simian

The bible code (according to the person who "developed" it) was only valid in hebrew and only for the first 5 books of the bible. Sadly, it did get published in a statistics journal.

Simian

Shadowy Man

Simian:

I have read the article. Unfortunately, my knowledge of advanced statistics techniques was not up to the task of fully understanding it.

Bede

My favourite Bible code story is about how the Y Files (an evangelical Christian site) believed in it until it was shown that the same method could be used to extract some heretical statements from the bible too. After that they were less keen...

B

simian

I am working from memory here, but this is what I remember from the technique:

*choose every nth letter from the Torah.
*set up these letters in rows/colums of different widths
*look for words horizontally, vertically, or diagonally
*reject anything that doesn't say what you are looking for
*claim that is lists many "possible" events, so could only be used for "prediction" after the fact

If I remember correctly, Hebrew doesn't include written vowels, so you have great freedom in what a string of consenants may say.

I haven't followed any of the links listed here, but did do some reading on the bible code when it was being put forth.

"Texas sharp-shooter," if I remember the name of the fallicy correctly: shoot the barn wall, then draw a target around it. You can get a bulls-eye every time.

Simian

Deistic Heretic

I don't believe in this Bible Code crap. My friend believes in it and claims he has read it and it predicted that JFK would be assassinated, WWI & II, Gulf War, 9/11 attacks, etc. I do not understand how they could possibly predict this, especially JFK assassination and 9/11 attacks, as they would have had no knowledge on the Americas nor that part of the Americas would be ruled by a presidential scheme, of which one of its presidents would be killed by something yet to be invented as the president rode down in something else yet to be invented.

My friend also claims that it says the world will end in 5 years due to a nuclear war between Iraq and NATO, so he's going around saying we have 5 years to live. B****cks to that.

There is no scientifically possible way 2,000+ years ago they could predict the future, whatever the event? A deity or anyform of deva from whatever-you-like couldn't have told them if time doesn't exist. Which, to be honest with you, all it really is is the synchronisation of clocks so you know when to catch a train.

callmejay

I actually heard some of the Bible codes people speak, and they claim to have searched for a list of (real) specific names and dates and compared those results to a bogus list of names and dates as the control. The results, according to them, are statistically significant. Obviously, you can find any message you want if it's short enough -- the question is can you show that messages exist which are statistically improbable.

For example, if you could show that Moby Dick contains the name and birth date of every US president in close proximity while similar lists of random names and birth dates very rarely come up, you'd have a similar claim.

I know many Orthodox Jews who think the Codes are bogus, including at least one talented statistician. I personally think they're horseshit, but you should at least debunk what they are claiming, rather than a straw man.

Answerer

Actually, if you observe carefully, you will realize that the author of book 'bible code' only talks about events that had happened and mentioned very vaguely about what will happen in the near future. And of course, you will discover that in all the books(that talked about Bible code), the authors always ended with a 'marvellous assurance' of a coming Doomsday. Of course, he wants everyone to be 'prepared' for it.

idiom

The original author of the Bible Codes is himself not a Christian. He does believe the Bible Codes have so external source however. But not God. Go figure. I think he is in the sort of vein of raelians and Ba'hai.

The Bible itself decries predicting the future and ties attempts to do it to the occult.

The Bible codes of interest however are known as "signature codes". For example the name "YHWY" is spaced evenly throughout the entire first five books. It strars like 28 letters in then has a letter every nine spaces or so then 28 letters to the next repitition. Those numbers are not correct. I shall run off and look them up.

Point is those Redactive scribes were really smart and patient.

Also most of the signature codes have been known about for millenia. You dont need a computer to find them. Just a hi-lighter, a hebrew copy of the Old Testament and the ability to count to 28.

JimBour

I read the article in Statistical Science that started all of the modern Bible Codes stuff and posted on it on Usenet (sci.skeptic and sci.math) some time ago. I'd just like to copy one of my old posts here from a few years ago. I think it is still relevant.

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I've noted that many people have been citing
Brendan McKay's work on the Moby Dick codes, which
are to respond to the challenge by the author of the Bible Code book, Drosnin. These do any excellent job, but they do not address the original Statistical Science paper by Witzum and Rips.

Brendan McKay *has* addressed the original work. A draft of his results can be found at:

<a href="http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/WNP.html" target="_blank">http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/WNP.html</a>

I had exchanged some messages on this subject last year ( which can be found on Dejanews ) and have read the original Statistical Science paper. At that time, the work above hadn't been presented. I think that this work is devastating
to the original, peer-reviewed work by Witzum and Rips.

The original paper looked only at a list of names of famous rabbis and the dates of their deaths. It appeared that the method used to compile this list was unambiguous to my untrained eye. A method to find word pairs between the names and the dates was created. Then a ranking system was created to compare the "distance" between the words. The performance of the Genesis text was compared to a letter-permuted Genesis text, a word-permuted Genesis text, War and Peace and other texts. The unpermuted Genesis was found to have word pairs that had shorter "distances" than the other texts.

I want to note that *finding* significant word pairs was not at all remarkable. In fact, in the figure given in the paper, the *permuted* Genesis text had 2 more word pairs found than the unpermuted text! This demonstrates nicely that later work which consists of little more than word hunting ( such as by Drosnin and others ) is of no value other than as entertainment.

However, the paper did show statistically significant shorter "distances" between word pairs in Genesis. I'll note that the
*only* data given in the original paper is in the form of rankings. It only tells you how well it did in comparison to other permutations
and such. It does not tell you what *actual* word pairs were finally found, *where* in the text they were located or give an idea of how close they were or what the skip factors were.

I had little intuition for how significant the effects were or how easily a small change in the sample lists could change the results, and I admitted as much before. In the latest McKay
work, he shows just how easy it is to create a list just as good as the one used in the original paper, for which War and Peace performs as well as Genesis did in the original paper!

Wait! Wasn't the list given by Witzum and Rips unambiguous? The answer given is a resounding no. Not only were there some
odd mistakes made by Witzum and Rips concerning the choosing of famous rabbis ( they were only to use the length of articles in a particular reference work, but included one that was too short and excluded another ), the names of many of the rabbis are very much subject to interpretation. A bible scholar Menachem
Cohen was called upon to comment and his letter is given in:

<a href="http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/cohen.html" target="_blank">http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/cohen.html</a>

There are many alternate spelling methods, variant names for the rabbis and such. Most telling is that the original paper was not consistent in its use of conventions, as evidenced in the letter above.

What Brendan McKay et al., did was create a new list of rabbis and death dates with *as many or fewer* changes as were found in
the original paper. They were able to find a list that could be used in the manner of the original paper for which the hebrew
War and Peace text performed as well as Genesis had previously!

I should note that neither War and Peace nor Genesis performs particularly well against a more consistent, corrected list.

To my mind, this gives a good feeling for how significant the effects were. Not very.

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Bookman

Good stuff, and thanks for sharing!

Welcome to II!

Bookman