What Scripture says
Scripture claims to be God’s word, with a plain message meant to be understood: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching” (2 Timothy 3:16, ESV). Its prophecies are given openly in the text, not hidden in letter patterns. God condemns trying to discover the future through divination (Deuteronomy 18:10–12).
What the evidence says
Science
What the “Bible code” claims
The Bible code claims that hidden messages are encoded in the Hebrew text of the Torah, found by equidistant letter sequences (ELS): starting at a letter and skipping a fixed number of letters (say, every 50th) to spell out words. Proponents arrange the text in a grid and look for related words crossing nearby.
The history
- In 1994, Israeli researchers Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg published a paper in the journal Statistical Science claiming the names of famous rabbis appeared in Genesis close to their dates of birth or death, more often than chance would predict. The journal’s editor presented it as a “challenging puzzle”.
- In 1997, journalist Michael Drosnin’s bestseller The Bible Code claimed the code predicted the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and that it predicted a world war, or an atomic attack, in the year 2000 or 2006.
How it was refuted
Drosnin challenged critics: “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I’ll believe them.”
The Australian mathematician Brendan McKay took up the challenge. Using the same method on Moby Dick, he found “predictions” of the assassinations of Indira Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy and Rabin, and of Princess Diana’s death.
In 1999, McKay and three Israeli mathematicians and statisticians published a detailed refutation in the same journal, Statistical Science. They showed that the original study’s results depended on choices made in selecting names and dates. With so many possible spellings and ways to search, researchers could, without intending to, tune the experiment until it worked. When they made similar choices, they found equally impressive results in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace.
| Text | Search | “Hits” found |
|---|---|---|
| Genesis (Witztum et al.) | Rabbis’ names and dates | Claimed significant |
| War and Peace (McKay et al.) | Same rabbis, adjusted choices | Equally significant |
| Moby Dick (McKay) | Famous assassinations | Many |
Why it works on any long book
In any long text, the number of possible letter sequences is enormous. With freedom to choose skip distances, starting points, spellings and which words count as “related”, meaningful-looking patterns will appear by chance, just as people see faces in clouds.
Drosnin’s predictions also failed: there was no world war or atomic attack in 2000 or 2006.
A textual problem
The Bible code also assumes that the Hebrew text is letter-for-letter identical to the original. But manuscripts differ slightly in spelling (see 4.1, 4.2). A single added or missing letter would destroy any code with long skips, though it wouldn’t affect the meaning of the text.
Where they meet
There is no hidden Bible code. Researchers found similar “codes” in other long books like Moby Dick; it’s a statistical artefact.
What’s still open
Nothing of substance.
Bottom line
No. Researchers found similar “codes” in other long books like Moby Dick; it’s a statistical artefact. This is rated Settled.