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In the first paragraph, it says that "These claims are strongly doubted by skeptics and by many religious groups." Perhaps "skeptic" has a negative connotation and should be avoided? Given the extremely dubious nature of the claim, one need not have hightened incredulity in order to disbelieve in the Code. 128.135.223.196 16:00, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
(See also my talk on The Bible Code page)
88.111.225.212 09:43, 11 January 2007 (UTC)==Questions==
Couple of questions:
Zashaw 01:45, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Ok, good questions. Let me reply to them here first. I won't edit the article until there is some consensus (but of course someone else might edit it). Let's be good Wikipedians and restrict ourselves to discussing the quality of the article rather than debating the codes themselves.
-- McKay 04:04, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I mostly agree with your conclusions, but one statement seems to go too far:
"To make any scientific sense out of it you first have to write a mathematically exact definition of what "better" means, and then you have to test it on data that was not on hand when the definition was written." -- Does this mean "whenever I can't get new data on something, I can't ever make scientific sense out of it." ? So, anything I could possibly say about Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 doesn't make any scientific sense, either? Spending a lot of time discussing various ways Drosnin et. al. could have cheated occasionally sounds like discussing the various ways Neil Armstrong et. al. could have faked the Apollo moon landing -- Apollo moon landing hoax accusations. If at all possible, I'd like to apply Hanlon's razor Wikipedia:Assume good faith -- assume Drosnin accurately reported his experiments, and show how he was mistaken in his results, rather than discuss how he could have deliberately lied about his experiments. -- DavidCary 30 June 2005 17:58 (UTC)
The Bible Code(s) remind me of another bit of pseudoscience from the 1970's, a book titled "Theomatics" by Del Washburn. An acquaintance urged me to read it at the time. I browsed it and it basically seemed like a form of (new age) numerology applied to the Bible. Apparently Washburn has continued his "research" to recent times.
I know that Theomatics has a completely different geneology than the more recent Bible Code as reported by Drosnin, the two are not directly related, but should some mention of theomatics perhaps be added to the article as another example of a mystical Bible-related psuedoscience?
Grizzly 04:37, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, it could be mentioned but others too. There is also "Bible Numerics" that has a longer history than Theomatics. I guess various kabbalistic practices are even older. Also slightly similar are some numerical patterns in the Quran and some other books (eg. Tamil sacred texts). -- McKay 05:48, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
This article should mention or at least provide a link to codes some believe exist in the Qur'an. This site has a number of links for both Bible and Qur'an: [4] — Hippietrail 23:24, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hello. Why is it that people named this article Bible codes, when in fact it should be named Torah codes. Bible contains both Old and New Tetstament, where old testament is not accurately translated. The only book that has been reported (in Statisitcal Journal) to have the statistically significant codes is the Hebrew Bible (Torah), not new testament and not Quaran. So, why do we always have to "plagiarize" or "close our eyes" on Judaism. There is not reason to be politically correct here, instead this article should convey the fact of the research i.e. so far only TORAH has been show to have this unique quality: torah codes. Also why is this article focuses so much on skeptical arguments against the codes, instead of actually explaining how the codes are derived, and talking about future directions of this research, such as solving multi-dimentional codes.
-- I think that might require a less specific article, such as Scripture Codes. If you want one for Qu'ran codes, make one for Qu'ran codes. -shrugs.- -- Thorns Among Our Leaves 19:37, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Because I don't like stub articles, I would prefer for you to stick such information in the closest article that already exists. Would any of this information (or information already in the article) be more appropriate in the Steganography article? A couple of semi-unrelated sentences won't hurt. If that section grows *larger* than a few sentences, *then* we can split the article. BigBucketsFirst. -- DavidCary 30 June 2005 17:58 (UTC)
Last edit has schizophrenia under 'See also'... Am I missing something or is someone having a laugh? San de Berg 15:12, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I removed the sentence "The belief is especially popular in many mental hospitals where schizophrenia is prevalent." from the opening paragraph. Although I believe the truth in this sentence, it seems to be positioned there in order to ridicule the hypothesis (which, by the way, I don't believe in, it seems to be ridiculuos, but heck, we are writing about it, not judging it).
I think it would be OK to return this sentence, but only in a proper context, explaining, that schizophrenia and paranoia often go together and that this combination often leads to less skepticism towards some strange theories like conspiracy theories, alien mind control beams or the bible code. I'm no expert in that, that's why I don't update it. -- denny vrandečić 18:44, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)
I don't see any better place to put it without restructuring the entire article. As for it "ridiculing" the hypothesis, it's a ridiculous "hypothesis" (it's not really a hypothesis at all, as it's not disprovable). Presenting the facts in an NPOV manner is naturally going to bring out the fact that it's ridiculous. I can't help that. The belief that God is sending you messages encoded in texts is one of the defining characteristics of many schizophrenics. NPOV is neutral point of view, not sympathetic point of view. Anthony DiPierro 18:50, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Better? I tried to rephrase it further, maybe it's clearer now.
I think presenting facts in a way leading easily to judgment is as bad as judging itself, if not even worse (because the reader thinks of it as his own conlusion, but he was just manipulated to make it himself). The whole idea of bible codes is ridiculous enough by itself.
I mean the sentence discussed could well be put into the articles on aliens and Conspiracy theories, but it isn't there either. Maybe a even more appropriate place would be the schizophrenia article itself. -- denny vrandečić 19:38, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)
The schizophrenia sentence is just too bad for words. I've worked with a number of schizophrenics as a doctor, and - believe me - they'll believe anything as long as it's out of the ordinary. I worked with a guy who wouldn't stop listening to music on his headphones, to the point that he developed bilateral otitis externa, because he got these interesting "messages" in his music. For example, he thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers were singing "Under the Bridge" in celebration of his attemped suicide under a bridge. He could not be convinced of the fact that the song was written years before his TS. To pair Bible Codes and schizophrenia is stigmatising on both sides, and I argue in favour of its removal. Jfdwolff 19:57, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm not really sure that the link to 'A Beautiful Mind' is relevant to Bible codes, since there was nothing in the movie whatsoever that dealt with finding codes in the Bible.
Also, I don't like the sentence "A significant number of Christian teachers continue to promulgate the Bible code theory." I have never in my life met a Christian teacher who stated belief in this theory, and there seems to be no evidence to provide backing to this statement.
Nondescript
I have a problem with the following paragraph in the article:
Did he really predict the assasination or did he find hints to it later on? That is a major difference and should be expressed properly. Erdal Ronahi 09:07, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
Can we have some proof of what the page claims, namely that he predicted this with the aid of Bible codes? An article explaining how he did it? Something to back up such an extraordinary claim? Gadykozma 15:03, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Right :-O Gadykozma 02:07, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I've removed the sentence:
Because it's a bit confusing. The names searched for were limited to a certain number of characters (I think 7). The frequencies found in the Torah are "leaps" (ELS's) of tens of thousands of letters. One couldn't humanly choose names that would in advance be guaranteed to give good results. However, there was enough "wiggle space" in the definitions of their experiment, that with a truly miminal amount of fiddling and trial and error one could conceivably shape a list to meet the requirements. In fact, McKay's team proceeded to create such a list, only very slightly different from the list tested in the Torah, that gave even better results (to a power of ten) when tested in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. (One of the scientists mentioned in this article is my mother). -- Woggly 15:14, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
I love how the example given in the article uses the English translation instead of the original language. Instead of providing evidence for the code, they're unwittingly refuting their own claims. Well done! (This also assumes that there is a correct English translation, even more hilarious). -- BRIAN 0918 06:13, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
[Addendum as of 20 April 2005] As someone who has worked with the Torah, searching for coded patterns and codes that extend into three dimensional space in a given body of text, I have been somewhat apalled by the lack of criticism concerning Dr. Brendan McKay, and his "Moby Dick" and "War and Peace" codes,.. The one main point that seems to not be brought to the fore in most arenas of argument is that in the case of Torah Codes, those codes that have proven to be the most real and proveable have been the codes that interact with the textual body in which they are found!
Dr. McKay, like some stubborn and unruly child spits criticism as though it were fact. And yet his "codes" can in no way claim to pertain to the actual body of text in which they are found. There is another matter that is frequently overlooked: The most original and proveable codes (hidden text within the text) that come forth are from the Five Books of Moses. This is the body of work that is most likely to provide any true proof of Torah Codes. These five books have been keep under the most strict of scribal laws. And it is (in this persons opinion) the only real source of 'Torah Codes' that can be taken seriously.
In conclusion, the fact that ELS (Equal Letter Sequencing) is the ONLY way being investigated is something that begs the question: What of the traditions that speak of 50 gates to the Torah or more? If one permutes the letters contained in the Torah (304,805) and applies the keys given by ancient scholars and modern, then seeks the guidance of the one that the Books are about in the first place, perhaps understanding will show itself in this matter. Until then there is only a bunch of argument and misguided judgements and meandering speeches that only serve to discredit a true marvel. 209.191.206.138 Apr 20, 2005
Phrases like "...like some stubborn and unruly child spits..." and "only a bunch of argument and misguided judgements and meandering speeches" automatically generate scepticism/disbelief among the curious and otherwise uninvolved. "Many people" would assume that if you look hard enough at any text you will be able to find numerical and other patterns (look at how analyses of what
Nostradamus' writings mean have changed over time).
Has anyone got a cryptography expert of a neutral persuasion (ie not atheist but someone who is not involved in the cultural background of the case) to do an analysis?
An atheist should, in fact, be ideal,, as they [a true atheist] cannot have any vested interest in a particular result; if the result shows that the Bible Code may be genuine, they will retest it, or convert! What is important is that the tester is impartial and fully comprehends the scientific technique and its interpretation. Asteroceras 12:48, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
I Call for extensive independant completely unbiased scientifically verifiable statistical analysis of all major claims independantly with controls. It is irrelavent what the outcome is as to the scientific method employed and the qualification of those conducting the experiments.
As far as I can tell, there are enough basic definitions as well as methods of testing to carry out such results with verifiable factual results. To my knowledge a good control would be another hebrew text, and major claims include occurence of statistically impossible occurences of specific identified words of various types: self-referencing, verifiable facts, and future predictions(not necessarilly all types).
If I am mistaken or if there is no-one qualified to do such testing, then propose an alternative please(or state concerns). I would also like exactly the same procedures to be seriously applied to all desputed verifiable or repeatable claims of any impact.
Dear anon, when WRR attempted to find the truth their paper was reviewed in a hostile fashion and massacred by skeptics in their blogs. The truth is a matter of opinion here; whatever test you do, there will always be characters who cannot live with the results. JFW | T@lk 23:26, 31 October 2005 (UTC) There can't be a definitive answer as to the truth of a bible code even is there is one until a definite test that allows searches past present and future. When past, present and future information is found and proved to be repeatable and verifiable we will have an answer. At best the current method of skip searches can be classed as little more than random searches. What is needed is a definitive method such as being able to search by time, date, location etc. This may be possible if one could in some way link the bible to astrology/astroomy as the heavens remain consistent over time. User Kaye 11 Jan 2007
In reply to Kaye's suggestion above, there can't be a definitive answer as to the truth of anything, only disproof. Astrology is not a scientific discipline and it has certainly not remained constant or consistent over time! For example, modern "star signs" assigned by date-of-birth did not exist in the mediaeval period or before, though the constellations themselves were mostly named in ancient times. As for astronomy remaining constant, numerous stars are variable over periods from hours to years (that is, they fade from visible to invisible [to the naked eye] and vice-versa) and several stars have literally exploded since the writing of the religious scriptures in question. Additionally, stars move through the galaxy, at a sufficient rate for some of them to have visibly changed over a lifetime (cf Barnard's Star). To link both astrology and astronomy, the defined boundaries and constituent stars of the constellations have also changed through time, with Scorpius being an example of an ancient constellation that has lost stars to a neighbouring constellation. Astrological references from "bible times" certainly do exist, but nothing that could be termed astronomical and of sufficient accuracy for use in a scientific analysis of the Bible Code. To sum up, astrology would be a very poor subject to base a test around for numerous reasons, while astronomy has too short a history as a science to use in this respect. Asteroceras 13:41, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
The truth is that the original research did show tight connection between a list of names and a list of dates and this supports at least the possibility that whoever the parents of those babies consulted before naming their newborn babies did use this "proximty technique" with the Hebrew Torah and not with Tolstoy... Ofer Hadas. Hadaso 08:06, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
The truth is that the original research "cooked" the results. The question whether or not the Torah is a divine text is not a scientific question and cannot be answered using scientific methods. But the question "does the Torah contain famous Rabbi names above what is statistically reasonable?" can be scientifically defined. But, as any basic course in statistics can show you, virtually everything can be proved using bad statistics. You know the saying: "the are lies, there are hideous lies, and there's statistics". Well, go ahead and find out for yourself. The bible text and programs for searching codes are all available in the net. Pick a list of things you expect to find in the text, and search for it. Then compare with what you can find in other texts. See if you get statistically meaningful results. I tried it myself a few years back, and I found that 'The Hobbit' was much better at fortune telling than the bible. mousomer 08:03, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
This article uses the religioustolerance.org website as either a reference or a link. Please see the discussion on Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/Religioustolerance.org and Wikipedia:Verifiability/Religioustolerance.org as to whether Wikipedia should cite the religioustolerance.org website, jguk 14:08, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
I just wantted to know what my name saiys in the bible code or if there is anything at all about me and my future.
Moby Dick says blub blub blub. As for the anon: there are software packages that let you check Bible Codes. I have no access to them at this point, but google is your friend. JFW | T@lk 15:24, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Shouldn't the article state that the proponents said they repeated the succeeded experiment with a few test texts (some of them being just the Torah, with the lines or words randomly exchanged) and the results they got were way worse than the results obtained with the original text?
I have some major problems with this article, especialy it being a FA. In several places the prose doesn't flow well. In ohter places the text doesn't make sense, like here:
"Additionally, since the English translation (of which there are hundreds of versions to choose) is not the original text of the Bible, this would require one to believe in the design of the English language or translation—either through the influence of an omniscient entity, or through careful construction"
Now, what is that supposed to mean. The bible code is in Hebrew, it's not meant to be translated. The Enlgish langaugae wasn't designed to be compatible with ancient Hebrew. It doesn't work traslated. This sentence among others makes no sense.
Also, this article has one picture, just one; And the pic shows the bible code on a traslation. The part of the definition of the code it is in Hebrew. The picture itself is inaccurate.
As for this article being featured; an "overview" section should be the intro. This article has an intro, then an overview. This article has way too many redlinks, unorganized refs, and just looks bad visualy. Also, there are no inline citations.
If these problems are not fixed I will nominate this on WP:FARC Tobyk777 03:29, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
I read that The Bible Code predicts 2006 as being the date of the apocalypse, possibly in the form of a nuclear war in the Middle East. Is this actually the case? Can anyone give a cite for this? -- Karada 08:30, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
"MICHAEL DROSNIN: The warnings that are most clearly stated in the code are (a) the world will face global economic collapse starting in the Hebrew year 5762. 2002 in the modern calendar. We know that one came true. (b) this will lead to a period of unprecedented danger as nations with nuclear weapons become unstable and terrorists can buy or steal the power to destroy whole cities. After 9/11 no one doubts it. And then of course there's the most terrible of the three predictions, god help us if this one comes true. The danger will peak in the Hebrew year 5766, 2006 in the modern calendar. The year that is most clearly encoded with both world war and atomic holocaust." Patken4 15:58, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, the prediction is proven false. It's already into the year 2007 and nothing apocalyptic has happened.
I believe that it pridictes that WWIII will start as a neucleur war in 2006, looking back, it seems as if this is wrong, however it may be that future historiens may deside that the official date for WWIII is, in fact 2006. -- Robin63 19:15, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
There are three interesting points to draw from this section (""Apocalypse" prediction for 2006"). Firstly, as it is now 2007, it did not happen. Second to this, as Robin 63 says, maybe in the future, our date system will be revised, just as the date of zero AD has migrated over time (I think it is currently at 12 BC in the current system). Hovever... if it is really a prediction it will be of little use if we cannot determine the date in out current system!
Third, in response to Patken4: (a) the world will face global economic collapse starting in the Hebrew year 5762. 2002 in the modern calendar. We know that one came true. (b) this will lead to a period of unprecedented danger as nations with nuclear weapons become unstable and terrorists can buy or steal the power to destroy whole cities. After 9/11 no one doubts it. In reality, there was an economic slump in 2001 and by 2002 we were in the recovery period. So,there was no "global economic collapse" in Hebrew year 5762. As yet, no nations with nuclear weapons have become unstable; if anything, nuclear powers are moving toward ever greater stability. For example, North Korea is actually discussing disarmament with the US. The phrase "After 9/11 no one doubts it" is somewhat meaningless, and does not belong on what is supposed to be a factual website. EDIT 1a: My username was not appended. EDIT 1b: North Korea have since agreed to disarm, so there is one less nuclear weapon state to worry about. Asteroceras 15:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
2008 and we haven't been nuked' yet....-- 72.131.57.148 ( talk) 19:52, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi all, I reorganized the links and added some context for each link. I think this is important since it helps readers who are not familiar with ergodic theory or whatever to judge the relative reliability of the sources. No doubt subsequent editors will (unintentionally) mess this up; I hope some kind editor will try to maintain order and to continue to provide some salient facts giving a bit of context for each website which might be cited.
I also added a few internal links. Right now the relevance of ergodic theory, combinatorics, symbolic dynamics, Ramsey theory might not be relevant; hence the todo list.--- CH 09:45, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I am looking for information from experienced WP editors on the problem of keeping good editors on Wiki. See the page here User:Dbuckner/Expert rebellion
This is no more than a list of people who have left Wikipedia, or thinking of leaving, or generally cheesed off, for the reason (1) what I will unpolitely call 'cranks', i.e. people engaged in a persistenta and determined campaign to portray their highly idiosyncratic (and dubious) personal opinion as well-established mainstream scientific or historical fact, or 'crank subculture' i.e. fairly sizeable subcultures which adhere strongly to various anti-scientific conspiracy theories (e.g. Free energy suppression) or anti-scientific political movements (e.g. Intelligent design) masquerading as "scholarship". (2) the problem of edit creep, i.e. the tendency of piecemeal editing to make articles worse over time, rather than better.
If you are in this category, leave a link to your user page there. If you can, put something on your user page that indicates reason for discontent. I particularly like war stories, so let me have any of those (links please, not on the page).
There is a more general discussion of this issue on Lina Mishima's page. User:LinaMishima/Experts Problem Note I am not in agreement with her title as it is not in my view a problem about experts, but more of adherence to scholarly standards, ability to put polished and balanced articles together. But her idea is good.
I don’t know much about this subject except that it's a possible crank magnet. If you know of any other, let me know, or even better, cut and paste this message on those pages. I'm going round the obvious places like intelligent design, Goedel, Cantor and so forth, but there must be many such. Dbuckner 15:00, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
I have already reverted the twice, citing the extensive, biased, and, "copy and paste" editing of an anonymous users User:87.103.49.4 and User:87.103.46.0 who seems to making similiar edits to bible code related articles. I hereby request that this article be locked from editing from anonymous and newly registered users.-- Kenn Caesius 23:22, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
I would love to note on the article that it is subject to biases.
While I am not here to doubt Brendan McKay's professionality, there is no doubt that he is the biggest and most outspoken critic of the Codes.
This article is in a sense written by him. You can see that he initiated it, and continues to maintain it regularly.
Does it make any sense to consider "neutral" someone with such a vested interested in the debate? That does not make any sense to me.
I am interested in this "Bible Code" ideas, and would like to see some more examples of things that the Bible code has "predicted." Could someone please add a section to this article giving examples of things that the Bible Code has predicted? I think that would be very helpful. Thank you -- Robin63 19:19, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
The place to look is Google.com. The idea of Wikipedia.com is to give information about subjects, not comprehensive examples. Asteroceras 14:59, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
The article previously said:
"These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code, that mistakingly claims that these codes can predict the future. Drosnin, using Bible Codes, predicted nuclear holocausts and the destruction of major cities by earthquakes in 2006. These predictions did not come true, casting serious doubt on the whole paradigm."
The author of the books in question makes the following observation:
I am not an expert in this area, not even close. But it does seem a bit much to say that he predicted things when he specifically disclaims it. At the same time, even what appears in the book is sufficient that the repeated empirical failures do case doubt on the entire paradigm. (To say the least.) So I changed the sentences to attempt to reflect that.
I am editing as an ordinary editor in this case, trying to help get us to accuracy and NPOV.-- Jimbo Wales 04:50, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
That was a really biased way of putting it. An anon ip number added that. As this article is the subject of an ongoing WP:BLP situation, and still needs a fair amount of work, I am going to semiprotect it for now.-- Jimbo Wales 03:57, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
The aliens possibility appears on pages 94-98 of the first book. He finds the word "computer" in the codes, then suggests the Bible was written by a computer, specifically "a device far beyond anything we have yet developed". Then he quotes Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke about the nature of alien civilizations and how they would appear to us. Then "the long-awaited contact from another intelligence actually took place long ago". It is possible to argue whether he is putting this forward as a definitive conclusion, but at a minimum he is stating it as a strong possibility. As Born2x says, the second book describes how he went searching for an ancient alien artifact buried somewhere near the Dead Sea. The aliens who put it there could foresee the future but couldn't make steel that doesn't rust (but now I'm getting off the topic). McKay 06:19, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Can someone who can edit this page please put a link to this film in:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
Mthastings25 23:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
This article on the torah code is far to short and has no details about the extraordinary codes that scientists have found within the torah. Scientists have found codes that statistically show that they can't just be mere chance. This article doesn't say anything about these statistics. Also this article is biased about the jewish veiw of the torah code.
Thank you for your suggestion. When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes — they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). Λυδαcιτγ 05:10, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Simple math will tell you that there is nothing special in the bible code. There are 26 chars+10 numbers in English. Suppose you are looking for a word with 5 characters in the way bible code does in a ny 3x10^6 ish character text. Allowing negative stepping, there are like 1000 pattern ways to find the word you are looking for (allowing -500 to +500 chars). So the number of occurence of the word you are looking for is about 3x10^6 / 36^5 * 1000 ~ 50 occurence (~1500 occurence for 4 words letter). Now, if you trying playing big event game. Each event probably have about 100 names (and each with like 10 synnonyms) associate with it and taking into account that the common words are already intact in grammatically correct sentence. And in grammatically correct sentence the distribution of characters in sensible words will make it more likely to find the dictionary word youare looking for. So, you will definitely found whatever you are looking for. Take Moby Dick as an example. http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html . Regards
198.129.217.68 ( talk) 05:55, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
I want to test this code out. Does anyone know how this stuff works. What texts do you look in the bible? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eldorado91 ( talk • contribs) 00:29, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
At the risk of being roundly lambasted, I just wanted to ask why we have nothing in the lead for this article to articulate how the subject of this article is viewed by professional statisticians? For a subject that is, ostensibly, quite profound, it seems remiss not to note the view of the scientific community. Perhaps, given the subject matter, we don't need to draw attention to this view as it's obvious, but a single sentence noting this seems like a good idea to me. How about:
"The existence of Bible codes has attracted some attention within the scientific literature<ref>the WWR paper</ref>, although they have been demonstrated to be strongly dependent on search criteria, and seemingly meaningful codes have been shown to occur in secular texts or even works of fiction<ref>the McKay et al. paper</ref>."
Cheers, -- Plumbago ( talk) 09:07, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
There's no mention in the article of the status of the subject of the code, i.e. the bible itself. The problem is, there's n0o single text that can be called the bible, not even in Hebrew - the Masoretic text was written in the last centuries of the fist millennium AD, by good and sincere sJewish scholars, using the best texts and techniques available to them, but when we look at earlier texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are variations. Not large, but they're present. And sometimes it's quite clear that the Dead Sea Scrolls version is better than the Masoretic version (for example, in the Genesis story of Cain and Able, the MT has: "Cain said to his brother...", and that's it, nothing about what Cain said; but the DSS has: "...Let us go into the fields." The DSS reading is accepted in modern bibles). So if you don't have a stable text of the bible, how can you apply the technique? PiCo ( talk) 06:26, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
The section "Criticism of the original paper" is unacceptable. It presents only the Witztum point of view and ignores almost everything contrary. For example, Witztum's articles response, havlin, eman_hb, dat2_hb are cited but the extensive replies made to them are not mentioned. See for example: 83 page PDF, further reply, Zacut, dates, appelations, and so forth. This is unacceptable article writing. McKay ( talk) 12:12, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
-- Criticism --
The primary objection advanced against Bible codes is that information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, if data chosen for ELS experiments are intentionally or unintentionally "cooked" before the experiment is defined, similar patterns can be found in texts other than the Torah. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words can be expected to appear, depending on the details chosen for the experiment, and that it is possible to "tune" an ELS experiment to achieve a result which appears to exhibit patterns that overcome the level of noise.
--- Criticism of the original paper ---
In 1999, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay, together with mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in Statistical Science (known as 'MBBK') as a refutation of the original paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR). The MBBK paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians prior to publication.
Observations of MBBK included:
From these observations, MBBK created hypothesis to explain the "puzzle" of how the codes were discovered. MBBK's claim, in essence, was that the WRR authors had "cheated". On further examination of this hypothesis, MBBK reviewers looked at the chronology of WRR's experiment with respect to the selection of the data and the design of the experiment, and it became apparent that MBBK's hypothesis required the presumption of a conspiracy between WRR authors and their group of expert contributors, to tune the data and experiment in advance. MBBK went on to describe the means by which the "cheating" might have occurred, and demonstrate the tactic as presumed.
The central allegation made in MBBK is that the WRR authors and contributors had, for almost ten years, conspired to choose a selection of names and/or dates in advance, and intentionally designed their experiments to match their selection and thereby achieve their desired result. The McKay paper argues that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations, and that "their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it.". The MBBK paper demonstrated that this "tuning" tactic, when combined with what MBBK asserted was available "wiggle" room, was capable of generating a result similar to WRR's Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. Psychologist and MBBK co-author Maya Bar-Hillel subsequently summarized the MBBK view that the WRR paper was a hoax, an intentionally and a carefully designed "magic trick" [1].
In response to the accusations of MBBK, the WRR authors issued a lengthy and detailed refutation of each of the claims of the McKay paper,
including third-party evidence that no such tuning did or even could have taken place.
WRR's refutation also presented results of additional experiments that used the specific "alternate" name and date formats that MBBK had accused the WRR authors of intentionally avoiding, and in most cases these results provided equivalent or better support for the existence of the codes.
In the wake of the WRR response, author Bar-Natan issued a formal statement of non-response, citing "damage to my career".
After a series of exchanges with McKay and Bar-Hillel, WRR author Witztum responded in a new paper claiming that McKay had used smoke screen tactics in creating several Straw Man arguments, and thereby avoided the points made by WRR authors refuting MBBK.
Witztum also claimed that, upon interviewing a key independent expert contracted by McKay for the MBBK paper, that some experiments performed for MBBK had validated, rather than refuted the original WRR findings, and questioned why MBBK had expunged these results from their paper.
By 1999, full scale war had erupted, and meaningful debate mostly disappeared into the noise of rancorous diatribes among the participants as they accused one another of all manner of madness, deceptions and ill intent.
--- Criticism of Michael Drosnin ---
Journalist Drosnin's books have been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future. [2] Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community, [3] mistranslating Hebrew words [4] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes. [5]
Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby Dick would not yield ELS results comparable to the Torah, McKay created a new experiment that was tuned to find many ELS letter arrays in Moby Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive ("Oslo", relating to the Oslo accords). [6] Drosnin and others have responded to these claims, saying the tuning tactics employed by McKay were simply "nonsense", and providing analyses to support their argument that the tables, data and methodologies McKay used to produce the Moby Dick results "simply do not qualify as code tables". [7]
Noted skeptic Dave Thomas claimed to find other examples in many texts, though Thomas' methodology was refuted by Robert Haralick [8] and others. In addition, McKay claimed that Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran and McKay again demonstrated the 'tuning' technique, demonstrating that these techniques could produce "evidence" of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, 'coded' references in non-Torah Bible texts, as for instance the famous Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (eg, misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text. McKay and others claim that in the absence of an objective measure of quality and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.
Consider:
"Since 2000, physicist Nathan Jacobi, an agnostic Jew, and engineer Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew, have discovered hundreds of examples of extended ELSs in acceptable Hebrew.
[9] The number of extended ELSs at different lengths is compared with those expected from a non-encoded text, as determined by a formula from Markov Chain theory.
[10]"
This is just a repeat of wild claims made in a junk source. Who says the Hebrew is "acceptable"? Answer: only the finders; try showing some examples to an uninvolved Hebrew speaker. Who says the "Markov Chain theory" is anything but mathematical nonsense from unqualified people? Answer: nobody qualified.
McKay (
talk)
11:01, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
Please be patient with the process. Thanks. WNDL42 ( talk) 16:34, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
On the Bible
In Pensees' Section X "Typography", Pascal presents an unusual proof for a "double meaning" interpretation of The Bible.
Pascal subsequently identifies the major problem of a "double meaning" reconciliation.
In the fields of Mathematics, Computer science and Information theory Pascal is widely regarded to be the "father of modern probability theory", the branch of science that underpins Cryptography. Pascal's strangely disembodied conclusion to his closing argument for the "double meaning" divinity of the Bible, and his choice of the word "cipher", which was the technical word for "cryptogram" in its day, has been cited frequently in the context of "Bible codes", referring to information that is purported to be encrypted in the Torah of the Old Testament.
Brendan, I've attempted to address those of your concerns I could, after doing further research. I would offer that, to the extent that the additional research I did today in an attempt to verify and address your concerns, I found that the overall tone of the article was, on balance and with a couple of exceptions, a fair characterization. I hope you'll agree that the "toning down" in certain areas addressed these and helps further. I do need to note in passing however that both WRR and MBBK made exceptional claims, and a general guideline on Wikipedia is "Exceptional claims require exceptional proof", and specifically in the context of BLPs, see here.
The point I make here is that WRR indeed made exceptional claims wrt Torah codes, but those claims "did no harm" to specific living persons per se. MBBK's exceptional claims have a different character, and in the context (especially Bar Hillel's "Maddness in the Method") of WP:BLP, extensive voice must be given here to those who may have been harmed by the claims. If you know of any secondary sources (outside of the MBBK team) or additional evidence that speaks to explicitly verify what can only be called the "allegations" of MBBK, I will happily support adding them to the section now entirely devoted to MBBK's refutation.
Of course, further comments on content are welcome. However, if you have any further concerns about WP:BLP, you may wish to place the article for review at the BLP noticeboard, or perhaps contact the WP:OFFICE. WNDL42 ( talk) 23:00, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
Brendan, there are no "non-partisans" in this debate. We don't "call out" the avowed athiests among the anti-codes researchers, and we don't "explore an expound" on the motivations of the participants (as we could with Bar-Hillel). Continuing to attempt to "spin" this will not work. You have a conflict of interest and (given the history of this article) should not edit it further. You have been invited to propose specific changes here, where you have done so they have been adderessed. User Audacity is a skeptic and can proxy for you. WNDL42 ( talk) 12:23, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Gans has stayed busy, anybody else following his stuff? WNDL42 ( talk) 13:43, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
The selection of a psychologist with no mathmatical experience for inclusion on the MBBK team, in particular a psychologist who has been quoted several times as saying "there is no standard. I will not believe it regardless" -- in response to requests from codes proponents is something "interesting". recently I found this observation:
There seems to be a strange irony in the idea that the search for truth should first have to pass the test of philosophical bias, before the evidence is fairly considered.
In all candor there is no question as to the human elements involved on both side of this debate, and the issue of bias is indeed a two edged sword. According to Rips the majority of people that are introduced to the Bible-codes are prone to either immediate acceptance, or precipitous rejection of the codes, aptly illustrating the problem of bias as an all too human weakness (qtd. in Satinover, 207).
Brendan, in the context of "partisanship", would you care to comment? WNDL42 ( talk) 13:05, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Should the article make at least some mention of the Isaish 53 megacluster? Over 1400 ELS's were discovered (beginning) in or around this passage, many over 20 letters long (I believe the longest to-date is 176 letters long). The probability (so I have heard) of these els's existing there by chance are staggering. And yet it goes without mention.
Two links containing information on this: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/310 and http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/488.
Examples of els's in this cluster: "Gushing from above was Yeshua my mighty name, and the clouds rejoiced." That was ONE els, not a cluster. Recently, it was extended to a 40 letter els: "Gushing from above was Yeshua my mighty name, my clouds rejoiced. Where? At the mountain, said Levi [This was probably another name for Matthew the evangelist]. Their light came. God is in it." Sounds very much like the transfiguration. And yet it's an els found in Isaish 53:5, word 2, letter 1. (see also: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/320). The relevant work is "Bible Code Bombshell, availabe on google books.
Just my opinion--but I think someone should research this in more depth and add it to the article. It certainly marks a new stage in Bible Cold research--now researchers are revisiting old two-word finds and finding that they extend (on either side) to whole phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. And with these extensions the odds grow increasingly slim that they appear by chance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sunshine20716 ( talk) 22:30, 22 March 2008 (UTC) ( talk) 22:28, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
I am also a well known codes critic and so should not be editing this article but I would raise an issue that was raised to me by Rabbi Adlerstein. The neutral editor should address this issue. Thank you.
The paragraph that begins "Yitzchok Adlerstein, self described as "one of the most vocal skeptics" about the Bible Codes..." makes it sound like he has now become neutral. This is a misrepresentation of the original Rabbi Adlerstein post (see footnote 17) where his punch line is "If you want to believe in the phenomenon, you can as a matter of faith. But you really can’t call it science." Rabbi A's point is that Aumann has now become as skeptical of the subject as Rabbi A has long been. That's not the impression left by the skewed writing.
This paragraph needs to be changed.
Barry Simon IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Caltech —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.94.192.207 ( talk) 02:00, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Who is this phrase referring to? And why are we using this wording? WP:PEACOCK? Moreschi ( talk) ( debate) 10:37, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
I propose that the section "Religious Belief Foundations" be deleted until replaced by a reasonable account based on scholarly sources. What is there now is a mishmash of crackpottery with scarcely any source that meets Wikipedia requirements. Some of it is supposedly based on a study of Dogon traditions!! Even from the viewpoint of the mainstream of Bible Code believers, both Jewish and Christian, little of this section makes sense. McKay ( talk) 05:49, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
can you please tell me what claims you believe to be unsourced, i would be more than happy to try and find sources for you or explain why the current sources are valid (p.s. i know that the sentance in the first paragraph about how it no longer has any credibility in old testament studies is probabely true for secular bible studies but the wikipedia article on old testament studies also includes old testemant studies done theologically, bible codes are far from uncommon amongst jewish and christian sources, if you want i can bring sources to back this up, i know that i shouldve probabely started this in a new section but im new to wikipedia and still havent quited gotten the hang of it yet) :-) g.j.g ( talk) 15:18, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Ok. Here it is in blue with my comments in red.
Hebrew religious, Kabbalaistic and 'Hebraic Sacred Science' what on earth is that?? traditions hold that the text of the Torah was originally given to mankind in a single long string of 304,805 This link goes to the personal jottings of some guy who wears a cowboy hat. Wikipedia only uses reliable sources.Hebrew characters. According to this tradition, the spaces, punctuation, sentence, chapter and five-book structures were all added later to form the modern Pentateuch. This needs (1) a clue as to what it has to do with the codes, (2) the scholarly take on the tradition.
For this reason, Hebrew tradition dictates that Torah scribes must complete many years of training, much of which has to do with learning the proper meditative techniques, before being allowed to copy Torah scrolls. [8] The tradition holds that not a single "jot or tittle", nor one iota of the Torah must be added, changed or omitted from "The Word".What does it have to do with the codes? The problem of the textual history of the Bible text is certainly relevant, but that needs a balanced presentation not a one-side recount of traditions.
Believers in this tradition sometimes point to a purely literal interpretation of the first seventeen words of the Gospel of John from the New Testament as evidence for their belief:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God".Which believers? What does it have to do with the codes?
In summary, the exclusive application of Bible Codes techniques to the Torah "string" is based in the belief that at the most fundamental level, God is a "Living Word", essentially, an almost infinitely complex information structure that begets all that exists, [11] that the Torah is an information structure analogous to the DNA structure of all creation. [9] [10] Some more recent beliefs among various groups suggest that "the Word was made flesh" in a literal sense; that the physical body of Jesus Christ was manifested divinely, that his DNA was somehow perfectly derived from "The Word". [12] [11]. Researcher-spiritualist Gregg Braden and others have been exploring the human DNA string and claim to have discovered evidence of "The Word" in human DNA. Note the complete lack of mention of the codes in this paragraph. And who on earth is "Researcher-spiritualist Gregg Braden"?? The links here go to someone's self-published ramblings (not allowed by Wikipedia) and a blog (also not allowed). And notice the reference to "Dogon Traditions"; what on Earth do the Dogon have to do with it?
Since 1994, more recent (post WRR) views extend the analysis of biblical texts to include Old Testament texts outside the Torah and also to the New Testament, but these are rejected by Kabbalaistic tradition.Even with the right spelling, Kabbalistic tradition does NOT reject analysis of texts outside the Torah. In fact there are many examples amongst the writings of the great Kabbalists.
The traditional view of the codes further asserts that the "information" encoded in the Torah cannot be used to predict the future, and that at best the codes provide evidence of an all-knowing creator whose knowledge of the Universe and all of its possibilities spans both space and time.(1) no source given, (2) sermonising tone In this view, (from an information theoretical viewpoint)Give me a break! the letter-sequence of the Torah is to the Universe as the DNA sequence is to the human body, useful for understanding how the universe works on a macro scale, and illustrative of the "Grand Design" which encompasses all possible events, but nonetheless utterly unreliable for prediction of what specific combinations of micro-scale events will occur to create the 'reality' of human history.unsourced mumbo-jumbo with broken link
The traditional view conflicts with the more recent and highly sensationalized views suggesting that the Codes may be valuable as tools of prediction. These views of the codes first emerged in popular culture with the book The Bible Code by journalist Michael Drosnin, which suggests that the codes can be analyzed by computer to provide warnings for the future.This sentence is true, but no non-useless justification or source or background has been presented for it.
A more nuanced and academic view of the Codes was presented in 1997 by Jeffrey Satinover in Cracking the Bible Code. Satinover attempted to present the 'puzzle' in broader historical, mathematical and theological contexts, but this work was overshadowed by the more sensational Drosnin works that fueled the controversy.Calling it "academic" is an opinion and so needs a source.
And now that I have studied it properly, it is obvious that it is well below Wikipedia standards and I'm getting out my chainsaw.... McKay ( talk) 11:28, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
in the future please give me time to respond before editing (which you really shouldnt be doing at all since your an involved party) i was reading your analysis and you made some good points (as well as some incorrect ones, kabbalists dod not anylise nonsacred texts) and i admit that the article as it is right now is rather flawed, i do not however think that we should ignore the religious background of a heavilly religious issue, i think that the section needs fixing up but must remain in some form. g.j.g ( talk) 12:10, 23 June 2008 (UTC) o and one more thing, you eep referencing to mainstream jews and christians, what exactly is mainstream again g.j.g ( talk) 12:12, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
This is the method that you are obliged to use for all the twenty-four books of Scripture that we have today, and after them, for all the words of the sages of blessed memory, and after that you apply it to all books of wisdom, for thereby you will ascend and perceive properly what is worthy of being perceived, regarding every matter. -- Avraham Abulafia, Otsar 'Eden Ganuz, Ms. Oxford 1580, fol. 171a; quoted from Moshe Idel, Language, Torah and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p100.
while they viewed the works of kabbala as holy and studied them extensively as a way to connect to god they never viewed them as being spoken word for word by god and as such they never would have used them for bible codes. —Preceding
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![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
In the first paragraph, it says that "These claims are strongly doubted by skeptics and by many religious groups." Perhaps "skeptic" has a negative connotation and should be avoided? Given the extremely dubious nature of the claim, one need not have hightened incredulity in order to disbelieve in the Code. 128.135.223.196 16:00, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
(See also my talk on The Bible Code page)
88.111.225.212 09:43, 11 January 2007 (UTC)==Questions==
Couple of questions:
Zashaw 01:45, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Ok, good questions. Let me reply to them here first. I won't edit the article until there is some consensus (but of course someone else might edit it). Let's be good Wikipedians and restrict ourselves to discussing the quality of the article rather than debating the codes themselves.
-- McKay 04:04, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I mostly agree with your conclusions, but one statement seems to go too far:
"To make any scientific sense out of it you first have to write a mathematically exact definition of what "better" means, and then you have to test it on data that was not on hand when the definition was written." -- Does this mean "whenever I can't get new data on something, I can't ever make scientific sense out of it." ? So, anything I could possibly say about Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 doesn't make any scientific sense, either? Spending a lot of time discussing various ways Drosnin et. al. could have cheated occasionally sounds like discussing the various ways Neil Armstrong et. al. could have faked the Apollo moon landing -- Apollo moon landing hoax accusations. If at all possible, I'd like to apply Hanlon's razor Wikipedia:Assume good faith -- assume Drosnin accurately reported his experiments, and show how he was mistaken in his results, rather than discuss how he could have deliberately lied about his experiments. -- DavidCary 30 June 2005 17:58 (UTC)
The Bible Code(s) remind me of another bit of pseudoscience from the 1970's, a book titled "Theomatics" by Del Washburn. An acquaintance urged me to read it at the time. I browsed it and it basically seemed like a form of (new age) numerology applied to the Bible. Apparently Washburn has continued his "research" to recent times.
I know that Theomatics has a completely different geneology than the more recent Bible Code as reported by Drosnin, the two are not directly related, but should some mention of theomatics perhaps be added to the article as another example of a mystical Bible-related psuedoscience?
Grizzly 04:37, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, it could be mentioned but others too. There is also "Bible Numerics" that has a longer history than Theomatics. I guess various kabbalistic practices are even older. Also slightly similar are some numerical patterns in the Quran and some other books (eg. Tamil sacred texts). -- McKay 05:48, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
This article should mention or at least provide a link to codes some believe exist in the Qur'an. This site has a number of links for both Bible and Qur'an: [4] — Hippietrail 23:24, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Hello. Why is it that people named this article Bible codes, when in fact it should be named Torah codes. Bible contains both Old and New Tetstament, where old testament is not accurately translated. The only book that has been reported (in Statisitcal Journal) to have the statistically significant codes is the Hebrew Bible (Torah), not new testament and not Quaran. So, why do we always have to "plagiarize" or "close our eyes" on Judaism. There is not reason to be politically correct here, instead this article should convey the fact of the research i.e. so far only TORAH has been show to have this unique quality: torah codes. Also why is this article focuses so much on skeptical arguments against the codes, instead of actually explaining how the codes are derived, and talking about future directions of this research, such as solving multi-dimentional codes.
-- I think that might require a less specific article, such as Scripture Codes. If you want one for Qu'ran codes, make one for Qu'ran codes. -shrugs.- -- Thorns Among Our Leaves 19:37, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Because I don't like stub articles, I would prefer for you to stick such information in the closest article that already exists. Would any of this information (or information already in the article) be more appropriate in the Steganography article? A couple of semi-unrelated sentences won't hurt. If that section grows *larger* than a few sentences, *then* we can split the article. BigBucketsFirst. -- DavidCary 30 June 2005 17:58 (UTC)
Last edit has schizophrenia under 'See also'... Am I missing something or is someone having a laugh? San de Berg 15:12, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I removed the sentence "The belief is especially popular in many mental hospitals where schizophrenia is prevalent." from the opening paragraph. Although I believe the truth in this sentence, it seems to be positioned there in order to ridicule the hypothesis (which, by the way, I don't believe in, it seems to be ridiculuos, but heck, we are writing about it, not judging it).
I think it would be OK to return this sentence, but only in a proper context, explaining, that schizophrenia and paranoia often go together and that this combination often leads to less skepticism towards some strange theories like conspiracy theories, alien mind control beams or the bible code. I'm no expert in that, that's why I don't update it. -- denny vrandečić 18:44, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)
I don't see any better place to put it without restructuring the entire article. As for it "ridiculing" the hypothesis, it's a ridiculous "hypothesis" (it's not really a hypothesis at all, as it's not disprovable). Presenting the facts in an NPOV manner is naturally going to bring out the fact that it's ridiculous. I can't help that. The belief that God is sending you messages encoded in texts is one of the defining characteristics of many schizophrenics. NPOV is neutral point of view, not sympathetic point of view. Anthony DiPierro 18:50, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Better? I tried to rephrase it further, maybe it's clearer now.
I think presenting facts in a way leading easily to judgment is as bad as judging itself, if not even worse (because the reader thinks of it as his own conlusion, but he was just manipulated to make it himself). The whole idea of bible codes is ridiculous enough by itself.
I mean the sentence discussed could well be put into the articles on aliens and Conspiracy theories, but it isn't there either. Maybe a even more appropriate place would be the schizophrenia article itself. -- denny vrandečić 19:38, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)
The schizophrenia sentence is just too bad for words. I've worked with a number of schizophrenics as a doctor, and - believe me - they'll believe anything as long as it's out of the ordinary. I worked with a guy who wouldn't stop listening to music on his headphones, to the point that he developed bilateral otitis externa, because he got these interesting "messages" in his music. For example, he thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers were singing "Under the Bridge" in celebration of his attemped suicide under a bridge. He could not be convinced of the fact that the song was written years before his TS. To pair Bible Codes and schizophrenia is stigmatising on both sides, and I argue in favour of its removal. Jfdwolff 19:57, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I'm not really sure that the link to 'A Beautiful Mind' is relevant to Bible codes, since there was nothing in the movie whatsoever that dealt with finding codes in the Bible.
Also, I don't like the sentence "A significant number of Christian teachers continue to promulgate the Bible code theory." I have never in my life met a Christian teacher who stated belief in this theory, and there seems to be no evidence to provide backing to this statement.
Nondescript
I have a problem with the following paragraph in the article:
Did he really predict the assasination or did he find hints to it later on? That is a major difference and should be expressed properly. Erdal Ronahi 09:07, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
Can we have some proof of what the page claims, namely that he predicted this with the aid of Bible codes? An article explaining how he did it? Something to back up such an extraordinary claim? Gadykozma 15:03, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Right :-O Gadykozma 02:07, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I've removed the sentence:
Because it's a bit confusing. The names searched for were limited to a certain number of characters (I think 7). The frequencies found in the Torah are "leaps" (ELS's) of tens of thousands of letters. One couldn't humanly choose names that would in advance be guaranteed to give good results. However, there was enough "wiggle space" in the definitions of their experiment, that with a truly miminal amount of fiddling and trial and error one could conceivably shape a list to meet the requirements. In fact, McKay's team proceeded to create such a list, only very slightly different from the list tested in the Torah, that gave even better results (to a power of ten) when tested in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. (One of the scientists mentioned in this article is my mother). -- Woggly 15:14, 4 May 2004 (UTC)
I love how the example given in the article uses the English translation instead of the original language. Instead of providing evidence for the code, they're unwittingly refuting their own claims. Well done! (This also assumes that there is a correct English translation, even more hilarious). -- BRIAN 0918 06:13, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
[Addendum as of 20 April 2005] As someone who has worked with the Torah, searching for coded patterns and codes that extend into three dimensional space in a given body of text, I have been somewhat apalled by the lack of criticism concerning Dr. Brendan McKay, and his "Moby Dick" and "War and Peace" codes,.. The one main point that seems to not be brought to the fore in most arenas of argument is that in the case of Torah Codes, those codes that have proven to be the most real and proveable have been the codes that interact with the textual body in which they are found!
Dr. McKay, like some stubborn and unruly child spits criticism as though it were fact. And yet his "codes" can in no way claim to pertain to the actual body of text in which they are found. There is another matter that is frequently overlooked: The most original and proveable codes (hidden text within the text) that come forth are from the Five Books of Moses. This is the body of work that is most likely to provide any true proof of Torah Codes. These five books have been keep under the most strict of scribal laws. And it is (in this persons opinion) the only real source of 'Torah Codes' that can be taken seriously.
In conclusion, the fact that ELS (Equal Letter Sequencing) is the ONLY way being investigated is something that begs the question: What of the traditions that speak of 50 gates to the Torah or more? If one permutes the letters contained in the Torah (304,805) and applies the keys given by ancient scholars and modern, then seeks the guidance of the one that the Books are about in the first place, perhaps understanding will show itself in this matter. Until then there is only a bunch of argument and misguided judgements and meandering speeches that only serve to discredit a true marvel. 209.191.206.138 Apr 20, 2005
Phrases like "...like some stubborn and unruly child spits..." and "only a bunch of argument and misguided judgements and meandering speeches" automatically generate scepticism/disbelief among the curious and otherwise uninvolved. "Many people" would assume that if you look hard enough at any text you will be able to find numerical and other patterns (look at how analyses of what
Nostradamus' writings mean have changed over time).
Has anyone got a cryptography expert of a neutral persuasion (ie not atheist but someone who is not involved in the cultural background of the case) to do an analysis?
An atheist should, in fact, be ideal,, as they [a true atheist] cannot have any vested interest in a particular result; if the result shows that the Bible Code may be genuine, they will retest it, or convert! What is important is that the tester is impartial and fully comprehends the scientific technique and its interpretation. Asteroceras 12:48, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
I Call for extensive independant completely unbiased scientifically verifiable statistical analysis of all major claims independantly with controls. It is irrelavent what the outcome is as to the scientific method employed and the qualification of those conducting the experiments.
As far as I can tell, there are enough basic definitions as well as methods of testing to carry out such results with verifiable factual results. To my knowledge a good control would be another hebrew text, and major claims include occurence of statistically impossible occurences of specific identified words of various types: self-referencing, verifiable facts, and future predictions(not necessarilly all types).
If I am mistaken or if there is no-one qualified to do such testing, then propose an alternative please(or state concerns). I would also like exactly the same procedures to be seriously applied to all desputed verifiable or repeatable claims of any impact.
Dear anon, when WRR attempted to find the truth their paper was reviewed in a hostile fashion and massacred by skeptics in their blogs. The truth is a matter of opinion here; whatever test you do, there will always be characters who cannot live with the results. JFW | T@lk 23:26, 31 October 2005 (UTC) There can't be a definitive answer as to the truth of a bible code even is there is one until a definite test that allows searches past present and future. When past, present and future information is found and proved to be repeatable and verifiable we will have an answer. At best the current method of skip searches can be classed as little more than random searches. What is needed is a definitive method such as being able to search by time, date, location etc. This may be possible if one could in some way link the bible to astrology/astroomy as the heavens remain consistent over time. User Kaye 11 Jan 2007
In reply to Kaye's suggestion above, there can't be a definitive answer as to the truth of anything, only disproof. Astrology is not a scientific discipline and it has certainly not remained constant or consistent over time! For example, modern "star signs" assigned by date-of-birth did not exist in the mediaeval period or before, though the constellations themselves were mostly named in ancient times. As for astronomy remaining constant, numerous stars are variable over periods from hours to years (that is, they fade from visible to invisible [to the naked eye] and vice-versa) and several stars have literally exploded since the writing of the religious scriptures in question. Additionally, stars move through the galaxy, at a sufficient rate for some of them to have visibly changed over a lifetime (cf Barnard's Star). To link both astrology and astronomy, the defined boundaries and constituent stars of the constellations have also changed through time, with Scorpius being an example of an ancient constellation that has lost stars to a neighbouring constellation. Astrological references from "bible times" certainly do exist, but nothing that could be termed astronomical and of sufficient accuracy for use in a scientific analysis of the Bible Code. To sum up, astrology would be a very poor subject to base a test around for numerous reasons, while astronomy has too short a history as a science to use in this respect. Asteroceras 13:41, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
The truth is that the original research did show tight connection between a list of names and a list of dates and this supports at least the possibility that whoever the parents of those babies consulted before naming their newborn babies did use this "proximty technique" with the Hebrew Torah and not with Tolstoy... Ofer Hadas. Hadaso 08:06, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
The truth is that the original research "cooked" the results. The question whether or not the Torah is a divine text is not a scientific question and cannot be answered using scientific methods. But the question "does the Torah contain famous Rabbi names above what is statistically reasonable?" can be scientifically defined. But, as any basic course in statistics can show you, virtually everything can be proved using bad statistics. You know the saying: "the are lies, there are hideous lies, and there's statistics". Well, go ahead and find out for yourself. The bible text and programs for searching codes are all available in the net. Pick a list of things you expect to find in the text, and search for it. Then compare with what you can find in other texts. See if you get statistically meaningful results. I tried it myself a few years back, and I found that 'The Hobbit' was much better at fortune telling than the bible. mousomer 08:03, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
This article uses the religioustolerance.org website as either a reference or a link. Please see the discussion on Wikipedia talk:Verifiability/Religioustolerance.org and Wikipedia:Verifiability/Religioustolerance.org as to whether Wikipedia should cite the religioustolerance.org website, jguk 14:08, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
I just wantted to know what my name saiys in the bible code or if there is anything at all about me and my future.
Moby Dick says blub blub blub. As for the anon: there are software packages that let you check Bible Codes. I have no access to them at this point, but google is your friend. JFW | T@lk 15:24, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Shouldn't the article state that the proponents said they repeated the succeeded experiment with a few test texts (some of them being just the Torah, with the lines or words randomly exchanged) and the results they got were way worse than the results obtained with the original text?
I have some major problems with this article, especialy it being a FA. In several places the prose doesn't flow well. In ohter places the text doesn't make sense, like here:
"Additionally, since the English translation (of which there are hundreds of versions to choose) is not the original text of the Bible, this would require one to believe in the design of the English language or translation—either through the influence of an omniscient entity, or through careful construction"
Now, what is that supposed to mean. The bible code is in Hebrew, it's not meant to be translated. The Enlgish langaugae wasn't designed to be compatible with ancient Hebrew. It doesn't work traslated. This sentence among others makes no sense.
Also, this article has one picture, just one; And the pic shows the bible code on a traslation. The part of the definition of the code it is in Hebrew. The picture itself is inaccurate.
As for this article being featured; an "overview" section should be the intro. This article has an intro, then an overview. This article has way too many redlinks, unorganized refs, and just looks bad visualy. Also, there are no inline citations.
If these problems are not fixed I will nominate this on WP:FARC Tobyk777 03:29, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
I read that The Bible Code predicts 2006 as being the date of the apocalypse, possibly in the form of a nuclear war in the Middle East. Is this actually the case? Can anyone give a cite for this? -- Karada 08:30, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
"MICHAEL DROSNIN: The warnings that are most clearly stated in the code are (a) the world will face global economic collapse starting in the Hebrew year 5762. 2002 in the modern calendar. We know that one came true. (b) this will lead to a period of unprecedented danger as nations with nuclear weapons become unstable and terrorists can buy or steal the power to destroy whole cities. After 9/11 no one doubts it. And then of course there's the most terrible of the three predictions, god help us if this one comes true. The danger will peak in the Hebrew year 5766, 2006 in the modern calendar. The year that is most clearly encoded with both world war and atomic holocaust." Patken4 15:58, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, the prediction is proven false. It's already into the year 2007 and nothing apocalyptic has happened.
I believe that it pridictes that WWIII will start as a neucleur war in 2006, looking back, it seems as if this is wrong, however it may be that future historiens may deside that the official date for WWIII is, in fact 2006. -- Robin63 19:15, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
There are three interesting points to draw from this section (""Apocalypse" prediction for 2006"). Firstly, as it is now 2007, it did not happen. Second to this, as Robin 63 says, maybe in the future, our date system will be revised, just as the date of zero AD has migrated over time (I think it is currently at 12 BC in the current system). Hovever... if it is really a prediction it will be of little use if we cannot determine the date in out current system!
Third, in response to Patken4: (a) the world will face global economic collapse starting in the Hebrew year 5762. 2002 in the modern calendar. We know that one came true. (b) this will lead to a period of unprecedented danger as nations with nuclear weapons become unstable and terrorists can buy or steal the power to destroy whole cities. After 9/11 no one doubts it. In reality, there was an economic slump in 2001 and by 2002 we were in the recovery period. So,there was no "global economic collapse" in Hebrew year 5762. As yet, no nations with nuclear weapons have become unstable; if anything, nuclear powers are moving toward ever greater stability. For example, North Korea is actually discussing disarmament with the US. The phrase "After 9/11 no one doubts it" is somewhat meaningless, and does not belong on what is supposed to be a factual website. EDIT 1a: My username was not appended. EDIT 1b: North Korea have since agreed to disarm, so there is one less nuclear weapon state to worry about. Asteroceras 15:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
2008 and we haven't been nuked' yet....-- 72.131.57.148 ( talk) 19:52, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi all, I reorganized the links and added some context for each link. I think this is important since it helps readers who are not familiar with ergodic theory or whatever to judge the relative reliability of the sources. No doubt subsequent editors will (unintentionally) mess this up; I hope some kind editor will try to maintain order and to continue to provide some salient facts giving a bit of context for each website which might be cited.
I also added a few internal links. Right now the relevance of ergodic theory, combinatorics, symbolic dynamics, Ramsey theory might not be relevant; hence the todo list.--- CH 09:45, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I am looking for information from experienced WP editors on the problem of keeping good editors on Wiki. See the page here User:Dbuckner/Expert rebellion
This is no more than a list of people who have left Wikipedia, or thinking of leaving, or generally cheesed off, for the reason (1) what I will unpolitely call 'cranks', i.e. people engaged in a persistenta and determined campaign to portray their highly idiosyncratic (and dubious) personal opinion as well-established mainstream scientific or historical fact, or 'crank subculture' i.e. fairly sizeable subcultures which adhere strongly to various anti-scientific conspiracy theories (e.g. Free energy suppression) or anti-scientific political movements (e.g. Intelligent design) masquerading as "scholarship". (2) the problem of edit creep, i.e. the tendency of piecemeal editing to make articles worse over time, rather than better.
If you are in this category, leave a link to your user page there. If you can, put something on your user page that indicates reason for discontent. I particularly like war stories, so let me have any of those (links please, not on the page).
There is a more general discussion of this issue on Lina Mishima's page. User:LinaMishima/Experts Problem Note I am not in agreement with her title as it is not in my view a problem about experts, but more of adherence to scholarly standards, ability to put polished and balanced articles together. But her idea is good.
I don’t know much about this subject except that it's a possible crank magnet. If you know of any other, let me know, or even better, cut and paste this message on those pages. I'm going round the obvious places like intelligent design, Goedel, Cantor and so forth, but there must be many such. Dbuckner 15:00, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
I have already reverted the twice, citing the extensive, biased, and, "copy and paste" editing of an anonymous users User:87.103.49.4 and User:87.103.46.0 who seems to making similiar edits to bible code related articles. I hereby request that this article be locked from editing from anonymous and newly registered users.-- Kenn Caesius 23:22, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
I would love to note on the article that it is subject to biases.
While I am not here to doubt Brendan McKay's professionality, there is no doubt that he is the biggest and most outspoken critic of the Codes.
This article is in a sense written by him. You can see that he initiated it, and continues to maintain it regularly.
Does it make any sense to consider "neutral" someone with such a vested interested in the debate? That does not make any sense to me.
I am interested in this "Bible Code" ideas, and would like to see some more examples of things that the Bible code has "predicted." Could someone please add a section to this article giving examples of things that the Bible Code has predicted? I think that would be very helpful. Thank you -- Robin63 19:19, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
The place to look is Google.com. The idea of Wikipedia.com is to give information about subjects, not comprehensive examples. Asteroceras 14:59, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
The article previously said:
"These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code, that mistakingly claims that these codes can predict the future. Drosnin, using Bible Codes, predicted nuclear holocausts and the destruction of major cities by earthquakes in 2006. These predictions did not come true, casting serious doubt on the whole paradigm."
The author of the books in question makes the following observation:
I am not an expert in this area, not even close. But it does seem a bit much to say that he predicted things when he specifically disclaims it. At the same time, even what appears in the book is sufficient that the repeated empirical failures do case doubt on the entire paradigm. (To say the least.) So I changed the sentences to attempt to reflect that.
I am editing as an ordinary editor in this case, trying to help get us to accuracy and NPOV.-- Jimbo Wales 04:50, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
That was a really biased way of putting it. An anon ip number added that. As this article is the subject of an ongoing WP:BLP situation, and still needs a fair amount of work, I am going to semiprotect it for now.-- Jimbo Wales 03:57, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
The aliens possibility appears on pages 94-98 of the first book. He finds the word "computer" in the codes, then suggests the Bible was written by a computer, specifically "a device far beyond anything we have yet developed". Then he quotes Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke about the nature of alien civilizations and how they would appear to us. Then "the long-awaited contact from another intelligence actually took place long ago". It is possible to argue whether he is putting this forward as a definitive conclusion, but at a minimum he is stating it as a strong possibility. As Born2x says, the second book describes how he went searching for an ancient alien artifact buried somewhere near the Dead Sea. The aliens who put it there could foresee the future but couldn't make steel that doesn't rust (but now I'm getting off the topic). McKay 06:19, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Can someone who can edit this page please put a link to this film in:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
Mthastings25 23:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
This article on the torah code is far to short and has no details about the extraordinary codes that scientists have found within the torah. Scientists have found codes that statistically show that they can't just be mere chance. This article doesn't say anything about these statistics. Also this article is biased about the jewish veiw of the torah code.
Thank you for your suggestion. When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes — they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). Λυδαcιτγ 05:10, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Simple math will tell you that there is nothing special in the bible code. There are 26 chars+10 numbers in English. Suppose you are looking for a word with 5 characters in the way bible code does in a ny 3x10^6 ish character text. Allowing negative stepping, there are like 1000 pattern ways to find the word you are looking for (allowing -500 to +500 chars). So the number of occurence of the word you are looking for is about 3x10^6 / 36^5 * 1000 ~ 50 occurence (~1500 occurence for 4 words letter). Now, if you trying playing big event game. Each event probably have about 100 names (and each with like 10 synnonyms) associate with it and taking into account that the common words are already intact in grammatically correct sentence. And in grammatically correct sentence the distribution of characters in sensible words will make it more likely to find the dictionary word youare looking for. So, you will definitely found whatever you are looking for. Take Moby Dick as an example. http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html . Regards
198.129.217.68 ( talk) 05:55, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
I want to test this code out. Does anyone know how this stuff works. What texts do you look in the bible? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eldorado91 ( talk • contribs) 00:29, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
At the risk of being roundly lambasted, I just wanted to ask why we have nothing in the lead for this article to articulate how the subject of this article is viewed by professional statisticians? For a subject that is, ostensibly, quite profound, it seems remiss not to note the view of the scientific community. Perhaps, given the subject matter, we don't need to draw attention to this view as it's obvious, but a single sentence noting this seems like a good idea to me. How about:
"The existence of Bible codes has attracted some attention within the scientific literature<ref>the WWR paper</ref>, although they have been demonstrated to be strongly dependent on search criteria, and seemingly meaningful codes have been shown to occur in secular texts or even works of fiction<ref>the McKay et al. paper</ref>."
Cheers, -- Plumbago ( talk) 09:07, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
There's no mention in the article of the status of the subject of the code, i.e. the bible itself. The problem is, there's n0o single text that can be called the bible, not even in Hebrew - the Masoretic text was written in the last centuries of the fist millennium AD, by good and sincere sJewish scholars, using the best texts and techniques available to them, but when we look at earlier texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are variations. Not large, but they're present. And sometimes it's quite clear that the Dead Sea Scrolls version is better than the Masoretic version (for example, in the Genesis story of Cain and Able, the MT has: "Cain said to his brother...", and that's it, nothing about what Cain said; but the DSS has: "...Let us go into the fields." The DSS reading is accepted in modern bibles). So if you don't have a stable text of the bible, how can you apply the technique? PiCo ( talk) 06:26, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
The section "Criticism of the original paper" is unacceptable. It presents only the Witztum point of view and ignores almost everything contrary. For example, Witztum's articles response, havlin, eman_hb, dat2_hb are cited but the extensive replies made to them are not mentioned. See for example: 83 page PDF, further reply, Zacut, dates, appelations, and so forth. This is unacceptable article writing. McKay ( talk) 12:12, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
-- Criticism --
The primary objection advanced against Bible codes is that information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, if data chosen for ELS experiments are intentionally or unintentionally "cooked" before the experiment is defined, similar patterns can be found in texts other than the Torah. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words can be expected to appear, depending on the details chosen for the experiment, and that it is possible to "tune" an ELS experiment to achieve a result which appears to exhibit patterns that overcome the level of noise.
--- Criticism of the original paper ---
In 1999, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay, together with mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in Statistical Science (known as 'MBBK') as a refutation of the original paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR). The MBBK paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians prior to publication.
Observations of MBBK included:
From these observations, MBBK created hypothesis to explain the "puzzle" of how the codes were discovered. MBBK's claim, in essence, was that the WRR authors had "cheated". On further examination of this hypothesis, MBBK reviewers looked at the chronology of WRR's experiment with respect to the selection of the data and the design of the experiment, and it became apparent that MBBK's hypothesis required the presumption of a conspiracy between WRR authors and their group of expert contributors, to tune the data and experiment in advance. MBBK went on to describe the means by which the "cheating" might have occurred, and demonstrate the tactic as presumed.
The central allegation made in MBBK is that the WRR authors and contributors had, for almost ten years, conspired to choose a selection of names and/or dates in advance, and intentionally designed their experiments to match their selection and thereby achieve their desired result. The McKay paper argues that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations, and that "their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it.". The MBBK paper demonstrated that this "tuning" tactic, when combined with what MBBK asserted was available "wiggle" room, was capable of generating a result similar to WRR's Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. Psychologist and MBBK co-author Maya Bar-Hillel subsequently summarized the MBBK view that the WRR paper was a hoax, an intentionally and a carefully designed "magic trick" [1].
In response to the accusations of MBBK, the WRR authors issued a lengthy and detailed refutation of each of the claims of the McKay paper,
including third-party evidence that no such tuning did or even could have taken place.
WRR's refutation also presented results of additional experiments that used the specific "alternate" name and date formats that MBBK had accused the WRR authors of intentionally avoiding, and in most cases these results provided equivalent or better support for the existence of the codes.
In the wake of the WRR response, author Bar-Natan issued a formal statement of non-response, citing "damage to my career".
After a series of exchanges with McKay and Bar-Hillel, WRR author Witztum responded in a new paper claiming that McKay had used smoke screen tactics in creating several Straw Man arguments, and thereby avoided the points made by WRR authors refuting MBBK.
Witztum also claimed that, upon interviewing a key independent expert contracted by McKay for the MBBK paper, that some experiments performed for MBBK had validated, rather than refuted the original WRR findings, and questioned why MBBK had expunged these results from their paper.
By 1999, full scale war had erupted, and meaningful debate mostly disappeared into the noise of rancorous diatribes among the participants as they accused one another of all manner of madness, deceptions and ill intent.
--- Criticism of Michael Drosnin ---
Journalist Drosnin's books have been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future. [2] Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community, [3] mistranslating Hebrew words [4] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes. [5]
Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby Dick would not yield ELS results comparable to the Torah, McKay created a new experiment that was tuned to find many ELS letter arrays in Moby Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive ("Oslo", relating to the Oslo accords). [6] Drosnin and others have responded to these claims, saying the tuning tactics employed by McKay were simply "nonsense", and providing analyses to support their argument that the tables, data and methodologies McKay used to produce the Moby Dick results "simply do not qualify as code tables". [7]
Noted skeptic Dave Thomas claimed to find other examples in many texts, though Thomas' methodology was refuted by Robert Haralick [8] and others. In addition, McKay claimed that Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran and McKay again demonstrated the 'tuning' technique, demonstrating that these techniques could produce "evidence" of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, 'coded' references in non-Torah Bible texts, as for instance the famous Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (eg, misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text. McKay and others claim that in the absence of an objective measure of quality and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.
Consider:
"Since 2000, physicist Nathan Jacobi, an agnostic Jew, and engineer Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew, have discovered hundreds of examples of extended ELSs in acceptable Hebrew.
[9] The number of extended ELSs at different lengths is compared with those expected from a non-encoded text, as determined by a formula from Markov Chain theory.
[10]"
This is just a repeat of wild claims made in a junk source. Who says the Hebrew is "acceptable"? Answer: only the finders; try showing some examples to an uninvolved Hebrew speaker. Who says the "Markov Chain theory" is anything but mathematical nonsense from unqualified people? Answer: nobody qualified.
McKay (
talk)
11:01, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
Please be patient with the process. Thanks. WNDL42 ( talk) 16:34, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
On the Bible
In Pensees' Section X "Typography", Pascal presents an unusual proof for a "double meaning" interpretation of The Bible.
Pascal subsequently identifies the major problem of a "double meaning" reconciliation.
In the fields of Mathematics, Computer science and Information theory Pascal is widely regarded to be the "father of modern probability theory", the branch of science that underpins Cryptography. Pascal's strangely disembodied conclusion to his closing argument for the "double meaning" divinity of the Bible, and his choice of the word "cipher", which was the technical word for "cryptogram" in its day, has been cited frequently in the context of "Bible codes", referring to information that is purported to be encrypted in the Torah of the Old Testament.
Brendan, I've attempted to address those of your concerns I could, after doing further research. I would offer that, to the extent that the additional research I did today in an attempt to verify and address your concerns, I found that the overall tone of the article was, on balance and with a couple of exceptions, a fair characterization. I hope you'll agree that the "toning down" in certain areas addressed these and helps further. I do need to note in passing however that both WRR and MBBK made exceptional claims, and a general guideline on Wikipedia is "Exceptional claims require exceptional proof", and specifically in the context of BLPs, see here.
The point I make here is that WRR indeed made exceptional claims wrt Torah codes, but those claims "did no harm" to specific living persons per se. MBBK's exceptional claims have a different character, and in the context (especially Bar Hillel's "Maddness in the Method") of WP:BLP, extensive voice must be given here to those who may have been harmed by the claims. If you know of any secondary sources (outside of the MBBK team) or additional evidence that speaks to explicitly verify what can only be called the "allegations" of MBBK, I will happily support adding them to the section now entirely devoted to MBBK's refutation.
Of course, further comments on content are welcome. However, if you have any further concerns about WP:BLP, you may wish to place the article for review at the BLP noticeboard, or perhaps contact the WP:OFFICE. WNDL42 ( talk) 23:00, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
Brendan, there are no "non-partisans" in this debate. We don't "call out" the avowed athiests among the anti-codes researchers, and we don't "explore an expound" on the motivations of the participants (as we could with Bar-Hillel). Continuing to attempt to "spin" this will not work. You have a conflict of interest and (given the history of this article) should not edit it further. You have been invited to propose specific changes here, where you have done so they have been adderessed. User Audacity is a skeptic and can proxy for you. WNDL42 ( talk) 12:23, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Gans has stayed busy, anybody else following his stuff? WNDL42 ( talk) 13:43, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
The selection of a psychologist with no mathmatical experience for inclusion on the MBBK team, in particular a psychologist who has been quoted several times as saying "there is no standard. I will not believe it regardless" -- in response to requests from codes proponents is something "interesting". recently I found this observation:
There seems to be a strange irony in the idea that the search for truth should first have to pass the test of philosophical bias, before the evidence is fairly considered.
In all candor there is no question as to the human elements involved on both side of this debate, and the issue of bias is indeed a two edged sword. According to Rips the majority of people that are introduced to the Bible-codes are prone to either immediate acceptance, or precipitous rejection of the codes, aptly illustrating the problem of bias as an all too human weakness (qtd. in Satinover, 207).
Brendan, in the context of "partisanship", would you care to comment? WNDL42 ( talk) 13:05, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Should the article make at least some mention of the Isaish 53 megacluster? Over 1400 ELS's were discovered (beginning) in or around this passage, many over 20 letters long (I believe the longest to-date is 176 letters long). The probability (so I have heard) of these els's existing there by chance are staggering. And yet it goes without mention.
Two links containing information on this: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/310 and http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/488.
Examples of els's in this cluster: "Gushing from above was Yeshua my mighty name, and the clouds rejoiced." That was ONE els, not a cluster. Recently, it was extended to a 40 letter els: "Gushing from above was Yeshua my mighty name, my clouds rejoiced. Where? At the mountain, said Levi [This was probably another name for Matthew the evangelist]. Their light came. God is in it." Sounds very much like the transfiguration. And yet it's an els found in Isaish 53:5, word 2, letter 1. (see also: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/320). The relevant work is "Bible Code Bombshell, availabe on google books.
Just my opinion--but I think someone should research this in more depth and add it to the article. It certainly marks a new stage in Bible Cold research--now researchers are revisiting old two-word finds and finding that they extend (on either side) to whole phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. And with these extensions the odds grow increasingly slim that they appear by chance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sunshine20716 ( talk) 22:30, 22 March 2008 (UTC) ( talk) 22:28, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
I am also a well known codes critic and so should not be editing this article but I would raise an issue that was raised to me by Rabbi Adlerstein. The neutral editor should address this issue. Thank you.
The paragraph that begins "Yitzchok Adlerstein, self described as "one of the most vocal skeptics" about the Bible Codes..." makes it sound like he has now become neutral. This is a misrepresentation of the original Rabbi Adlerstein post (see footnote 17) where his punch line is "If you want to believe in the phenomenon, you can as a matter of faith. But you really can’t call it science." Rabbi A's point is that Aumann has now become as skeptical of the subject as Rabbi A has long been. That's not the impression left by the skewed writing.
This paragraph needs to be changed.
Barry Simon IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Caltech —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.94.192.207 ( talk) 02:00, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
Who is this phrase referring to? And why are we using this wording? WP:PEACOCK? Moreschi ( talk) ( debate) 10:37, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
I propose that the section "Religious Belief Foundations" be deleted until replaced by a reasonable account based on scholarly sources. What is there now is a mishmash of crackpottery with scarcely any source that meets Wikipedia requirements. Some of it is supposedly based on a study of Dogon traditions!! Even from the viewpoint of the mainstream of Bible Code believers, both Jewish and Christian, little of this section makes sense. McKay ( talk) 05:49, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
can you please tell me what claims you believe to be unsourced, i would be more than happy to try and find sources for you or explain why the current sources are valid (p.s. i know that the sentance in the first paragraph about how it no longer has any credibility in old testament studies is probabely true for secular bible studies but the wikipedia article on old testament studies also includes old testemant studies done theologically, bible codes are far from uncommon amongst jewish and christian sources, if you want i can bring sources to back this up, i know that i shouldve probabely started this in a new section but im new to wikipedia and still havent quited gotten the hang of it yet) :-) g.j.g ( talk) 15:18, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Ok. Here it is in blue with my comments in red.
Hebrew religious, Kabbalaistic and 'Hebraic Sacred Science' what on earth is that?? traditions hold that the text of the Torah was originally given to mankind in a single long string of 304,805 This link goes to the personal jottings of some guy who wears a cowboy hat. Wikipedia only uses reliable sources.Hebrew characters. According to this tradition, the spaces, punctuation, sentence, chapter and five-book structures were all added later to form the modern Pentateuch. This needs (1) a clue as to what it has to do with the codes, (2) the scholarly take on the tradition.
For this reason, Hebrew tradition dictates that Torah scribes must complete many years of training, much of which has to do with learning the proper meditative techniques, before being allowed to copy Torah scrolls. [8] The tradition holds that not a single "jot or tittle", nor one iota of the Torah must be added, changed or omitted from "The Word".What does it have to do with the codes? The problem of the textual history of the Bible text is certainly relevant, but that needs a balanced presentation not a one-side recount of traditions.
Believers in this tradition sometimes point to a purely literal interpretation of the first seventeen words of the Gospel of John from the New Testament as evidence for their belief:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God".Which believers? What does it have to do with the codes?
In summary, the exclusive application of Bible Codes techniques to the Torah "string" is based in the belief that at the most fundamental level, God is a "Living Word", essentially, an almost infinitely complex information structure that begets all that exists, [11] that the Torah is an information structure analogous to the DNA structure of all creation. [9] [10] Some more recent beliefs among various groups suggest that "the Word was made flesh" in a literal sense; that the physical body of Jesus Christ was manifested divinely, that his DNA was somehow perfectly derived from "The Word". [12] [11]. Researcher-spiritualist Gregg Braden and others have been exploring the human DNA string and claim to have discovered evidence of "The Word" in human DNA. Note the complete lack of mention of the codes in this paragraph. And who on earth is "Researcher-spiritualist Gregg Braden"?? The links here go to someone's self-published ramblings (not allowed by Wikipedia) and a blog (also not allowed). And notice the reference to "Dogon Traditions"; what on Earth do the Dogon have to do with it?
Since 1994, more recent (post WRR) views extend the analysis of biblical texts to include Old Testament texts outside the Torah and also to the New Testament, but these are rejected by Kabbalaistic tradition.Even with the right spelling, Kabbalistic tradition does NOT reject analysis of texts outside the Torah. In fact there are many examples amongst the writings of the great Kabbalists.
The traditional view of the codes further asserts that the "information" encoded in the Torah cannot be used to predict the future, and that at best the codes provide evidence of an all-knowing creator whose knowledge of the Universe and all of its possibilities spans both space and time.(1) no source given, (2) sermonising tone In this view, (from an information theoretical viewpoint)Give me a break! the letter-sequence of the Torah is to the Universe as the DNA sequence is to the human body, useful for understanding how the universe works on a macro scale, and illustrative of the "Grand Design" which encompasses all possible events, but nonetheless utterly unreliable for prediction of what specific combinations of micro-scale events will occur to create the 'reality' of human history.unsourced mumbo-jumbo with broken link
The traditional view conflicts with the more recent and highly sensationalized views suggesting that the Codes may be valuable as tools of prediction. These views of the codes first emerged in popular culture with the book The Bible Code by journalist Michael Drosnin, which suggests that the codes can be analyzed by computer to provide warnings for the future.This sentence is true, but no non-useless justification or source or background has been presented for it.
A more nuanced and academic view of the Codes was presented in 1997 by Jeffrey Satinover in Cracking the Bible Code. Satinover attempted to present the 'puzzle' in broader historical, mathematical and theological contexts, but this work was overshadowed by the more sensational Drosnin works that fueled the controversy.Calling it "academic" is an opinion and so needs a source.
And now that I have studied it properly, it is obvious that it is well below Wikipedia standards and I'm getting out my chainsaw.... McKay ( talk) 11:28, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
in the future please give me time to respond before editing (which you really shouldnt be doing at all since your an involved party) i was reading your analysis and you made some good points (as well as some incorrect ones, kabbalists dod not anylise nonsacred texts) and i admit that the article as it is right now is rather flawed, i do not however think that we should ignore the religious background of a heavilly religious issue, i think that the section needs fixing up but must remain in some form. g.j.g ( talk) 12:10, 23 June 2008 (UTC) o and one more thing, you eep referencing to mainstream jews and christians, what exactly is mainstream again g.j.g ( talk) 12:12, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
This is the method that you are obliged to use for all the twenty-four books of Scripture that we have today, and after them, for all the words of the sages of blessed memory, and after that you apply it to all books of wisdom, for thereby you will ascend and perceive properly what is worthy of being perceived, regarding every matter. -- Avraham Abulafia, Otsar 'Eden Ganuz, Ms. Oxford 1580, fol. 171a; quoted from Moshe Idel, Language, Torah and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, p100.
while they viewed the works of kabbala as holy and studied them extensively as a way to connect to god they never viewed them as being spoken word for word by god and as such they never would have used them for bible codes. —Preceding
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