Bible code

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The term Bible code (also known as the Torah code ) denotes the assumption that there are meaningful text constellations hidden in the text of the Bible. This type of coding is assigned to the field of steganography . However, for the claimed Bible codes, neither a “general key” nor a systematics or a scheme can be determined with which information can be specifically found; in addition, the underlying text base is uncertain. Therefore, the thesis is considered refuted from both a historical and a mathematical perspective.

Here the letters of the English translation of Genesis 26: 5–10 are arranged in a 21-column grid to find the words “Bible” and “code”. Different arrangements would yield different words.

background

The term Bible code was coined by the journalist Michael Drosnin 's publication of the same name , but describes a method called Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS for short) (see also interval code ). With this method, a freely definable number of letters is skipped from a starting point in the text corpus during the reading and it is checked whether meaningful words can be determined. Since terms could be found in the Torah using the method, Drosnin chose the term Bible Code to imply that these terms were encoded in the text. To visualize the method, letter grids were used whose line width is constant and corresponds to the previously defined spacing of the letters. If several found terms are transferred, words that are related to one another can be read vertically, horizontally or diagonally in the resulting matrix. The observation that words are related to one another (e.g. the name of a rabbi and his place of birth) appeared statistically significant to the observer. To indicate the robustness of the text corpus, reference is made to the tradition of the Torah texts. To this day, all Torah scrolls are handwritten and are subject to checks against the Masoretic text .

history

The idea of ​​looking for hidden meanings in the text of the Torah is part of Jewish hermeneutics. The gematria about one of these procedures. As early as the 13th century, the cabbalistic rabbi Bachja Ben Ascher of Saragossa in Spain wrote that he had discovered a secret in 42 letter intervals in a section of Genesis .

Based on these traditions, Rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weissmandl (died 1957) wrote the entire text of the Torah without spaces or punctuation in a 10 by 10 grid on individual cards. By displaying the text in letter grids, he found a whole series of words. He himself did not publish his results; only his students published the words he found.

Scientific investigations

Example of a word constellation for September 11th, which was created by E. Rips (using keywords from daily newspapers)

In the late 1980s, Daniel Michelson (University of California, Los Angeles) studied the ELS and found even more words than Rabbi Weissmandl. In order to clarify whether this phenomenon was based on a regularity, a statistical analysis was started and the results were published in the journal “Statistical Science”. The experiments carried out by him, Yoav Rosenberg and Eliyahu Rips should provide evidence of significant statistical deviations. They put together a list of names of 34 known rabbis from the past, including their dates of birth and death, and checked the text of Genesis and other texts for these terms. According to Witztum, no other text showed such statistically significant deviations as in the text of Genesis. They came to the conclusion:

“ Our conclusion is that the removal of related KBFs (constant letter sequences) in Genesis (Genesis) is not due to chance. "

The scientists later identified a number of other word combinations.

The American journalist Michael Drosnin took up this idea and searched the text of the entire Torah using a computer program for further interval words. He published the results in 1997 in the book The Bible Code . During his investigations he found the name "Yitzhak Rabin" by arranging the Torah text in lines of 4,772 letters each. Rabin's name crossed in this order (read vertically) with the text of Deuteronomy 4:42 (horizontally). Drosnin translated it with: "Murderer who will murder". This passage from the Bible is actually about a manslayer who killed accidentally and unintentionally, and not about someone who plans or carries out an assassination attempt. He then claimed that the original Hebrew text of the Bible contained a hidden announcement of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Drosnin went on to say that he had tried unsuccessfully to warn Yitzhak Rabin of the attack.

Other publications later appeared in which Drosnin continued to claim that the Torah was inscribed with a hidden code that could prove her divine inspiration . In addition, all kinds of world historical events - from the Holocaust to the Armageddon war - are hidden in the text of the Torah.

criticism

On Drosnin's methodology

Both Witztum and Rips and Rosenberg distanced themselves from Drosnin after the book was published, which Drosnin concealed in the subsequent volume ( Bible Code II ). Rips expressly emphasizes that he never “worked” with the journalist. Drosnin's opponents among the Biblical Code proponents say that one result of Drosnin's work is that further serious research into the real statistical phenomenon, which occurs in this type and accumulation exclusively in the Tora version used by Rips, is again being largely closed to the public.

The same people refer to Drosnin as sensational journalists and believe that with his superficial "discoveries" trimmed for showmanship, he did more harm than good to the research he propagated (a precise and understandable description of the procedures used by Rips is on one of the web links found below). Drosnin was accused of prophesying every event in the way he used. Drosnin, on the other hand, said he would be convinced if his opponents succeeded in finding evidence of a prime minister and his murder in Moby Dick .

The computer scientist Brendan McKay of the National University of Australia examined the English text of Moby Dick using Drosnin's method. He found "announcements" of the murder of Indira Gandhi , Martin Luther King , John F. Kennedy , Abraham Lincoln and other people - not least Yitzhak Rabin . McKay's accusation was that in this way you would not find an inspired encrypted message, but rather the data that you selected in advance at your own discretion.

In this way word constellations were also found in other written works (Moby Dick, War and Peace, etc.). But critics who followed the mathematical method of Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg became supporters of the statement that this was no coincidence.

Interested researchers went even further and also examined short texts. An arbitrarily selected, current press release from Microsoft , when examined with the computer tools available, provided references to current events within a few minutes, namely the trial of OJ Simpson and the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield , in which the latter's ear was partially bitten off. For example, the character "ojdidit" found ( OJ has done ), "ear" ( ear ) and the name of the injured counterparty in overlapping or at least related areas of the text box.

General criticism

The critics argue that the arbitrary column widths of the scheme (in various constellations up to several thousand letters, only solvable with a computer), coupled with the fact that the Hebrew script only knows consonants , but no vowels, results in a large number of hits is given in the form of words with a high probability. Additionally, in certain cases when rendering non-Hebrew words and names, some letters in Hebrew are phonetically interchangeable, expanding the effective number of letters and their combinations. In conjunction with the target error , this increases the likelihood of hits even further.

As with the birthday paradox, there is a high probability that there will be some statement in the text (with the birthday paradox: birthday sometime in the year ). On the other hand, the probability of deciphering a predefined statement is low, for example global warming by 2 degrees by 2100 (or birthday on May 12th ). There is also no way to verify the plain text. A key can be found for each plain text, which translates the ciphertext accordingly, just like with one-time pad encryption, which provides a more or less meaningful plain text for each key.

The claim that coded messages were deliberately hidden in the original Hebrew text is also invalid. Drosnin's statement that "all Bibles in the original Hebrew today are identical letter by letter" is incorrect. It is astonishing that the Bible text has been preserved for thousands of years without any major differences, but the individual manuscripts that have survived are not identical letter by letter.

The oldest complete Hebrew manuscript is the Codex Leningradensis . It was made around 1000 AD and is the basis of most of today's Hebrew Bible translations. Rips and Drosnin, however, used the text of the Torah edition by Koren Verlag . The Codex Leningradensis differs from the Koren edition - in the Deuteronomy alone by 41 letters. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain scriptures that were copied over 2,000 years ago. Not their corresponding statement, but the arrangement of the letters differs even more from the Codex Leningradensis . In some scrolls, letters were often added to indicate vowels, since vowel points were not yet written at the time. A single changed letter would fundamentally change the sequence of letters including the resulting statement, if it were there.

The theory of a Bible code has been thoroughly refuted from a mathematical perspective by the work of the American mathematician Persi Diaconis . This applies equally to the works related by critics and McKay. The connections found in Moby Dick are the result of a targeted search for them and appropriately designed sequencing of the text. McKay and other critics thus availed themselves of the same arbitrariness and unscientificness that they rightly accuse Drosnin of. This would make sense, since they wanted to show that Drosnin's methods can also be used with other texts. McKay says, however, that Witztum had worked with these methods from the start: "Every single one of our tricks was copied from Witztum's work."

Adaptation

References

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Drosnin: The Bible Code. 1997-2002.
  2. ↑ Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg: Equidistant letter sequences in the Book of Genesis. 1994, pp. 429-438.
  3. ↑ Jeffre Satinover: The Hidden Message of the Bible. 1997, p. 26.
  4. ^ Daniel Michelson: Reading the Torah with Equal Intervals. (PDF; 1.6 MB).
  5. ↑ Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg: Equidistant letter sequences in the Book of Genesis. 1994, pp. 429-438. (German in Drosnin: The Bible Code. Appendix).
  6. ↑ Jeffre Satinover in: The Hidden Message of the Bible. 1997, pp. 34-37.
  7. ↑ Marcus du Sautoy : Music of the prime numbers. On the trail of the greatest puzzle in mathematics. CH Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52320-X , p. 332.
  8. ^ Brendan McKay: Did we really find codes in War and Peace? "Every single one of our tricks was copied from Doron Witztum's own work."

literature

Web links