I’m guessing that as we creep closer to 2012, a year when many are predicting the end, we’re going to see a few more “end of the world” movies. Apparently one of them is going to be based on Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code and its sequels. From HitFix
A former Washington Post reporter, Drosnin claims to have discovered hidden messages written within the Hebrew Bible that have accurately predicted (or post-dicted) momentous historical events such as the holocaust, Hitler, the events of September 11th, 2001, and the election of Barack Obama. Using a method called “Equidistant Letter Sequencing” letters from the books’ passages are put into a graph and analyzed for patterns and words by a computer. Believers in the method see conscious messages from God or perhaps extraterrestrials within these patterns, skeptics see tricks played with probabilities.
[...]
Although written as non-fiction, [Relativity Media] plans to develop the series of three books, “The Bible Code,” “The Bible Code II: The Countdown,” and “The Bible Code III: Saving the World” into a “tent-pole” film for 2012. The third book predicts the end of the world, but also “how to prevent it”; subject matter that definitely lends itself to big budget action. Relativity Media is dabbling with the disaster genre this year with the release of “Skyline.”
The Bible Code isn’t the dumbest use of the Bible I’ve seen. That’s a tough contest, but I’d have to say the PraiseMoves workout, in which you hold your body in positions simulating the Hebrew Alphabet, tops that list. Still, Drosnin’s holy word search is pretty bad.
Dave Thomas of the group New Mexicans for Science and Reason has made a hobby out of debunking the Bible Code. He presented a paper at TAM 4, Data Mining for God (PDF), where he discusses the math involved.
“and the election of Barack Obama”
Weird that The Bible Code (1997) and The Bible Code II (2002) make no mention of Obama whatsoever, and yet after reading this sentence I googled “bible code obama” and found several sites claiming that Obama was predicted by the bible code. If the code were real it would be useless since it can only predict things after they happen.
I thought the whole 2012 was debunked because of a misread of the Mayan calendar? It is always much easier to show how some book predicts something after it happens but you know many christians will eat this up.
From what I’ve heard there really is no Mayan end of the world prophecy. It’s simply that the Mayan calendar switches to the next order of magnitude in their number system. It’s equivalent to us switching from 999 to 1000 or 9999 to 10000. Somehow this is interpreted to mean the end of the world.
Also, it’s mixed up with something about the Earth coming into galactic alignment because the planet passes the plane of the galactic disc on 21 Dec 2012 – which of course is total and utter bullcrap.
But it would be naïve to expect that pointing out such simple facts would change the minds of those who believe these silly things. At most, they’ll maybe learn something when the day passes without incident, but I doubt it. More likely, they’ll latch on to something equally ridiculous, or they’ll try to reinterpret what the “prophecy” meant. It’ll probably turn out that it was really about that big earthquake that occured somewhere the next day, or something like that.
Am I incorrect in figuring that the predictions would hypothetically only affect the southern hemisphere?
Woops. Yeah. I’m a stupid. Sorry, argument nullified.
Nop. You did a pretty common error
http://xkcd.com/753/
Thanks — still, I hate to be ignorant. :)
Don’t want to come across as one of those “ignorant lawyers:”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESGKpMHBSoQ
Exactly. I have an acquaintance who goes to Yucatan for a couple of weeks every year foe spelunking, and he reports that the rural Maya continue to have babies and save money.
So you’re saying 2012 is the Mayan Y2K? Better get all your money out of the Mayan banks.
I’d like to see these people run their bible code software on other books, like War And Peace. Just imagine if other books showed just as many so called predictions as the bible.
It’s been done: Assassinations foretold in Moby Dick:
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html
I like the closing lines of the article linked to in the story:
“Mathematician David Thomas did an ELS on Genesis and found the words “code” and “bogus” close together not once but 60 times. What are the odds of that happening? Thomas also did an ELS analysis on Drosnin’s Bible Code II: The Countdown (2002) and found the message “The Bible Code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax.”* Does this mean that God put in a code to reveal that there is no code?”
Actually, I just thought of something.
Palin 2012.
OMG COULD THE MAYANS BE RIGHT AFTER ALL???????
I find it so ridiculous that you would try to decipher a code from the bible. Which version do they use? The English King James? What about the Lutheran bible of the 1500′s. Or the Latin version prior to that. How about the Aramaic original? But which order to choose? Uh – and there’s a translation/spelling error – or a missing word.
The number of variables is as astronomical as the deciphering attempts are stupid.
I think it’s usually done with the Torah or Tanakh, witch makes the results even more dubious, since there are no vowels. Some Rabbis use the code, too. At least they have a fighting chance of understanding the “discovered” words.
My feeling is that if there actually were a god, it would want to impart eternal wisdom, rather than the equivalent of the CNN crawl. Petty stuff, in the great scheme of things.
I think it is done only with the Torah. However, our current version of the Torah is obviously very different from versions that were around, say, 2500 years ago, so I don’t really see how it could possibly be meaningful.
I don’t see how it could be meaningful even if the current version of the Torah was identical to the one from 2500 years ago.
I suppose I should have said ” . . . so I don’t see how it could possibly be meaningful even if there really were actual codes hidden in the first written versions of the Torah.
Obviously I wasn’t trying to suggest there were actual codes in it.
Never read any of Drosnin’s stuff (in fact, I’d never heard of it until I walked past it in a bookshop yesterday on the ‘reduced’ table) – but it sounds like something that Hal Lindsey and Erich von Daniken might co-operate on (& perhaps be the source material of the next Dan Brown thriller?)