempted any cryptographic analyses of the Bible, nor any explicit reference by Newton to the text of the bible as a cryptogram or 'cipher', as Pascal had come to believe. Newton's interest in Biblical texts appeared to be in the unlocking of allegorical riddles rather than any mathematical de-coding of texts.

The 13th-century Spanish Rabbi Bachya ben Asher may have been the first^{[citation needed]} to describe an ELS in the Bible. His 4-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Hebrew calendar. Over the following centuries there are some hints that the ELS technique was known, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by the Slovakian Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known only to a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of an Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partners Doron Witztum and Alexander Rotenberg, and several others. As a means of recording the passage of time, the 13th century was that century which lasted from 1201 to 1300. ... For the town in Italy, see Rabbi, Italy. ... Bahya ben Asher or Bahya ben Asher ben Halawa also known as the Rabbeinu Behaye, born about the middle of the thirteenth century at Saragossa, died 1340 was a 13th century rabbi and scholar of Judaism. ... The Hebrew calendar (‎) or Jewish calendar is the calendar used by Jews for religious purposes. ... Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl (1903-1957) became famous for his tireless efforts to the save the Jews of Slovakia from extermination at Nazi hands during the European Holocaust. ... Eliyahu Rips is an Israeli mathematician known for his research in algebra and the controversial Bible codes. ... The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים) is one of Israels biggest and most important institutes of higher learning and research. ...

Rips and Witztum designed computer software for the ELS technique and subsequently found many examples. About 1985, they decided to carry out a formal test and the "Great rabbis experiment" was born. This experiment tested the hypothesis that ELSs for the names of famous rabbis could be found closer to ELSs of their dates of birth and death than chance alone could explain. The definition of "close" was complex but, roughly, two ELSs are close if they can be displayed together in a small rectangle. The experiment succeeded in finding sequences which fit these definitions, and they were interpreted as indicating the phenomenon was real.

The great rabbis experiment went through several iterations but was eventually published (1994) in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. Prior to publication the journal's editor Robert Kass subjected the paper to an unprecedented three successive peer reviews by the journal's referees, who according to Kass were "baffled". Though still skeptical,^[10] none of the reviewers had found any flaws. Understanding that the paper was certain to generate controversy, it was presented to readers in the context of a "challenging puzzle". Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. ...

Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none were published in journals. Another experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places of their births and deaths (rather than the dates), was conducted by Harold Gans, Senior Cryptologic Mathematician for the United States National Security Agency.^[11] Again, the results were interpreted as being meaningful and thus suggestive of a more than chance result. These Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries. Cryptology is an umbrella term for cryptography and cryptanalysis. ... “NSA” redirects here. ... Michael Drosnin (born January 31, 1946) is an American journalist and author, best known for his writings on the Bible code. ... The Bible Code is a best-selling controversial book by Michael Drosnin, first published in 1997. ... Jean-François Millet Le Semeur (The Sower) Simon & Schuster logo, circa 1961. ... For the band, see 1997 (band). ...

In 2002, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject, called The Bible Code II. The Jewish outreach group Aish-HaTorah employs the Bible Codes in their Discovery Seminars to persuade secular Jews of the divinity of the Bible and to encourage them to trust in its traditional Orthodox teachings. Use of Bible code techniques also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, who is a Messianic Jew, and Grant Jeffrey. Another Bible code technique was developed in 1997 by Dean Coombs (also Christian). Various pictograms are claimed to be formed by words and sentences using ELS.^[12] The Baruch Hashem Messianic Synagogue in Dallas, Texas Theology and Practice Messiah · Yeshua · Dance · Seal Religious Texts Messianic Bible translations Movement leaders & Orgs. ... Grant R. Jeffrey is a teacher of Bible prophecy and apologist for Evangelical Christianity. ... Pictogram for public toilets A pictogram or pictograph is a symbol which represents an object or a concept by illustration. ...

Since 2000, physicist Nathan Jacobi, an agnostic Jew, and engineer Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew, have discovered hundreds of examples of lengthy, extended ELSs. ^[13] The number of extended ELSs at different lengths is compared with those expected from a non-encoded text, as determined by a formula from Markov Chain Theory.^[14]

Recent developments

Yitzchok Adlerstein, self described as "one of the most vocal skeptics" about the Bible Codes noted that on October 10, 2005, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to leading Bible Code proponent Robert Aumann for his work in game theory, the same field that led to an earlier award to John Nash. Reviewing Aumann's 2004 concluding remarks in response to the "Gans Committee" study^[15] in the context of Aumann's twenty years of codes research, Adlerstein noted that Aumann had come to the conclusion that the codes could neither be proven nor could they be disproven with the scientific methods employed to date.^[16] The Nobel Prize (Swedish: ) was established in Alfred Nobels will in 1895, and it was first awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace in 1901. ... Israel Robert John Aumann (ישראל אומן) (born June 8, 1930) is an Israeli mathematician and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. ... Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is often used in the context of economics. ... John Nash may refer to: John Nash (1752-1835), British architect John Forbes Nash (born 1928), mathematician, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and subject of the novel and film titled A Beautiful Mind. ...

In 2006, three new Torah Codes papers were published at the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06). Nachum Bombach and Harold Gans presented "Patterns of Co-Linear Equidistant Letter Sequences and Verses,", WRR author Eliyahu Rips and Art Levitt presented "The Twin Towers Cluster in Torah Codes", and Art Levitt published "Component Analysis of Torah Code Phrases".[5] Each of the three works is supported by noted high technology entrepreneur Yuri Pikover, founder of Xylan (acquired in 1999 by Alcatel)^[17][18] Eliyahu Rips is an Israeli mathematician known for his research in algebra and the controversial Bible codes. ... Alcatel SA is a global company, headquartered in France that provides hardware, software and services to telecommunications service providers and enterprises. ...

Criticism

The primary objection advanced against Bible codes is that information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, if data chosen for ELS experiments are intentionally or unintentionally "cooked" before the experiment is defined, similar patterns can be found in texts other than the Torah. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words can be expected to appear, depending on the details chosen for the experiment, and that it is possible to "tune" an ELS experiment to achieve a result which appears to exhibit patterns that overcome the level of noise. Not to be confused with information technology, information science, or informatics. ...

Criticism of the original paper

In 1999, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay, together with mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in Statistical Science (known as 'MBBK') as a refutation of the original paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR). The MBBK paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians prior to publication. Brendan D. McKay is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ANU (Australian National University). ... Dror Bar-Natan (born January 30, 1966) is a mathematics professor at the University of Toronto, Canada. ...

MBBK's refutation of WRR:

• Observed that the data used by Witztum and Rips was a list of rabbi names in Hebrew, a language that is somewhat flexible as far as name spelling goes, and that each rabbi has several different appellations (aliases and nicknames), so the WRR result could be explained if the appellations were not collected properly. The MBBK paper asserted "...the (WRR) data was very far from [being] tightly defined by the rules of their experiment. Rather, there was enormous "wiggle room" available, especially in the choice of names for the famous rabbis".
• Asserted that "indirect evidence" exists to support an allegation that the data were not, in fact, collected properly; that is, the choice of names and spellings was somehow biased, either intentionally or unintentionally, towards a result supporting the validity of the "codes".
• Discussed attempts at replicating the experiment that, while being similar in the large, failed to achieve exactly the same results. From the paper: "A technical problem that gave us some difficulty is that WRR have been unable to provide us with their original computer program. Neither the two programs distributed by WRR, nor our own independent implementations of the algorithm as described in WRR's papers, consistently produce the exact distances listed [by WRR]".

From these observations, MBBK created an alternative hypothesis to explain the "puzzle" of how the codes were discovered. MBBK's claim, in essence, was that the WRR authors had "cheated"^[19]. MBBK went on to describe the means by which the cheating might have occurred, and demonstrate the tactic as presumed. In statistics, the Alternative Hypothesis is the hypothesis proposed to explain a statistically significant difference between results, that is if the Null Hypothesis has been rejected. ...

MBBK's refutation was not strictly mathematical in nature, rather it asserted that the WRR authors and contributors had intentionally or unintentionally (a) selected the names and/or dates in advance and (b) designed their experiments to match their selection and thereby achieved their "desired" result. The MBBK paper argued that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations, and that the WRR result "merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it.".

The MBBK paper demonstrated that this "tuning", when combined with what MBBK asserted was available "wiggle" room, was capable of generating a result similar to WRR's Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. Psychologist and MBBK co-author Maya Bar-Hillel subsequently summarized the MBBK view that the WRR paper was a hoax, an intentionally and a carefully designed "magic trick"^[20]. For other uses, see War and Peace (disambiguation). ...

Refutation of "cheating" allegations

On further examination of the MBBK hypothesis, reviewers looked at the chronology of WRR's experiment with respect to the selection of the data and the design of the experiment, and it became apparent that MBBK's hypothesis required the presumption of a conspiracy between WRR authors and their group of co-contributors, to tune the data and experiment in advance. In his own refutation of the "conspiracy hypothesis", codes proponent Harold Gans prefaced his work with "As we shall see, if there is a conspiracy here the number of people necessarily involved in it will stretch the credulity of any reasonable person."^[21]

Responding to the MBBK allegations of trickery, WRR authors issued a series of detailed refutations of the claims of MBBK, including evidence that no such tuning did or even could have taken place. An earlier WRR response to a request by MBBK authors presented results from additional experiments that used the specific "alternate" name and date formats which MBBK suggested had been intentionally avoided by WRR. Using MBBK's alternates, the results WRR returned showed equivalent or better support for the existence of the codes, and so challenged the "wiggle room" assertion of MBBK. In the wake of the WRR response, author Bar-Natan issued a formal statement of non-response. After a series of exchanges with McKay and Bar-Hillel, WRR author Witztum responded in a new paper claiming that McKay had used smoke screen tactics in creating several Straw Man arguments, and thereby avoided the points made by WRR authors refuting MBBK. Witztum also claimed that, upon interviewing a key independent expert contracted by McKay for the MBBK paper, that some experiments performed for MBBK had validated, rather than refuted the original WRR findings, and questioned why MBBK had expunged these results from their paper. A straw man argument is a logical fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponents position. ...

By 1999, meaningful debate mostly disappeared into personal attacks and diatribes as the participants accused one another of all manner of madness, deceptions and ill intent.

Criticism of Michael Drosnin

Journalist Drosnin's books have been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future.^[22] Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community,^[23] mistranslating Hebrew words ^[24] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes.^[25]

Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby-Dick would not yield ELS results comparable to the Torah, McKay created a new experiment that was tuned to find many ELS letter arrays in Moby Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive ("Oslo", relating to the Oslo accords).^[26] Drosnin and others have responded to these claims, saying the tuning tactics employed by McKay were simply "nonsense", and providing analyses to support their argument that the tables, data and methodologies McKay used to produce the Moby Dick results "simply do not qualify as code tables". ^[27] Moby-Dick book cover Moby-Dick - the official title of the first edition - is a novel by Herman Melville. ... Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat during the Oslo Accords on September 13, 1993. ...

Skeptic Dave Thomas claimed to find other examples in many texts, though Thomas' methodology was refuted by Robert Haralick ^[28] and others. In addition, McKay claimed that Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran and McKay again demonstrated the 'tuning' technique, demonstrating that these techniques could produce "evidence" of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, 'coded' references in non-Torah Bible texts, as for instance the famous Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (eg, misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text. McKay and others claim that in the absence of an objective measure of quality and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans. Dave Thomas is a physicist and mathmatician, mostly known for his writings and research on the paranormal (such as UFO citings in Roswell, New Mexico and Aztec culture, as well as finding codings in other texts that dispute the credibility of the Bible Code). ... Robert Haralick, Professor Emeritus, is a Computer Scientist working at the City University of New York. ... The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. ... A television program is the content of television broadcasting. ... John Safran vs God is an 8 part television documentary series by John Safran which was broadcast on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) of Australia in 2004. ... This Australian media personality is not to be confused with the American author Jonathan Safran Foer. ... is the 254th day of the year (255th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the state. ... Robert Matthew Van Winkle (born October 31, 1968), better known as Vanilla Ice, is a Grammy Award nominated, American Music Award winning American rapper and actor known mostly for the 1990 single Ice Ice Baby. ... For other uses, see Number of the Beast (disambiguation). ...

Predictions versus probabilities

Traditional codes scholars and adherents believe that the codes cannot (and should not) be used for "soothsaying". The traditional view that the codes are "useless for prediction", and the basis for it, were described by Jeffrey Satinover in his 1997 book "Cracking the Bible Code"^[29]. This view holds that, at best, signs of the existence of encrypted historical information in the Torah indicate evidence supporting the existence of an all-knowing creator.

Nonetheless, the use and publication of "predictions" based on Bible codes has succeeded in bringing about popular awareness of the codes, most notably based on the work of journalist Michael Drosnin. Drosnin, who says he is "not at all religious" and does not believe in God, has offered speculations on the source of the codes but no answers, saying "I'm a reporter and can't go past the hard evidence. There is a code, therefore there is an encoder. I don't know who or what it/he/she is.^[30] Michael Drosnin (born January 31, 1946) is an American journalist and author, best known for his writings on the Bible code. ...

Drosnin's most famous prediction, in 1994, was the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, using a Bible code technique.^[24] Drosnin uses this prediction as evidence for the validity of his bible code techniques.^[31] Opponents claim that in the political atmosphere of the time, predicting with no additional details the fact that Rabin would be assassinated is not compelling, though dramatic.^{[citation needed]}. Less political predictions include the 2004 Red Sox World Series victory, and widespread use of hand held communication devices (cell phones).^{[citation needed]} Year 1994 (MCMXCIV) The year 1994 was designated as the International Year of the Family and the International Year of the Sport and the Olympic Ideal by the United Nations. ... Year 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full 1995 Gregorian calendar). ... Assassin and Assassins redirect here. ... For other persons named Rabin, see Rabin (disambiguation). ...

Drosnin, in The Bible Code II, described the probabilities of nuclear holocausts and the destruction of major cities by earthquakes in 2006, saying "The dangers will peak in the Hebrew year 5766 (September 2005 - September 2006 in the modern calendar), the year that is most clearly encoded with both 'World War' and 'Atomic Holocaust'..."The Bible Code is not a prediction that we will all die in 2006. It is a warning that we might all die in 2006, if we do not change our future." ^[32] Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2005 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December- → Deaths in September September 28 : Constance Baker Motley September 25 : M. Scott Peck September 25 : Don Adams September 20 : Simon Wiesenthal September 14 : Robert Wise September 10 : Hermann Bondi September 8 : Donald Horne September 7 : Moussa Arafat... September 2006 is the ninth month of 2006 and has begun on a Friday. ...

More recently, Drosnin has refrained from making concrete predictions, saying, "I don't think the code makes predictions. I think it reveals probabilities." Drosnin also said "I think it might tell us all our possible futures."^[33]

See also

• Number of the Beast
• Cryptography
• Kabbalah
• Jeffrey Satinover
• Shemhamphorasch
• The Bible Code (book)
• Summary of Christian eschatological differences
• theomatics
• bibliomancy
• confirmation bias
• Brendan McKay
• Eliyahu Rips
• π (film)
• Texas sharpshooter fallacy

Relevant topics: For other uses, see Number of the Beast (disambiguation). ... The German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II for encryption of very high-level general staff messages Cryptography (or cryptology; derived from Greek κρυπτός kryptós hidden, and the verb γράφω gráfo write or λεγειν legein to speak) is the study of message secrecy. ... This article is about traditional Jewish Kabbalah. ... Jeffrey Satinover, MD, is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author of five books. ... 72 names of God Note: This article contains special characters. ... The Bible Code is a best-selling controversial book by Michael Drosnin, first published in 1997. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Theomatics is a numerological study of the Greek and Hebrew text of the Christian Bible, based upon gematria and isopsephia, that its proponents assert demonstrates the direct intervention of God in the writing of Christian scripture. ... Bibliomancy is the use of books in divination. ... It has been suggested that Myside bias be merged into this article or section. ... Brendan D. McKay is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ANU (Australian National University). ... Eliyahu Rips is an Israeli mathematician known for his research in algebra and the controversial Bible codes. ... π (also known as Pi or Pi - Faith in Chaos) is a 1998 American psychological thriller directed by Darren Aronofsky. ... The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a logical fallacy where a cluster of statistically non-significant data is taken from its context, and therefore thought to have a common cause. ...

• Ergodic theory, which forms the foundation for modern information theory
• Information theory, which involves various statistical properties of long sequences of text
• Ramsey theory, for an interesting and important notion of "unavoidable coincidences"
• Symbolic dynamics, a subfield of ergodic theory which deals with (possibly multidimensional) symbolic sequences
• Holographic principle, in which John Archibald Wheeler and others posit that the universe may be made of information rather than matter and energy.

In mathematics, a measure-preserving transformation T on a probability space is said to be ergodic if the only measurable sets invariant under T have measure 0 or 1. ... Not to be confused with information technology, information science, or informatics. ... Ramsey theory, named for Frank P. Ramsey, is a branch of mathematics that studies the conditions under which order must appear. ... In mathematics, symbolic dynamics is the practice of modelling a dynamical system by a space consisting of infinite sequences of abstract symbols, each sequence corresponding to a state of the system, and a shift operator corresponding to the dynamics. ... The holographic principle is a speculative conjecture about quantum gravity theories, proposed by Gerard t Hooft and improved and promoted by Leonard Susskind, claiming that all of the information contained in a volume of space can be represented by a theory which lives in the boundary of that region. ... John Archibald Wheeler (born July 9, 1911) is an eminent American theoretical physicist. ...

References

• Drosnin, Michael (1997). The Bible Code. USA: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-81079-4. 
• Satinover, Jeffrey (1997). Cracking the Bible Code. New York: W. Morrow. ISBN 0-688-15463-8. 
• Drosnin, Michael (1997). The Bible Code. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81995-X. 
• Drosnin, Michael (2002). The Bible Code II: The Countdown. USA: Viking Books. ISBN 0-670-03210-7. 
• Drosnin, Michael (2002). The Bible Code II: The Countdown. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84249-8. 
• Drosnin, Michael (Forthcoming 2006). The Bible Code III: The Quest. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84784-8. 
• Stanton, Phil (1998). The Bible Code - Fact or Fake?. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. ISBN 0-89107-925-4. 
• Haralick, Robert M.; Rips, Eliyahu; and Glazerson, Matiyahu (2005). Torah Codes: A Glimpse into the Infinite. Mazal & Bracha Publishing. ISBN 0-9740493-9-5. 

2008 (MMVIII) is the current year, a leap year that started on Tuesday of the Anno Domini (or common era), in accordance to the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 73rd day of the year (74th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 356th day of the year (357th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2008 (MMVIII) is the current year, a leap year that started on Tuesday of the Anno Domini (or common era), in accordance to the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 73rd day of the year (74th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 284th day of the year (285th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2008 (MMVIII) is the current year, a leap year that started on Tuesday of the Anno Domini (or common era), in accordance to the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 55th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... The Bible Code is a best-selling controversial book by Michael Drosnin, first published in 1997. ...

External links

• The Bible Code (In Spanish but you can see the news matrices found in War and Peace book)
• The Bible Code, transcript of a story which aired on BBC Two, Thursday 20 November 2003, featuring comments by Drosnin, Rips, and McKay.
• Doron Witztum's codes page from Doron Witzum, a coauthor of the Statistical Sciences paper
• Tutorial Website from Professor Robert Haralick
• "Scientific Refutation of the Bible Codes" by Brendan McKay (Computer Science, Australian National University) and others
• The Bible Code: A Book Review by Allyn Jackson, plus Comments on the Bible Code by Shlomo Sternberg, Notices of the AMS September 1997 (see the American Mathematical Society)
• The Bible "Codes": a Textual Perspective, by Jeffrey H. Tigay (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania)
• Hidden Messages and The Bible Code from Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, publisher of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine
• Trying to stay objective, by Remy Wilders (Computer Science, France)