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by MICHAEL DROSNIN
CAN there really be a code in the Bible that recorded
events thousands of years before they happened, that told our history ahead of
time, that might now reveal a future that for us does not yet exist?
I had been a reporter at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, two of
America's most respected newspapers. I had started out on the police beat and
always had a very down-to-earth view of reality.
But over five years working closely with Dr Eli Rips, the distinguished
mathematician who had discovered the Bible code and unlocked it with a computer
program, we found ten, then 100 and then 1,000 world events encoded in the
Bible.
It was possible on any given day to pick up a newspaper and, if the front-page
story was important enough, find it encoded in a document that had been written
3,000 years ago.
The information, time after time, proved as accurate as current accounts - the
names, the places, the dates all encoded in Genesis through to Deuteronomy in
the Hebrew Old Testament. And sometimes it was found in advance.
Six months before the 1992 presidential election in America, the code revealed
Bill Clinton's victory. Connected to 'Clinton' was his title, 'President'.
The greatest recent upheaval in America, the fall Of Richard Nixon in the
Watergate crisis is also encoded. 'Watergate' appears with 'Nixon' and the year
he was forced to resign, 1974. Where 'Watergate' is encoded, the hidden text of
the Bible asks a question: Who is he? President, but he was kicked out.'
Man's triumphs, like the Moon landing, are also encoded. 'Man on Moon' appears
with 'spaceship' and 'Apollo 11'. Even the date Neil Armstrong first stepped on
the lunar surface. July 20. 1969. is in the Bible. It is encoded in Genesis
'Apollo 11', at the point where, in the plain text, God tells Abraham: 'Look now
toward Heaven, and count the stars, if thou be able to number them.'
GREAT artists and writers, inventors and scientists from
ancient to modern times are encoded, too. 'Homer' is identified as the 'Greek
poet'. 'Shakespeare' is foretold in a single code sequence that spells out not
only his name but his deeds: 'Shakespeare' - 'presented on stage' - 'Hamlet' -
'Macbeth'.
'Einstein' is encoded once. 'They prophesied a brainy person' appears in the
same place. The word 'science', overlapped by the words 'a new and excellent
understanding', cross his name. And right above 'Einstein' the hidden text
states: 'He overturned present reality.'
I kept searching the Bible code on my own, not as a mathematician, but as an
investigative reporter, checking the facts. What is subject to proof, what can
be pinned down in addition to the maths, is the information about the recent
past, and the near future.
Two years into my investigation I found something cosmic predicted in the code -
and then watched it happen in the real world.
In July 1994, the world witnessed the biggest explosion ever seen in our solar
system. A comet bombarded Jupiter with the force of more than a billion megatons
creating fireballs the size of the Earth.
I had found the Jupiter/comet encoding in the Bible myself, two months before
the collision, using a computer program based on Eli Rips's mathematical model.
The collision was encoded twice, once in the Book of Genesis and again in the
Book of Isaiah. The comet, 'Shoemaker-Levy', appeared both times with its full
name - the names of the astronomers who discovered it in 1993 - and its impact
with 'Jupiter' was graphically presented.
In the Bible code, the name of the planet and the name of the comet intersect
twice. In Isaiah the exact date of the impact was stated in advance - July 16.
The event that astronomers had been able to predict a few months ahead of time,
the Bible code predicted just as precisely 3,000 years before it happened.
It was one of those finds that was so dramatic it caused me to believe all over
again. Throughout my search, I kept asking myself if it was all a hoax. Each
morning I woke up doubting it.
Religious and academic authorities have never agreed on the origins of the
Bible. Spiritual leaders say the first five books, Genesis through to
Deuteronomy, were written more than 3,000 years ago by Moses. The academics say
they were written by many hands over many hundreds of years.
However, the argument turns out to be irrelevant. The Old Testament has been a
settled text for at least 1,000 years. There is a complete version from AD1008
(the Leningrad codex), and every Hebrew Bible that now exists is the same letter
for letter.
So the text used in the Bible code computer program has not changed in at least
1,000 years. A hoax is simply ruled out because it would have required a forger
who could see the future.
I went to see Dr Rips at Columbia University, New York, where he was a visiting
professor. He looked at my printout of the Jupiter collision. "This is
exciting," he said, like myself sometimes still awed by the precision of the
Bible code.
ASTRONOMERS knew the comet would hit Jupiter because they
could trace its trajectory, they knew when because they could measure its speed.
But whoever encoded the Bible had the same information thousands of years before
that was possible, thousands of years before Shoemaker and Levy discovered the
comet. So how could the Bible encode the date of the impact?
It was, of course, the big question - how could the future be known? I went with
Rips to see one of Harvard's top mathematicians, David Kazhdan, who told me he
believed the code was real but he could not explain how it worked.
"It does appear that the Bible was encoded 3,000 years ago with information
about future events," said Kazhdan. "I haven't checked it as a statistician, but
I've seen the results. There are no scientific grounds to challenge it. I think
it is real."
"How does it work?" I asked.
"We don't know," said Kazhdan. "But we recognised the existence of electricity a
hundred years before we could explain it."
I asked Rips and Kazhdan how anyone, man or God, could see what did not yet
exist. I had always assumed that the future did not exist until it happened.
Rips replied first with a theological answer. "The world was created," he said.
"The Creator is not confined by time or space. For us the future is non-
existent. For the Creator, the whole universe from beginning to end was seen in
one stroke."
Kazhdan gave a Newtonian explanation. "Science accepts that if we know the
position of every molecule and atom, we can foresee everything," he said.
"In the mechanical world, if we know the position and velocity of an object - a
bullet or a rocket to Mars - then we could also know precisely when and where it
will arrive. So there's no problem in that sense about knowing the future.
"But if you ask me if I am surprised that the future is encoded in the Bible,"
added Kazhdan, "of course I am."
Doron Witztum - Rips's colleague - had done an extensive search for 'the
Holocaust' in the Bible code, and found it spelled out in extraordinary detail.
'In Germany' was encoded with 'Nazis' and 'Berlin'. And the man who actually ran
the concentration camps, 'Eichman', was encoded with 'the ovens' and
'extermination'.
'In Auschwitz' was encoded where the plain text of the Bible decrees 'an end to
all flesh'. Even the technical details of' the 'final solution' were there. The
gas used to kill the Jews, 'zyklon B' was encoded with 'Eichman'.
I. Piatetski-Shapiro, a leading academic at prestigious Yale university, had
seen these findings and he was startled. "As a mathematician," he said, "my
instinct is that there is something real here."
BUT HE cannot explain how it was done. "There is no way
within the known laws of mathematics to explain seeing the future," he said.
"Newtonian physics is too simple to explain a set of predictions this complex
and detailed. Quantum physics is also not enough.
"What we're talking about here is some intelligence that stands outside." The
mathematician paused for a moment then declared: "I think that is the only
answer - that God exists."
"Do you think one day we will be able to explain it in purely scientific terms?"
I asked.
"I doubt it," said Piatetski-Shapiro. "Maybe part of it, but always some part
will remain unknown."
"It is possible, theoretically, to believe in the Bible code without believing
in God," he added. "But if you assume God exists, you don't have to answer the
question: who can see the future?"
I went to see Israel's most famous mathematician, Robert J. Aumann, a member of
both the Israeli and the US National Academy of Science. "The Bible code is
simply a fact," he said.
"The science is impeccable. Rips's results are wildly significant, beyond
anything usually seen in science. I've read his material thoroughly, and the
results are straightforward and clear.
"It goes contrary to all my training as a mathematician, and even the religious
thinking I've come to be comfortable with. There has been nothing like it in all
the hundreds of years of modern science."
Aumann talked to leading mathematicians in Israel, in the United States, all
over the world. No one could find a flaw in the maths. Finally, on March 19,
1996, the most famous mathematician in Israel told the Israeli Academy of
Science: "The Bible code is an established fact."
If the future can be foreseen, can it also be changed? If we had known about
Hitler in advance could we have prevented World War II? Could Yitzhak Rabin, the
Israeli Prime Minister, or US President John Kennedy have been saved from
assassins' bullets? All these events had been encoded in the Bible code and they
had happened.
Even if the killers, Amir or Oswald, had been found in the Bible code in
advance, could they have been stopped? Was there an alternative probability -
that the gunmen would be caught, that Rabin or Kennedy would live?
All the assassinations that have changed the course of human history - the
murders of Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi, Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin and
both John and Robert Kennedy - were foreseen in the Bible code.
The only time 'President Kennedy' appears, the next words in the same code
sequence are 'to die'. The name of the city where he would be shot, 'Dallas',
was encoded in the same place.
'Oswald' is encoded with 'name of the assassin who will assassinate'. The same
words from the same verse of the Bible, were encoded with 'Yitzhak Rabin' and
the name of his assassin, 'Amir'.
'Marksman' and 'sniper' are also encoded with 'Oswald', and there is even a
precise description of how he would kill Kennedy - he will strike in the head,
death'.
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CRACK THE CODE
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TO find the Bible code, Dr Eli Rips first eliminated all the spaces between the
words and turned the entire original Bible into one continuous letter strand,
304,805 letters long. In doing that, he was actually restoring the Old Testament
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'.
he computer then searches the strand of letters for names, words, and phrases
hidden by a particular skip code, which is best explained by reading the
following paragraph, 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.
The program 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 up to several thousand.
The computer then cuts the letter strand into rows of equal length, and stacks
them one upon another, so that the hidden word appears vertically, or
diagonally, with each letter highlighted in a circle or square.
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OSWALD'S own death is also foretold in the code. The name
of the man who shot him, 'Ruby', appears with 'Oswald,' and the hidden text
says: 'He will kill the assassin.'
The name of the slain President's brother, 'R. F. Kennedy', also appears in the
Bible. And the second Kennedy assassination was also predicted. In fact, the two
murders are encoded together in the same place.
Crossing the name 'R. F. Kennedy' is the name of his assassin, 'S. Sirhan'. And
it is at the exact point that 'Sirhan' and 'Kennedy' cross that the hidden text
states: 'Second ruler will be killed.'
The question is whether the Bible code tells us what will happen or may happen,
presents one predetermined future, or predicts all the possible futures.
Physicists have been locked in the same debate ever since Werner Heisenberg
formulated his famous Uncertainty Principle, which states that there is not one
future, but many possible futures. Stephen Hawking, the British physicist,
defined it in layman's terms: 'One certainly cannot predict future events
exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe exactly!'
Does the Bible code, like quantum physics, present all the probabilities? Or,
are the encoded predictions set in stone? Some like the Rabin assassination,
clearly do happen. Did all the predictions come true? We don't yet have enough
experience with the Bible code to know, but even the apparently iron-clad rule
of the Uncertainty Principle might not apply to it.
In the end, all conventional science, indeed all conventional concepts of
reality, may be irrelevant. If some being that stands outside the system,
outside our three dimensions, outside of time, encoded the Bible, the code may
not obey any of our laws, scientific or otherwise.
Even Hawking admits that the rules of chance may not apply to God: "We could
still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for
some supernatural being."
Once we admit that we are not alone - that there is some intelligence beyond our
own - everything else must be re-examined.
And the greatest scientist of our time, Albert Einstein, never accepted that the
universe was governed by chance. "Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing," said
Einstein. "But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The
theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the
'Old One'."
"God," said Einstein, "does not play dice."
There is still a great deal no one knows about the Bible code. Eli Rips, who
knows more than anyone, says it's like a giant jigsaw puzzle with thousands of
pieces, and we have only a few hundred.
I asked Rips if there was any limit to the information that was in the code how
much of our history was hidden in the Bible. "Everything," said the
mathematician.
Given that the original text of the Old Testament was only 304,805 letters long,
how could that be possible?
"Theoretically there is no limit to the amount of information that could be
encoded," said Rips. He started writing down an equation. I couldn't understand
the maths, but I got the point. Even with a limited data base there could be an
endless number of combinations and permutations.
AT LEAST ten or 20 billion,' said Rips. He explained the
sheer size of that number: 'If you start counting from one and never stop day or
night, it will take you 100 years to count up to three billion.'
In other words, the Bible code contains more information than we could even
count, let alone find, in several lifetimes. And that doesn't take into account
the 'crossword puzzles' created when two or three or ten different words are
linked together.
In the end, says Rips, the amount of information is incalculable, and probably
infinite.
And that is only the first, crudest level of the Bible code.
We have always thought of the Bible as a book. We now know that was only its
first incarnation. It is also a computer program. Not merely a book that Eli
Rips typed into a computer, but something that its original author actually
designed to be interactive and ever-changing.
The Bible code may be a timed series of revelations, each designed for the
technology of its age.
It may be some form of information we cannot yet fully imagine, something that
would be as strange to us now as a computer would have been to people 3,000
years ago.
"It is almost certainly many more levels deep, but we do not have a powerful
enough mathematical model to reach it," says Rips, "It is probably less like a
crossword puzzle and more like a hologram. We are looking at two-dimensional
arrays and we probably should look in at least three dimensions, but we don't
know how."
And no one can explain how the code was created. Every scientist, every
mathematician and physicist who understands the code, agrees that not even the
fastest supercomputers we have today - not even all of the computers now in the
world working together - could have encoded the Bible in the way it was done
3,000 years ago.
"I can't even imagine how it would be done, how anyone could have done it," says
Rips. "It is a mind beyond our imagination."
WHEN I saw Eli Rips in 1996 we looked back together on the
years we had been investigating the Bible code. I asked him when he first knew
that the code was real. "When the Scud missiles were fired at Israel on the
second day of the Gulf War, on the exact date we found three weeks in advance in
the Bible code," he said.
"I was in a sealed room with my whole family. My wife, my five young children,
and I were all wearing gas masks. We could hear the air-raid sirens outside. It
was 2am on the 3rd of Shevat, January 18, 1991. That was the day that had been
encoded.
"I knew the missiles were flying at us we heard that Tel Aviv had already been
hit, and all I could think was: 'It works! The code works!' "
Does it prove there is a God?
For Eli Rips, the answer is yes. "The Bible code is firm scientific proof," the
mathematician states. But Rips believed in God before he found the evidence.
"The existence of God requires no mathematical proof."
Many will, however, say that we now have the first secular evidence of His
existence. I am persuaded only that no human could have encoded the Bible in
this way. We do have scientific proof that intelligence outside our own does
exist, or at least did exist when the Bible was written.
No one knows if the Bible code accurately foretells what is yet to come. But
that ancient intelligence may have encoded the Bible to leave us a warning: that
we are about to face the real Armageddon, nuclear world war.
ABRIDGED extract from THE BIBLE CODE, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
on May 30, 1997. Copyright Michael Drosnin 1997.
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