The Future Encoded
Posted: Thursday, January 20, 2011
by Dante Petrilla
Doorway to Happiness
Imagine the ability to predict the future. Events, places, names, dates and times mapped out in front of you on a sheet of paper. And while cutting edge science is theorizing that time, as Einstein once remarked, may itself be an illusion, that there is no real difference between past, present and future - it seems outlandish. Who can know the future?
Had Drosnin uncovered some plot to assassinate Rabin? No. He found his information in the Bible. Drosnin is a reporter from New York City who formerly wrote for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and he is the author of an astounding book called The Bible Code.
The Bible code, as the name implies, is a hidden code which exists in the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament. This mysterious code amazingly uncovers specific details of important historical events which happened thousands of years after the Old Testament was first chiselled in stone.
The notion that there might be some sort of hidden code in the Bible was first hit upon by a rabbi by the name of H.M.D. Weissmandel from Czechoslovakia. He noted that at the beginning of the book of Genesis if he skipped fifty letters, then a further fifty, then fifty more, the letters in this skip sequence spelled the word "Torah". Torah is the Hebrew name for the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). He also found this sequence in the Books of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
More than fifty years later, a Russian born mathematician by the name of Eliyahu Rips heard about this purely by chance. He found it interesting and did some follow-up work. With the help of a modern computer Rips unlocked the Bible code.
The program Rips applied to the original Hebrew text searched for significant words or phrases spelled out in any number of skip sequences like the one mentioned above. It could be every second, fifth, tenth or thousandth letter in the 304,805 letter long string which is the Torah. A keyword or phrase is located in this way, and the skip code is identified. If, say, the keyword is spelled out using every 100th letter, the text is then arranged in rows of 100 characters in length. The program then searches the surrounding text for related words or phrases. Every time the rows are rearranged according to different skip sequences a new set of interlocking text is created surrounding the particular keyword, whatever it happens to be. But if even one single letter of the Torah is out of place or missing, the code will not work.
The amount of information which has been found in this manner in the Bible code is nothing short of astonishing. In his own words Rips, "Found words encoded far more than statistics allowed for by random chance." And one of Israel's leading mathematicians is quoted as saying, "Statistically it is far beyond what is normally required. The most stringent standard ever applied is 1 in a thousand. Rips' results are significant at least at the level of 1 in a 100,000..."
Rips, working in conjunction with colleagues Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, developed a mathematical model which when applied to the Hebrew Old Testament via computer, confirmed the existence of the code.
They conducted an experiment to obtain this verification of the code in which they searched the text for the names of 32 significant wise men from historical to modern day. They wanted to see if the names would appear along with the dates on which these people were born and died. They also searched other control texts including a Hebrew translation of War and Peace for these same names and dates. The results were shocking.
All the names together with the correct birth and death dates appeared in the Bible code. None appeared in any of the three control texts. They calculated the odds of this happening to be 1 in 10 million.
A paper detailing Rips, Witztum and Rosenberg's premise and results of their experiments was submitted to Statistical Science, a journal of mathematics from the U.S. The skeptical editor of this publication had the results checked an unprecedented three times by separate mathematical experts to determine its authenticity. Each expert came back in disbelief with the same result - there was a code in the Bible. The paper was published in August of 1994. No one could refute the findings or even bring them into question, and no one has since. What's more, no one has been able to explain how this code was created.
Harold Gans, a master code-breaker working in America's National Security Agency investigated the code, believing it to be a hoax. Gans set out to prove that there was no code. He went to the trouble of devising a computer program of his own to search the text.
Gans used the same information Rips and his colleagues used in their original experiment with something added. It was Gans' thinking that if the names and dates of the wise men appeared together, so should the cities where they were born. Amazingly, all the cities were there as well, all matching the appropriate names and dates. Gans said, "I set out to disprove the code and ended up proving it."
That the Bible code exists seems at this point to be an unarguable fact despite its incredible nature, what it contains, and what the implications of its existence are.
Here is just a small sample of some of the more interesting things found in the code: The stock market crash of 1929. The words "depression", "stocks" and "economic collapse" all appear with the Hebrew year "5690" which is 1929 on our calendar.
"Evil man", "slaughter", "Nazi and enemy" appear encoded together with the name "Hitler".
"Newton" appears with "gravity". "Edison" appears with "light bulb" and "electricity". "Wright Brothers" appears with "airplane". The list goes on and on. In fact, practically every significant event throughout history appears together with relevant names, dates and phrases. The amount of accurate information is staggering.
So what exactly could we be dealing with here? A mathematician by the name of I. Paitetski-Shapiro who also examined and confirmed the code's existence is of the opinion that its ostensible ability to predict future events is outside the scope of classical Newtonian as well as quantum physics. He believes it is representative of some higher intelligence. In fact, he believes that it is confirmation that God exists.
Another question which arises concerns whether or not the code is written in stone, so to speak. It has been spot on in predicting events which took place after its first writing which were in its future, but to us exist in the past. But what of our perceived future?
Mathematician Roger Penrose suggests in his book Shadows of the Mind that it is only our consciousness which requires us to perceive a "flow" of time, and that in physicists' description of space-time, space and time are interchangeable. Time is no more required to flow than is space. If time truly does not flow such as we perceive, then it is reasonable to assume that a being of sufficient intelligence, possessing the technology capable of producing something as complex as the Bible code, would be able to "view" the whole fabric of time in one complete picture. Any and all probabilities would be a part of this picture, and the reality of what we experience may only represent a tiny part of it, and be no more significant than any other part of the picture - a single thread within an intricate and complex weave which makes up this fabric of reality.
Is the Bible code predicting just the one possible, unchangeable future, or is it presenting us with probabilities based upon what is happening in our perceived "now"? Could we change the future?
We can return to Drosnin's experience with Rabin's assassination to examine this. Drosnin had seen Rabin's assassination in the code a year before it happened, but he didn't really believe in it at the time. He nevertheless attempted to warn the Prime Minister to no avail. And as Drosnin asserts, Rabin's death brought the reality of the Bible code home to him, and in a strange way this is connected to something else Drosnin subsequently found in the code.
In 1995 Drosnin found "Holocaust of Israel" encoded with our year 1996. On further inspection he found in the same place, "atomic holocaust". There were also other connected phrases in this area which seemed to link these events with the Rabin assassination: "The next war", "It will be after the death (of) Prime Minister", "Yitzhak".
Then Drosnin noted that the characters in Hebrew which represent 1996, "5756" also spell out the phrase "Will you change it?" Drosnin and Rips who were working together on the code at that time were compelled by the evidence and convinced of a real danger - the threat of a possible nuclear attack on Israel which might spark another world war.
Drosnin went to great pains to contact and convince Prime Minister Shimon Peres. He believed that the danger was real, but that it was possible something could be done to prevent it. After much communication with Drosnin, an initially sceptical Peres made a speech in Jerusalem in which he focused attention on the great danger posed by nuclear weapons falling "Into the hands of irresponsible countries..."
There was no nuclear attack on Israel in 1996. So had Drosnin, with the help of the code, succeeded in changing a supposed future prediction of war? Was the Peres speech a catalyst which stepped up security and prevented at atomic attack on Israel? There is no way to know.
So is it possible that the Bible code could be a warning for us - a creation of some benevolent being or race with an intelligence far exceeding our own who desires to help us? Perhaps a God? Again, there is no way to know, but the evidence seems to show that the code is a stark and sometimes frightening reality. It is not someone's personal interpretation of Nostradamus or any other prophet. It is a self evident, objective reality in its own right which has been confirmed by numerous initially skeptical experts.
The Bible code even refers to itself. The phrase "Bible code" is encoded from the books of Genesis to Numbers. The word used to refer to Bible is Torah which, again, is just the first five books of the Bible. The phrase appears attached to "He encoded the Torah and more".
And in the book of Deuteronomy, "Bible code" again appears, but this time the word used for Bible is Tanakh, which refers to the Old Testament in its entirety, suggesting that perhaps more than just the first five books are encoded. The phrase appears with "Sealed before God".
It also contains the inter linked phrases "It was made by computer", and "The writing of God engraved on tablets". This suggests that the technology of the computer was required to unlock the code which, in fact, it was. Indeed, Sir Isaac Newton was obsessed with the notion that there was a code in the Bible, and spent much of his life trying to prove it. If he had had a modern computer, he would most likely have found it.
So if the code is a way of warning us of possible future catastrophic events on our planet, how do we go about putting it to good use? How can we know what to look for? Rips says that, "Our efforts to see the future and to do something about it both probably play a role." So what we might do is to carefully examine the current events we believe may be shaping our future in a significant way, and look for these in the code, then search for surrounding clues as to what might happen. In this way we might discover a course of action which may improve our chances of survival.
And it may be in our best interests to do just this. For just as the code told of comet Shoemaker-Levy smashing into Jupiter, naming the comet, the planet and the date exactly, it also encodes "comet" with the Hebrew year "5772" (2012), and "Earth annihilated", and "It will be crumbled, I will tear to pieces". Another possible catastrophe is predicted for the far-off date of 2113 where we find the phrases "desolated, empty, depopulated", and "for everyone, the great terror: fire, earthquake".
There is more, but this alone should be enough to make us sit up and take notice of this enigma called the Bible code. Whether or not it is God trying to help us along is open for debate, but could the code actually save us from some future catastrophic event? Strangely, it suggests this itself where along with "world war", "atomic holocaust" and "end of days" the phrase "code will save" is found. Perhaps we should examine the code in more depth and perhaps save ourselves.
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