'Bible code' debate renewed

By Richard N. Ostling, Associated Press writer

NEW YORK -- An international team of statisticians is attacking "Bible code" theory, which claims the Old Testament contains secret references to 20th century events.

Television documentaries, fast-selling books and numerous articles have popularized the idea, which originated with a 1994 article in the academic journal Statistical Science.

The same journal, published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics based in Hayward, Calif., will publish a study by three researchers challenging the theory.

"Despite a considerable amount of effort, we have been unable to detect the codes," the study stated.

According to Bible code proponents, the Hebrew text of the Old Testament refers to events that were thousands of years away when the text was written.

The hidden references are revealed by turning the text into a string of letters without spaces and looking for words formed by equidistant letter sequences. For instance, computers might select every ninth Hebrew letter and register a "hit" when a "coded" word intersects with a Bible verse containing related words.

The technique has been used to claim encoded biblical predictions of everything from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 to a Los Angeles earthquake in 2010.

Major Bible scholars have ignored the code, noting that no one has a letter-by-letter version of the Bible as originally written. The oldest surviving manuscripts include slight variations. The new article makes the same point.

The theory was put forward in a 1994 article in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, in which three Israeli scholars reported on tests using the Book of Genesis that produced intersections between names of famous rabbis and their birth or death dates.

That experiment is re-tested in a new article in the same journal written by Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, who teach mathematics at Jerusalem's Hebrew University; Maya Bar-Hillel, a psychology professor at the same school; and Brendan McKay, a computer scientist at Australian National University.

Such letter configurations can be found in any long text, the article says.

They repeated the 1994 experiment, using other spellings and assumptions and applying the rabbis' names to other biblical books.

Comparison tests using the Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" were just as successful as those with the Bible.

Bar-Natan said the 1994 article was based on research that offered "enough wiggle room to produce whatever you want."

But Michael Drosnin, author of "The Bible Code," stood by the theory. He said a retired code-breaker for the U.S. National Security Agency has proven the code works.

Eliyahu Rips, a co-author of the 1994 article and professor in the same department as Bar-Natan and Kalai, issued a statement promising a "detailed reply" soon. He called the new article's examples "mathematically meaningless."

Robert Kass, head of the statistics department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, edited Statistical Science when it published the 1994 article. In a recent interview he said that the 1994 data "involved a lot of latitude" and skewed the findings.