English 101, College Writing
11/30/2003
Documented essay
Draft#1
Scientific Research of the Bible Codes
We know not too many things in the World that would inflame a stable interest to everyone. It has well known that one of such things is the Bible. An influence of this book may be hardly overestimated. Any event, related to the Bible, makes a wide resonance in the human society. That is not amazed, since archeological discovers and textual researches for last couple of centuries resettled the Bible from a kind of a fairytale digest to the row of serious historical witnesses. For instant, discovering of the Kumrahn library in 1947 approved unchangeable of the bible text during last twenty centuries and decoding of clay tables of Babylon library approved existing of the peoples and countries that had mentioned in the bible text only.
Archeological and text researches continue until now. Scientists and the wide community adopted some of these researches, but other ones could be considered rather as truth reinforcement for those who believe in the Lord.
In 1997, Mikael Drosnin issued a book “The Bible Code” (Drosnin, Michael. The Bible Code. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.) The author, at the time of presentation, said - “My book “The Bible Code” is about a hidden text in the Old Testament that reveals the details of events that took place long after the Bible was written.” This book presents the results of several text researches of first fives parts of the Bible that called Torah. Among some other interesting things founded in the Bible, the author mentioned about assessment of the president of the USA John F.Kennedy and predicting a year before it happened an assessment of Israel Prime Minister Ytzhac Rabin. The names of Saddam Husain, Usama Ben Laden, Hitler and Indira Gandy also have founded in the Torah. It is clear that such kind of claim could not make the community to be quiet and born many discussing about it. These discussions about the bible codes are continue until now. Probably this is the reason why the second book by this author has issued not so long time ago -“The Bible Code II.”
The second book presents latest results of studying of the bible codes.
It needs to say that the theme of hidden message in the Bible is not new at all. Yet Sir Isaac Newton dedicated a bigger part of his life to research of bible text believing into hidden message of God. He wrought about a million words regarding his research; his works is keeping in the library of Cambridge University, England now. Many times famous in the past rabbins tried to discover these codes in the bible. The rabbi H.M.D.Weissmandel, which were living in Prague in the beginning of twentieth century, found interesting legitimacy inside of the Torah. Nevertheless, the real celebrity to the idea of bible codes has got just after publicizing of the article “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis” written by Israel scientists Eliyahu Rips and Doron Witztum in "Statistical Science" (Witztum, Doron; E.Rips, Y.Rosenbreg "Equidistant Letter Sequences in Genesis." Statistical Science. Vol. 3 (1994): 429-436). They set up a series of experiments, when analyzed the text of Torah with specially designed program of scanning, trying to find the names of 32 famous Wiseman that lived during IX-XVIII centuries. The form of this essay does not allow explaining in details this quite complicated
method of making this experiment. If shortly, the program used “the code of missing” which read tenth, fourteenth and so one letters of the text. Beginning from the very first letter, the search was doing forward and backward until something interesting was found. If it did not, the search got started again from the
second letter. After several trying, the program has found a bigger part of the seeking names. A possibility of random discovering was extremely low in this case. The authors of the experiment concluded that hidden text actually had been presented in the bible.
So, the book of Mikael Drosnin just continue to lead this idea. The author, which had been a reporter of Washington Post and Wall Street Journal some time ago, after learning the result of experiment made by Rips and Witztum and meeting with Israel scientist, made his own research. He got a very impressive result and, being under influence of it, wrote the book.
The book “The Bible Code” induced polarity responds in the wide community. Despite the book got bestseller for many weeks, the author of scanning program professor of Hebrew University Eliyahu Rips claimed that the book does not have any scientific value. “The only conclusion that can be drawn from the scientific research regarding the Torah codes is that they exist and that they are not a mere coincidence” - he said. The other critics glaringly laughed with this book. Applying the methods of Mr.Drosnin to some books of world literature, they found a pile of the very like “foretolds”. “Once you learn Drosnin's rules (none) and the method (a bit of messy programming) you can find things like this anywhere.” - that was their judgment. Many scientists-mathematics were even more categorical with a sentence. After learning of research by Rips and Witztum they issued a petition against this work. They wrought - “There is a common belief in the general community to the effect that many mathematicians, statisticians, and other scientists consider the claims to be credible. This belief is incorrect. On the contrary, the almost unanimous opinion of those in the scientific world who have studied the question is that the theory is without foundation. The signatories to this letter have themselves examined the evidence and found it entirely unconvincing.” This petition have signed by fifty-four mathematics, each of them have a rank Ph.D. least.
It could be the end of the story of the bible codes. Nevertheless, it is not, because researches of the Bible continue. Here is a statement that made in the present time by R.Edwin Scherman, FCAS, MAAA and Nathan Jacoby, Ph.D. They are saying - “Four years ago Mr. Sherman began examining this phenomenon, strongly suspecting that there was nothing to it. After developing formulae to estimate the probability of chance occurrence of different purported Bible code phenomena, he concluded that virtually all examples from published books were not at all improbable.” Then they continue - “Mr. Sherman was forced to reverse his negative position on Bible codes, which he had been presenting on a website, and he changed the site to biblecodedigest.com. During April 2003 this website received 1.3 million hits as the result of interest generated by the war in Iraq and the posting of hundreds of ELSs (Equidistant Letter Sequence) regarding current events on that site.” Besides, Mr.Scherman and Dr.Jacoby called in question a scientific background and the way of presentation of conclusions from the group of mathematics, that named above. By the way, everyone who is interesting about the study can learn it from the site, and anyone, who would like to make his own research, has an able to get a special program from there also.
These researches of the Bible codes are interesting, because the scientists, it seems, have seen an able to approve the being of God by scientific method. Nevertheless, it difficult to say what is the practice result of them. Some European newspapers mentioned about an invitation of Mr.Dosnin to the Pentagon for help to find Usama ben Laden using the Bible code. Rather of all, this is only gossip, because even scientists, who supports the idea of the bible codes, against this possibility to forecast everything in the World. Therefore, even if the whole community accepts the idea of the bible codes entirely, it is going to be nothing else, but one more evidence in supporting the being of the God only. The most obvious goal of the Bible is growing in everyone inside high-spiritual principles of being, which could allow a peaceful existing of many different peoples. Many thousands years people come to the God with their own truth only, not with any scientific approving. That is the way we should not to expect any changes in relationship between the God and the Gods people.
Work Cites
Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick!
http://cs.anu.edu.au/people/bdm/dilugim/moby.html
Mathematicians' Statement on the Bible Codes
http://www.math.caltech.edu/code/petition.html
Meet Michael Drosnin Author, "The Bible Code"
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9706/04/israel ... inlog.html
Non-Random Equidistant Letter Sequence Extensions in Ezekiel
By R. Edwin Sherman, FCAS, MAAA, and Nathan Jacobi, Ph.D.
http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/186
Public Statement By Eliyahu Rips
http://www.thei.aust.com/torah/coderips.html
