This book is a reporter's assessment of a "Bible Code" found when the computer was used to "crunch" thousands of Hebrew letters and find hidden messages that appear to be prophesies of the future. Having studied the work of Nostradamus, written in Middle French crossed with Latin, gibberish can appear to be very wise projections of future events. The Da Vinci Code, a purported novel which relied heavily on the work in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, has been taken by the public to be factually based, making anything connected with deciphering the Bible as some kind of secret conspiracy. It is up to the reader to determine if there really is a code, and what, if any, significance that it has beyond the content of the book itself. ( )

My Amazon.com review: A popular, anecdotal, sensational piece of journalism., July 23, 1997

Here are my observations and reactions after reading Drosnin's book. (1) Using the ELS Bible code technique described in his book, Drosnin said that he was able to predict the outcomes of elections in Israel and in the USA. Furthermore, according to Drosnin, ancient Jewish sages speculated that all knowledge is encoded in the Torah. Does it not follow, therefore, that a gamblin' man should be able to make bets on such predictions and reap big rewards? Do you suppose that the outcomes of sports contests are encoded in the Torah? Hmmm, I wonder. (2) My biggest problem with Drosnin's book, even after reading it twice, is that I wasn't provided with enough information to discern the statistical significance of most of his findings. For instance, there are several tabulations of unencoded strings of plain text on the horizontal, e.g., "ASSASSIN THAT WILL ASSASSINATE," crossing vertically encoded ELS text, e.g., "YITZHAK RABIN." Shouldn't all of the conceptually related search terms be hidden ELS codes, not plain text, to be statistically significant? (3) In my opinion, the most significant findings in Drosnin's book can be found in the Appendix which contains a reprint of the 1994 Statistical Science paper by Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg. After only one reading of "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis," I found myself in agreement with the authors' conclusions: (a) that Torah codes exist and (b) that they are not mere coincidence. I can only hope that Drosnin's popular work stimulates more scientific research on the codes, and less reporting of the anecdotal and the happenstance. (4) I eagerly await books by Witztum, Rips, Rosenberg, Gans, and others like them. It seems to me that their cautious, scientific approach will enable their discoveries to be better received by skeptical, but reasonable, people than Drosnin's journalistic approach. (5) I thank God for His chosen people to whom the plain text of the Torah was entrusted and by whom the hidden code of the Torah was discovered. (6) Is there more to this quote from John 5:46 than meets the eye? Jesus said, "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me." Now there's a challenge for the Torah codes experts. ( )

Supercherie! ( )

The book that brought Equi-distant Lettering Sequences contained in the Hebrew Scripture to the mainstream public's attention.

Drosnin goes a bit too far in some of the conclusions he draws, but the book is well-worth the read.

Included is the original Witztum, Rips, Rosenberg paper establishing the scientific validity of the Bible Codes ( )

Intriguing, but a bit nutty. Drosnin lets his biases show in later works. ( )