Michael Drosnin, “Bible Code” guy.
“The Bible Code” opens with a stunning moment: The author, having discovered a biblical passage suggesting that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel would be assassinated, hops on a plane in 1994 to deliver a letter of warning. The message doesn’t alter the course of events — Mr. Rabin was shot and killed a year later — but, as Mr. Drosnin writes, it was “dramatic confirmation” of the Bible code.
That may sound like an Indiana Jones plot, but “The Bible Code” had its roots in science. In the early 1990s, the Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips and his colleagues performed an experiment in which they laid out the 304,805 letters of the Torah like a giant crossword puzzle and then performed a “skip-code” computer search. They discovered uncanny combinations. “Kennedy” appeared near the word “Dallas.” Hitler’s name, written upside down, appeared 20 rows from “Nazi,” written backward. And so on.
The findings were published in 1994 in the journal Statistical Science. Mr. Drosnin based his book on that research, adding discoveries of his own.
Many critics found the book unscientific, arbitrary and curiously weighted toward people and events relevant to an American living in the 20th century. Skeptics demonstrated that “Moby-Dick,” or a phone book for that matter, would reveal intriguing word groupings if one went looking for them. Mr. Rips himself denounced Mr. Drosnin’s interpretation of his work.
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Mr. Drosnin offered more revelations in “The Bible Code II” (2002), another best seller, in which he claimed the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center had been predicted and warned that the world might have only three years left to avoid Armageddon. Then came “The Bible Code III” (2010), but by that time the novelty had worn off; it did not make the best-seller list.
Still, Mr. Drosnin had a high batting average as an author. Of his four books, three were best sellers, including the first, “Citizen Hughes” (1985), a portrait of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes as revealed through stolen office memos.
I think that I read the first book, The Bible Code. If not, I am quite familiar with it. And while it was intriguing, I must admit that I didn’t give it a lot of credence, just because I was a Bible scholar in my younger years, and still do some fairly serious study of the Bible. And I found that the Bible in it’s original languages and in the original manuscripts, was the inspired word of God, and so the message to humankind from God was intended for everyone to be able to read and understand, not something that held hidden codes and secrets that took computers in order to discern what God was trying to tell us about Himself,as revealed in Scripture.
I found the idea intriguing but not really worth worrying about. I felt like there is enough written in plain everyday language, that if we could put that to our hearts and our actions, we would be doing more than humankind had done for 2000 years.
I of course, do remember quite well the occasion when the idea of numerology and the Bible was popular. And there are some preachers who know the various numbers that can be drawn from the Bible, and used to prove a point, for example, the fact that God gives Himself the number 3. And it can be found over and over in the Bible, where God refers to Himself, using 3 as the way He does so. You can note, that the term Holy, is always used as a singular, Holy, or when referring to God,as Holy, Holy, Holy, or 3 times.
The number 7 is a number of completion. There are 7 days in a week, the octave scale actually only has 7 notes,the 8th note merely being a repeat of the first. There are 7 deadly sins, 7 continents, 7 wonders of the ancient world.
I have heard preachers who take the lists of strange names from the old testament, and pulled out one name, and trace the lineage from his life, and bring it through the Bible, all the way from 3,000 BC, until the Birth of Jesus, showing how important that man actually was, and why those lists of hard to pronounce names really have a place in the Bible,and are not just there as filler. Some of these men are brilliant, having such a great mastery of the Bible they make me feel like I don’t know anything.
Sorry to take this in such a different direction,but it reminded me of my past, my time in Bible college, and my early years of study of the Bible. Happy Fathers Day, and have a safe and prosperous week.