In 1994, in recognition of his efforts to achieve peace in the Oslo Accords, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin received the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside former and future Prime Minister Shimon Peres and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat. Some may criticize Rabin for his hawkish past, directing operations during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War as well as during the 1980s as the Israeli Minister of Defense, but during his first term as Prime Minister, aligned with the dominant progressive Labor Party in the 1970s, he worked toward peace with Egypt, and during his tenure in the 1990s, he ran on a peace platform and made some headway in that direction with not only the Oslo Accords but also the Israel-Jordan treaty. While generally popular when he was swept into power in the 1990s with a coalition government, he remained unpopular with religious conservatives, like the leaders of the opposition Likud party, who believed that any withdrawal proposed in the peace process was tantamount to the forfeit of ancestral lands and a capitulation to enemies. One such leader was Benjamin Netanyahu, who today serves as Prime Minister and, in the wake of militant group Hamas’s October 7th rampage, has overseen the most destructive military campaign in recent history—more destructive proportionally than the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II, according to the Associated Press. Netanyahu has always been an ultra-right-wing religious conservative hard-liner sympathetic to Israeli settlement. When Rabin worked for peace, Netanyahu said he was “removed from…Jewish values,” and conservative rabbis followed his lead to work against the Oslo peace process, actually forbidding soldiers from evacuating any settlers. His party organized protests in which Rabin was called a “traitor” and “murderer,” where could be seen pictures of Rabin in a sniper’s cross-hairs and effigies that depicted him as a Nazi. In 1995, Netanyahu personally led a symbolic funeral procession to a protest rally, with such props as a noose and a coffin. At the rally, protesters held signs aloft that read “Death to Rabin.” When a security chief urged Netanyahu to temper his violent rhetoric because there actually was intelligence that Rabin’s life might be in danger, Netanyahu refused. Within a few months, Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead at a peace rally by a student with far-right views. Every year, Rabin’s assassination is memorialized, and in marking that anniversary, even as recently as 2022, politicians in Rabin’s Labor Party, which has fallen out of power as politics in Israel have moved further and further to the right, have suggested that Benjamin Netanyahu was complicit in the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, that his violent rhetoric incited the murder. Certainly at the time when Netanyahu was encouraging such violent sentiment there was also a palpable threat on the life of the Prime Minister. Indeed, according to New York Times Bestselling author Michael Drosnin, Rabin had been warned about an impending assassination attempt a year before the vile act was actually committed. In the wake of his murder, numerous conspiracy theories unsurprisingly arose, some strikingly similar to certain American political assassinations. There were rumors of powder burns and bullet wounds and ballistics tests proving there had been multiple shooters, or that Rabin had escaped unharmed only to be murdered afterward. But perhaps the strangest conspiracy theory involves the nature of the intelligence that writer Michael Drosnin purportedly offered Rabin in 1994. It was not heard-earned intelligence he had acquired through investigative journalism. Rather, it was intelligence that had been around since antiquity. Michael Drosnin claimed that Rabin’s death had been foretold in a secret cipher woven into the Holy Bible millennia earlier.

After reading and writing about the cipher hunting of Shakespeare denialists, who could manage to find within the works of Shakespeare anything they might be looking for, I was inspired to talk about the very similar phenomenon of the Bible Code that was all the rage for a while in the 1990s. For those unfamiliar with the Bible Code phenomenon, it makes sense to start with the publication of Michael Drosnin’s book of the same name in 1997. While Drosnin did not originate the claims of a Bible Code, he certainly popularized them and took them to the extremes for which the notion is remembered today. Drosnin was formerly a journalist for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and as have so many newspaper journalists before him, he moved into book writing with a book about Howard Hughes in 1985. For nearly a decade afterward, he struggled to find the topic of his next book, until finally learning about the weird findings of a group of researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who were using specially designed computer software to locate what appeared to be hidden messages in the Hebrew text of the Torah. These researchers examined the Hebrew text in an array, basically laying out the characters in a grid, and searched for encoded words using Equidistant Letter Sequencing, which is essentially like a word search puzzle, finding words in the grid horizontally, vertically and diagonally, except that the computer program could skip any number of characters, provided the same number of characters was skipped between each of the encoded word’s letters. And it could search at any diagonal angle, like taking one character then counting nine characters over and three up each time to find the next character. One is rather reminded of Orville Owen’s cipher wheel in that, just as Shakespeare’s work had to be laid out in an arcane fashion for the cipher to appear, so too the Hebrew text had to be rearranged as a grid for this code to be discernible. Already some doubts should begin to simmer here, but Drosnin took the work of these researchers as science, and he ran with it in his book, which turned it into a sensation.

Example of the ELS method showing an arrangement of the letters from Genesis 26:5–10 in a 21-column grid to derive the words "Bible" and "code". Image attribution: Cmglee (CC BY-SA 4.0)

By finding words in the text, and then searching in the same array for nearby words and dates, he claimed that historical events had somehow been predicted within the text of the Torah in antiquity. He found the name “Clinton” near the word “President,” the words “Moon landing” near “spaceship” near “Apollo 11,” the name “Kennedy” near “Dallas,” and “Hitler” near “Nazi.” The very nearness of these terms to each other in the text, Drosnin argued, meant it was statistically impossible to have occurred randomly, by coincidence. Armed with the computer program, he claimed to have found, predicted within the letter arrays of the Torah’s text, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair over the course of a few books, the Bush-Gore election fiasco, and even 9/11. However, these were all ex-post facto, as most of the “predictions” found with the Bible Code must be, since one does not know what words to look for until after the events have transpired. However, Drosnin’s most compelling claim, that he discerned within the text of the Torah that Yitzhak Rabin would be killed in 1995 and that he’d tried to warn him, would seem to indicate that the Bible Code can be used to predict the future and not just the recent past. But Drosnin’s ability to predict the future with the Bible Code seems less impressive when we learn that he used it to make other predictions, about the world ending in the year 2000, about imminent nuclear holocausts, about further terror attacks on the U.S. using Libyan WMDs, and about Yasser Arafat’s assassination, none of which actually occurred. Drosnin’s explanation is that the Bible Code actually contains all eventualities, that “[a]ll probabilities may be there, and what we do may determine what actually happens.” So apparently the Bible Code contains all possible eventualities? The multiverse of potential outcomes can be found encoded within it? By this logic, Drosnin was able to claim that his predictions did not come true because he had personally deterred them by warning of them. Of course, if the code really does predict all probabilities, which seems impossible given just the limitations of the letter array used, then it would seem that it actually predicts nothing.

The religious proponents of the Bible Code, however, did not need it to actually predict the future to be useful. For them, it was simply a proof of God. For if the presence of these references to historical events and persons were really to be found within the text of the Torah, and there were mathematicians saying that it was statistically impossible for it to be coincidence, then that was strong evidence, in their eyes, that the Bible was a divine work, that it could only have been written by the Hand of God, through divine inspiration. And this was not only an argument for rabbis to make, but Christians too. Indeed, it may actually be that fundamentalist, biblical literalist Christians touted the Code more than anyone. They had long argued through interpretation that references to Jesus being the Messiah could be found in the Old Testament, but now they could actually find the name Yeshua encoded there. But the very nature of it, being only accessible through computer software, begs the question of its purpose. If the code were intentionally woven into the text of the Torah from the start by God, who according to tradition had transmitted it to Moses during the Israelites’ forty years in the desert, then why would God not make it accessible for us to decode until the advent of computing technology? Believers in the code will say that it was placed there to serve as convincing evidence of the divinity of the text and of God’s omniscience and was only intended to bolster faith in these latter days. However, as we’ve seen, the predictions supposedly embedded within the text are fallible, maybe accurate maybe not, so it’s not very compelling evidence of an all-knowing intelligence having composed the scriptures. Drosnin has suggested that the fallibility and false predictions are baked into the code “to preserve free will,” but that would suggest that signs of potential future events were placed there so that humanity can take action to prevent or ensure them. So if God put in a warning about Nazism and the Holocaust without the potential to decode it, it means that God did not want us to change it. Rather, God just wanted us to know after the fact that it was all part of the plan. In which case, it just further bolsters the atheistic argument that if God were real, then he/she/they/it is cruel, or even evil, and therefore unworthy of our devotion and worship. Michael Drosnin, who does not profess to be religious, nevertheless also insists that there must be some supernatural intelligence at work, so he looks to ancient aliens, suggesting that “[t]he Bible code is, in fact, an alternative form of contact…for intelligent life beyond this planet,” quoting physicist Paul Davies to suggest that it was only meant to be deciphered later in our technological development because it had been “programmed to manifest itself only when civilization on Earth crossed a certain threshold of advancement.” An interesting take, but one cannot help but wonder, then, why they only baked vague references to people and events into the text rather than an explanation of how to establish further contact or even just a plain message like “We came in peace.” The more we learn of Drosnin’s claims, the clearer it is that he may not actually have been the best advocate for this Bible Code phenomenon, and indeed, though he claimed to have the support of the scientists working on the code, actual mathematicians who worked on the code and see themselves as part of a long tradition of decoding the Torah, actually dislike Drosnin and his claims very much.

Michael Drosnin in his appearance on one of the most formative TV series of my youth, Unsolved Mysteries.

There really is a long history to the claim that there is some encoded meaning in the Torah, though not so long as its proponents might claim. The first real hint of it appears in the Middle Ages, when Maimonides, a 12th century philosopher and Sephardic rabbi, is said to have found his own name, or rather an acronym used to refer to him, using the first letters of words in a certain passage in Exodus. But of course, this is an acrostic, not an equidistant letter sequence. A Shakespeare denialist would find such an acrostic and suggest that it meant Maimonides actually wrote Exodus, but Maimonides only took it to mean his greatness and wisdom had been foretold. Around the same time, Nachmanides, an early 13th century Jewish scholar and kabbalist, likewise is said to have impressed someone by finding their name in Deuteronomy, using the third letter of every word in a certain passage. While no longer an acrostic, it still was not equidistant letter sequencing, since the words used were all of different lengths, making a lot of variation in the number of characters between each letter in the name being decoded. Having entered the age of the Kabbalah, a big focus of which was on the decryption of hidden meaning in scripture, we come closer to the development of the idea of the Bible code. Gematria, which assigns numerical value to letters and words, was important to kabbalists, and it would later be a central part of the Bible code, since that was how dates for predictions were derived, using the number value of letters around the names and words decoded. Later that century, Rabbi Bahya ben Asher, wrote cryptically about a kabbalistic decryption of Genesis involving counting to its forty-second character, and then counting 42 letters between each character. Through this decryption one could discern the name of god and the true date of creation. To Asher, 42 was the answer to life the universe and everything, and I wonder if Douglas Adams may have been steeped in kabbalistic lore when he wrote the same.

The final development of the Bible code concept would come many centuries later, when another rabbi, Michael Ber Weissmandl, a Talmudic scholar and mathematician, became very interested in kabbalistic codes like these. Weissmandl was a hero during the Holocaust, forming an underground organization called the Bratislava Working Group in Slovakia that saved the lives of many Jews by ransoming them from German officials and transporting them to safety. He and his family were actually put aboard a train bound for Auschwitz, but Weissmandl was prepared, bringing with him a loaf of bread into which he had baked a saw. He cut a hole in the train car andleapt from the moving train. The unimaginable tragedy was that his family did not follow him, and he never saw them again. It was Weissmandl who further developed Rabbi Bahya ben Asher’s concept of stringing together hidden words by skipping equal intervals of characters in the book of Genesis. The best he could manage was by laying out letter arrays of the text using paper cards, but he was unable to pick out the decrypted words that, decades later, a computer program would be capable of finding. It was Weissmandl’s work, published posthumously by his students, that would inspire the work of the researchers at Hebrew University, which in turn would inspire Michael Drosnin. These researchers, Eliyahu Rips, Doron Witztum, and Yoav Rosenberg, designed their computer program to do what Weissmandl had been trying to do. They claimed that they never suggested that the Torah code could be used to predict future events. Rather, they searched for the names of Rabbis throughout history, including those I’ve mentioned in the episode, along with their birth and death dates, arguing that finding them could not be explained by chance. And they managed to get their work published in a scholarly journal. The editors of the journal in question, Statistical Science, were actually skeptical, since they understood that computers were capable of finding surprising patterns even in random data, but they published regardless, more as a challenge of a claim that needed disproof. Their publication only legitimized what appeared to Drosnin and others to be mathematical proof of something supernatural.

Michael Dov Ber Weissmandl in a photo taken before WWII

Of course, for any such argument to work, for the messages picked out of the Torah by computers using equidistant letter sequencing to have been a deeply encoded message whether left by God or aliens, the Torah would have to have been unchanged, down to the letter, from its original reception. Even if you aren’t looking for proof of divinity, for the Bible Code to be meaningful at all, since even the change of one letter would throw off the entire array, it must be viewed as an untouched, inviolable ancient text. Indeed, this is the received tradition of Judaism. Moses is said to have received it, whether from God or aliens, and it is said to have been preserved perfectly through succeeding ages by prophets and scribes, as in Deuteronomy it is expressly forbidden to make any additions or deletions. To believe this, we must not only accept the story about God divinely transmitting the Torah down to the character, or at least accept Moses’ authorship, and then also accept that when it was later recompiled by Ezra in an entirely different script, using the Assyrian “square script” common in the Second Temple period, that it was still preserved perfectly, down to each particular character, exactly as it had formerly appeared in paleo-Hebrew. Today, however, even the authorship of Moses is doubted by Bible scholars, who have taken up a number of hypotheses, from there having been four sources—the Jahwist, Elohist, Priestly, and Deuteronomist sources—to perhaps just the two sources—the Priestly and Deuteronomist sources—to perhaps there having been numerous additions to some pre-existing tradition. What is typically agreed on is that, like other ancient works, they had their origins in oral tradition, and when put into writing, were changed by more than one author and/or redactor. And variations are even observable today, with the text of the oldest complete manuscript, the Leningrad Codex, differing in numerous places from the standard text first published by typographer Eliyahu Koren in 1961. Whatever your view on it, though, to argue that the code has been perfectly preserved since Moses in the desert seems manifestly incorrect, since the letter arrays used in the decoding are not even in the Paleo-Hebrew script in which Moses would have transcribed the words of God. And it is especially doubtful when we come to understand how much the text has been further changed to suit the computer program that decodes it.

One element of the argument about the preservation of the exact text of the Torah has to do with the preservation of its vowels. In the Hebrew alphabet, indications of vowel sounds are recorded in points, the dots added to characters essentially as diacritics, such that a Hebrew character may be “vowelized.” There are also certain weaker consonants that can serve as vowel letters, and though today there is a trend of “full spelling” using these characters, traditionally, and especially in the transmission and study of scripture, the points were used to indicate vowels. However, inscriptions in which the Torah had been preserved did not include the points, nor did many a hand-copied manuscript version, since it saved the scribe much work to omit the points. If one were aware of the oral tradition inscribed, one could read it despite the missing vowels, though, and by the time of the printing press, the Torah and other scriptures were printed in full vowelized form. The thing is, though, that without vowels, Hebrew can become meaningless. A single word, as just a grouping of consonants, could be read as several different words depending on the vowels one adds. How, then, can we trust that memory of the vowels was accurately carried down from the time when it is said God must have provided them or Moses recorded them. It is an article of faith that prophets and rabbis kept the tradition and no errors were introduced in the transmission of the oral traditions. There is even a quote from the Beatitudes in Matthew when Jesus asserts this, or seems to: “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished,” or as some other translations have it, not “one jot or one tittle” would be changed. And there is no doubt about the vowels in the text of Matthew, at least, since the books of the New Testament were written in Greek, complete with vowels. The relevance to the Bible code here is that, indeed, many jots and tittles have been taken away for it to work. The computer software designed to tease out messages from the Torah uses unvowelized consonant Hebrew letters only. When a name like “Rabin” or a word like “assassin” is found, Drosnin added in the vowels to make it work. So really, the name could just as well have been “Ruben,” and the hidden message could just as well have been about the 1970 murder of Chicano rights activist Ruben Salazar. The “code” is not mathematical, then, but rather entirely subjective and open to interpretation.

Apparent hidden messages about the murder of JFK found in the text of Moby Dick to answer a challenge made by Drosnin himself, proving one can find these coincidences in any text. Shared online by Brendan McKay.

To further demonstrate the flexibility of the Bible code, when Drosnin or the Hebrew University researchers made claims that years can be found in close proximity to words, keep in mind that they are using gematria, taking the numerical value of letters in the area, and then picking which value to use, as there are numerous gematric alphabets, and they are also choosing which calendar to use. Essentially, with a plethora of nearby letters, they can make any number appear. That is the heart of this puzzle. There are infinite solutions. It is claimed that what makes the findings statistically significant is that words are found in proximity to one another, but even this is not really true. In skipping characters to find equidistant sequences, they find it acceptable to skip thousands at a time to find encoded words, such that, yes, words may cross each other, but we’re talking about letters scattered across the entirety of the text, really emphasizing the “distant” in “equidistant.” They essentially used a computer to run billions of searches for select words and phrases scattered equidistantly across what is basically a database of randomly placed letters, in whatever directional sequence they might be found, and they only mention their successes. They don’t record their many, many failures to find the words and phrases they searched for. But they claimed is was a statistical impossibility that they found what they did find, unless it was encoded there on purpose, and they further claimed that no other text could produce such hits. Drosnin famously claimed that it couldn’t be done with, for example, War and Peace, but of course, you wouldn’t be removing vowels from that work, now would you? The researchers at Hebrew University took it further. While Drosnin happily used other books of the Old Testament, like Daniel, they insisted that no other works besides the works attributed to Moses were so encoded, and they used Isaiah as a control. Many a claim was made about the statistical unlikelihood that such things could be found within the Torah, but skeptics gladly took up the challenge, especially David E. Thomas, and found many examples of supposedly hidden messages in other works, without even needing to remove vowels. In the King James Version of Genesis, which by the researchers’ own rules should not have a Bible code since it is in English, he found the words “Roswell” and “UFO.” When Drosnin publicly challenged his critics to find messages about someone’s assassination in Moby Dick, mathematician Brendan McKay did just that, finding supposedly encoded indications about the deaths of Trostsky, Gandhi, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in Herman Melville’s novel. Thomas pointed out that it was actually very common and easy to find the words “Hitler” and “Nazi” in many texts. Any work with the word “generalization,” for example, contained the word “nazi” with a skip of only two letters. To really prove his point, Thomas used the text of Drosnin’s own book and found the hidden message, “The code is a silly snake-oil hoax.”

Scatterbrained: The Bible Code Craze

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