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by MICHAEL DROSNIN
"A MATHEMATICIAN has discovered a hidden code in the Bible
that appears to reveal the details of events that took place thousands of years
after the Bible was written," I disclosed in a letter to Yitzhak Rabin, the
Prime Minister of Israel.
"The reason I'm telling you about this is that the only time your full name -
Yitzhak Rabin - is encoded in the Bible, the words "assassin that will
assassinate" cross your name.
"That should not be ignored, because the assassinations of both John and Robert
Kennedy and Anwar Sadat (the Egyptian leader) are also encoded in the Bible - in
the case of Sadat with the first and last names of his killer, the date of the
murder, the place, and how it was done.
"I think you are in real danger, but that the danger can be averted."
On November 4 1995, more than a year after my letter was delivered to Rabin by
his close friend, the poet Chaim Guri, came the awful confirmation - a shot in
the back from a man who believed he was on a mission from God, the murder that
was encoded in the Bible 3,000 years before.
The assassination of Rabin is dramatic confirmation of the reality of the Bible
code, a hidden text in the Old Testament which reveals the future.
The code was discovered by Dr Eliyahu Rips, one of the world's leading experts
in group theory, a field of mathematics which underlies quantum physics.
It has been confirmed by eminent mathematicians at the prestigious American
universities of Harvard and Yale, and been replicated by a senior code-breaker
at the US Department of Defence, who tested it with his own computer program.
Rabin's assassination was not the only modern event found. In addition to the
other assassinations, hundreds of other world-shaking events are also encoded in
the Bible - everything from World War II to Watergate, from Winston Churchill to
Bill Clinton, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, from the Moon landing to the
collision of a comet with Jupiter.
And the Rabin murder was not the only event discovered in advance - the Jupiter
collision was found, with the exact date of impact, before it happened, as were
the dates of the Gulf War.
It doesn't make ordinary sense in our secular world, and since I am not
religious, I would normally be among the first to dismiss it as millennium
fever.
But I have known about this for five years. I've investigated it exactly as I
would have checked out a story when I was a reporter at the Washington Post and
the Wall Street Journal.
I spent weeks at a time with Dr Rips. I learned Hebrew and checked the code on
my own computer every day. I talked to the Defence Department codebreaker. I
went to Harvard, Yale and Jerusalem's Hebrew University to meet some of the
world's leading mathematicians. They all confirmed that there is a code in the
Bible which reveals the future.
I did not fully believe it until Rabin was killed. Suddenly, brutally, I had
absolute proof that the Bible code was real. It could not have been a
coincidence.
Rabin's name appeared only once in the Bible. The odds against his name
appearing with the prediction of his assassination were at least 3,000 to one.
Mathematicians say 100 to one is beyond chance: the most rigorous test ever used
is 1,000 to one.
MOREOVER, the code had revealed in advance when it would
happen. 'In 5756', the Hebrew year that began in September 1995 crossed 'Rabin
assassination'. Now we saw that the code also revealed where: 'Tel Aviv'.
I remembered being asked: 'What if you had known about the Sadat assassination
before it happened? Could you have warned him, and kept it from happening?'
With Rabin, I tried and failed. Before his murder, no one was able to find the
name of the gunman, or the exact date.
Afterwards, though, the name of his assassin, Amir, was immediately found. It
was always there, right above Rabin's name but, of course, because we hadn't
known it we couldn't see it, it was hidden in plain sight. And also, in that
same verse, the hidden text stated: 'He struck, he killed the Prime Minister.'
He was even identified as an Israeli who shot at close range: "His killer, one
of his people, the one who got close."
But the Bible code is not a crystal ball - you can't find anything without
knowing what to look for.
When I first flew to Israel, the Bible code and the Bible itself were the
furthest things from my mind. I was there as a reporter to meet the chief of
Israeli Intelligence about the future of warfare.
But while in Tel Aviv I learned of another mystery, one that suddenly pulled me
back several millennia - 3,200 years, to be exact, to the time when, according
to the Bible, God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai.
As I was leaving Intelligence headquarters, a young officer I'd met earlier
stopped me. "There's a mathematician in Jerusalem you should see," he said. "He
found the exact date the Gulf War would begin - in the Bible."
It all seemed beyond belief. But the man who had discovered the code was
considered a near genius in the world of mathematics. I went to see him.
Eli Rips is so self-effacing that he tends to give other people credit for his
own work, and one would never guess he is a world-famous mathematician. When I
met him in June 1992, I assumed that there would be nothing to his claim.
Rips pulled down a volume from his bookshelf and read to me, quoting an 18th-
century sage called the Genius of Vilna: "The rule is that all that was, is and
will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah (the Bible), from the
first word to the last word."
I picked up a Bible from the desk in his study, and asked Rips to show me the
Gulf War. Instead of opening the Bible, he turned on his computer. "The Bible
code is a computer program," he explained.
On the computer screen appeared Hebrew letters highlighted in five different
colours creating a crossword puzzle pattern. Rips handed me a print-out.
'Hussein', 'Scuds', and 'Russian missile' were all encoded together in Genesis.
The full code sequence stated: 'Hussein picked a day.'
Rips said: "Here, in Genesis Chapter 14, where we have the story of Abraham's
wars with the surrounding kingdoms, we found the date - 'fire on 3rd Shevat'.
"That's the date in the Hebrew calendar equivalent to January 18 1991. It's the
day Iraq launched the first Scud missile against Israel."
"How many dates did you find?" I asked.
"Just this one three weeks before the war began," he replied.
"But who knew 3,000 years ago that there would be a Gulf War let alone that a
missile would be fired on January 18?"
"God," replied Rips.
THE Bible code was discovered in the original Hebrew version of the Old
Testament, the Bible as it was first written. That book, now translated into
every language, is the foundation of all Western religion. But the code exists
only in Hebrew, because that is the Bible's original language.
Eli Rips told me that the first hint of the encoding had been found more than 50
years ago by H M D Weissmandel, a rabbi in Prague who discovered that if he
skipped 50 letters, and then another 50, and then another 50, the word 'Torah'
was spelled out at the beginning of the Book of Genesis.
THE same skip-sequence again spelled out 'Torah' in the
Book of Exodus, Book of Numbers and Book of Deuteronomy.
"I heard about it totally by chance," said Rips. That was 12 years ago. "At
first I tried just counting letters like Weissmandel. You know, Isaac Newton
also tried to find the code in the Bible, and he considered it more important
than his theory of the universe."
Sir Isaac Newton was the first modern scientist; he worked out the mechanics of
the solar system and discovered the force of gravity. He was certain, too, that
there was a hidden code in the Bible that would reveal the future. He learned
Hebrew, and spent half his life trying to find it.
In fact, according to his biographer John Maynard Keynes, it became an
obsession. When Keynes became provost at Cambridge University, he discovered
there the papers that Newton had packed up in 1696 when he had retired as
provost.
Keynes was shocked. Most of the million words in Newton's own handwriting were
not about mathematics or astronomy, but esoteric theology. They revealed that
the great physicist believed there was hidden in the Bible a prophecy of human
history.
Newton, said Keynes, was certain the Bible, indeed the whole universe, was a
"cryptogram set by the Almighty", and wanted to "read the riddle of the Godhead,
the riddle of past and future events divinely foreordained".
Newton was still searching for the Bible code when he died. But his lifetime
quest failed no matter what mathematical model he applied.
The discovery that had eluded Newton was made by Eli Rips because he had the one
essential tool that Newton lacked - a computer. The hidden text of the Bible was
encoded with a kind of time-lock. It could not be opened until the computer had
been invented.
WHEN I applied a computer, I made the breakthrough," Rips
explained. "I found words encoded far more than statistics allowed for by random
chance, and I knew I was on to something of real importance."
Final proof of the Old Testament code eluded him until he met another Israeli,
physicist Doron Witztum. It was Witztum who completed the mathematical model,
and Rips considers him a genius. Rips handed me a copy of their original
experiment, Equidistant Letter Sequences In The Book Of Genesis. What they had
done was to search for the names of 32 great sages, wise men from biblical to
modern times, to determine whether their names, and the dates of their birth and
death were encoded in the first book of the Bible.
They looked for the same names and the same dates in the Hebrew translation of
War And Peace and in two original Hebrew texts. In the Bible the names and the
dates were encoded together. In War And Peace and the two other books, they were
not.
And the odds of finding the encoded information by random chance were ultimately
found to be one in ten million.
A senior code-breaker at the US Department of Defence, heard about the startling
discovery in Israel, and decided to investigate.
Harold Gans had spent his life making and breaking codes for American
Intelligence. He was trained as a statistician. He spoke Hebrew. And he was sure
that the Bible code was "off-the-wall, ridiculous".
Gans was certain he could prove that the code did not exist. He wrote his own
computer program, and he looked for the same information the Israelis had found.
He was surprised. It was there. The dates that the sages were born and died were
encoded with their names. Gans could not believe it. He decided to look for
entirely new information in the Bible code, and thereby expose the flaw in
Rips's experiment, possibly even reveal a hoax.
"If this was real," said Gans, "then I figured that the cities where these men
were born and died ought to be encoded as well.'
In his 440-hour experiment, Gans checked not only the names of the 32 sages Rips
finally used, but also 34 others from an earlier list checking all 66 against
the names of the cities. The results made him a believer.
"It sent a chill up my spine," recalled Gans. The cities also matched the names
of the sages in the Bible code.
The Defence Department codebreaker, using his own computer program, had
independently replicated the Israelis' results. The Bible code was real.
"In evaluating the Bible code," Gans later said, "I was doing the same kind of
work I did at the Department of Defence. At first, I was 100 per cent sceptical.
I thought this was all just silly. I set out to disprove the code, and ended up
proving it."
Rips and Witztum submitted their paper to a leading American mathematics
journal, Statistical Science. The editor, Professor Robert Kass, was sceptical.
But he decided to have it checked by other experts, the peer-review process
standard in all serious scientific journals. To Kass's surprise, the paper
passed.
"Our referees were baffled," said Kass. "Their prior beliefs made them think the
Book of Genesis could not possibly contain references to modern-day individuals.
Yet when the authors carried out additional checks, the effect persisted."
Despite the automatic scepticism of mathematicians, no one could find fault with
the maths. No one could raise an unanswered question about the experiment. No
one could explain away the startling fact that the Bible was encoded - that it
revealed the future.
TO UNDERSTAND how the Bible code works, imagine that the Old Testament is
constructed like a giant crossword puzzle. It is encoded from beginning to end
with words that connect to tell a hidden story.
Rips explained that each code is a case of adding every fourth or twelfth or
fiftieth letter to form a word. Skip X spaces, and another X spaces, and another
X spaces, and the hidden message is spelled out.
This is best explained by reading the paragraph below, starting at the first
letter, and skipping every three letters.
"Rips ExplAineD thaT eacH codE
is a Case Of adDing Every fourth or twelfth or
fiftieth letter to form a word." The hidden message is READ THE CODE.
But it is more than a simple skip code. Criss-crossing the entire known text of
the Bible, hidden under the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, is a complex
network of words and phrases, a new revelation. There is a Bible beneath the
Bible.
The Bible was first chiselled in stone and hand-written on parchment scroll, and
finally printed as a book. Now that we have computer technology it can be read
as it was always intended to be read.
To find the code, Rips first eliminated all the spaces between the words, and
turned the entire original Bible (the first five books) into one continuous
letter strand 304,805 letters long.
In doing that, he was actually restoring the Torah to what some believe was its
original form. According to legend, it was the way Moses received the Bible from
God - 'contiguous, without break of words'. The computer searches the strand of
letters for names, words, and phrases hidden by a particular skip code. It
starts at the first letter of the Bible, and looks for every possible skip
sequence - words spelled out with skips of one, two, three, all the way to
several thousand.
The computer then cuts the letter strand into rows of equal length, an stacks
them one upon another, so that the hidden word appears vertically, or
diagonally, with each letter highlighted in a circle or square.
After it finds the key word, the computer can then look for related information.
Time after time it finds connected names. The computer scores the matches
between words using two tests - how closely they appear together, and whether
the skips that spell out the search words are the shortest in the Bible.
Rips explained how it works, using the Gulf War as an example. "We asked the
computer to search for Saddam Hussein," he said. "Then we looked for related
words to see if they came together in a way that was mathematically significant.
With the 'Gulf War', we found 'Scuds' with 'Russian missiles', and the date the
war would begin encoded with the name 'Hussein'."
The words formed a crossword puzzle. Consistently, the Bible code brings
together interlocking words that reveal related information. With Bill Clinton,
'President'. With the Moon landing, 'spaceship' and 'Apollo 11'. With Hitler
'Nazi'. With Kennedy, 'Dallas'.
In experiment after experiment, the crossword puzzles were found only in the
Bible. Not in War And Peace, not in any other book and not in ten million
computer-generated test cases.
According to Rips, there is an infinite amount of information encoded in the
Bible. Each time a new name or word or phrase is discovered in the code, a new
crossword puzzle is formed. Related words cross vertically, horizontally, and
diagonally.
This is not Nostradamus, not 'A star will rise in the East and a great king will
fall', words that can later be read to mean anything that actually does happen.
Instead there are details as precise as any reported by the BBC, names, places,
dates, that are all accurate.
Still, it was all hard to believe. I asked Rips if it were not possible to find
similar information in any text - random letter combinations that had no actual
meaning. Perhaps finding the date of the Gulf War, even a political
assassination, was just a coincidence.
Rips took a coin out of his pocket and flipped it in the air. "If this is a fair
coin," he said, "then half of the time it should come up heads, and half of the
time it should come up tails.
"If I flip the coin 20 times and each time it comes up heads, then everyone
would assume the coin is weighted. The probability that the same side would come
up 20 times in a row is less than one in a million. 'The Bible is like the
weighted coin - it is coded."
He cited his original experiment, the sages encoded in Genesis. 'The only other
possibility is that a random event happened - that we, by chance found the best
match of 32 names and 64 dates - and that would only happen one time in ten
million.'
But if Rips is right, if there is a Bible code, if it foretells the future, then
conventional science can't yet explain it. Not surprisingly, some conventional
scientists can't accept that. One, an Australian statistician, Avraham Hasofer,
attacked the code before Rips published his experiment, before the mathematical
evidence was known.
"Certain types of patterns must inevitably occur in large data sets," he said.
"You can no more find a patternless arrangement of digits or letters than you
can find a cloud without a shape.
"In any event, the use of a statistical test in matters of faith raises grave
problems."
Eli Rips says his critic is wrong on the science, and wrong on the religion.
Hasofer, he notes, never did a statistical test, never checked the maths, and he
never looked at the Bible code itself.
"Of course you can find random letter combinations in any text " says Rips. "Of
course, you will find 'Saddam Hussein' in any large enough data base, but you
won't find 'Scuds', 'Russian missiles', and the day the war began. All in the
same place.
"It doesn't matter if we're looking in a text of 100,000 or 100 million letters,
you will not find coherent information - except in the Bible.
"A great part of mankind now assumes that the Bible is just old folklore, myth,
that science is the only reliable picture of reality. Others say that the Bible,
is the word of God, must be true, and therefore science must be in error.
"I think that, finally, when we understand both well enough, religion and
science will come together."
In the three years since the Rips-Witztum paper was published, no one has
submitted a rebuttal to the maths journal. No scientist who has actually
examined the Bible code challenges it. They all started out as sceptics, and
ended up believers.
Einstein once said: "The distinction between past, present and future is only an
illusion, however persistent". Time, he said, is not at all what it seems. It
does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with
the past.
But a question remained: if the future could be known, could it also be changed?
Is the Bible code proof of God's existence?
ABRIDGED extract from THE BIBLE CODE, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
on May 30, 1997. Copyright Michael Drosnin 1997.
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