The Bible Code matrixes presented in Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code do seem quite impressive, and it is not unreasonable to suspect that, therefore, they do not exist by chance alone. Yet this leads to absurd conclusions, since equally impressive code matrixes have been found in Moby Dick and the Hebrew translation of War and Peace.

For example, the following code matrixes have been found in Moby Dick by Brendan McKay:

1. The War on Terrorism
2. Assassinations of Famous Politicians
3. Princess Diana's death
4. Assassination of Michael Drosnin
5. Moby Dick's opinion of Bible Codes

Similarly, Brendan McKay has also found code matrixes in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace:

1. The 9/11 Terrorist Attack
2. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet
3. Jesus in War and Peace
4. Chanukah Codes
5. More Chanukah Codes
6. Rosh Hashanah Codes
7. Brendan McKay in War and Peace

We also find that Brendan McKay has discovered the Bali terrorist attack in the text of Bible Code II, and that Avi Norowitz has found the War in Iraq encoded in Moby Dick months before the war was declared!

On December 26, 2004, a tsunami killed more than 120,000 people in the province of Aceh. This event was found encoded in Moby Dick. In this cluster, the ELS for tsunami is the most minimal skip ELS (+238) for the entire text.

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Yitzchak Rabin's assassination is one of the very few Bible Codes that Michael Drosnin (or anyone else) found before the event occurred. Some critics such as Michael Shermer have claimed that Rabin's assassination prediction was found only after the event occurred, but this is certainly incorrect.

As demonstrated by Brendan McKay, however, Rabin's assassination can also be found encoded in Moby Dick. It is fair to assume that most texts of sufficient length will have Rabin's assassination encoded as well. Therefore, the only thing unusual about the prediction is that Michael Drosnin (author of The Bible Code) looked for the code, not that the Bible contained it. If there is a prophet in this case, it is Drosnin rather than the Bible.

However, a lucky guess is certainly the most plausible explanation for Drosnin's prediction. Prior to Rabin's assassination, some Israeli extremists were openly chanting "death to Rabin," and the Israeli astrologer Herzl Lifshitz predicted Rabin's assassin as well. Unless we choose to attribute prophetic abilities to Israeli extremists and astrologer Herzl Lifshitz, there is no reason to attribute prophetic abilities to Michael Drosnin, and even less reason to attribute prophetic abilities to alleged codes in the Bible.
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In The Bible Code, Michael Drosnin presents the following claim:

The code was discovered by Dr. Eliyahu Rips, one of the world's leading experts in group theory, a field of mathematics that underlies quantum physics. It has been confirmed by famous mathematicians at Harvard, Yale, and Hebrew University. It has been replicated by a senior code-breaker at the U.S. Department of Defense. It has passed three levels of secular peer review at a leading U.S. math journal. (pp. 13-14)

Later in the book we find Drosnin making similar claims:

The major scientists who actually examined the Bible code confirm it. The Pentagon code-breaker, the three referees at the math journal, the professors at Harvard, Yale, and Hebrew University all started out skeptics, and ended up believers. (p. 31)

However, these claims are misleading, and some of them are false. The truth is that almost all qualified mathematicians who have studied the evidence for the scientific Bible Codes of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg have rejected it, and there is not a single qualified mathematician that has endorsed Michael Drosnin's research:

1. It is true that Eliyahu Rips, a highly regarded mathematician, is a strong supporter of scientific research of the Torah codes. Concerning Drosnin's book, however, Rips has written the following: "I do not support Mr. Drosnin's work on the Codes, nor the conclusions he derives."
2. No mathematicians at Harvard, Yale, and Hebrew University (aside from Rips) have confirmed the Bible Code. The four mathematicians Drosnin refers to wrote a letter endorsing further scientific research on the Bible Codes, but never stated that these codes necessarily existed. It is very doubtful that they would have written the same letter today, after studying the refutations by Brendan McKay and his colleagues.
3. Today only two mathematicians support the Bible Code: Eliyahu Rips and Daniel Michelson. Rips has stated that he does not support Drosnin's research, and Michelson has not given any endorsement to Drosnin's claims.
4. 55 mathematicians have "themselves examined the evidence [for the Bible Codes] and found it entirely unconvincing."
5. Harold Gans is a retired cryptologist at the U.S. Department of Defense and a supporter of the scientific codes of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg. Gans, however, does not endorse Dronsin's book. Further, mathematician Barry Simon has noted that "the only thing that the codes that cryptologists study have in common with the codes used by Witztum et al is the use of the word 'codes'. It is Statistics that is most relevant to the Torah codes debate."
6. The academic peer-review process does not ensure scientific accuracy: it only ensures that a paper meets the minimal requirements to be published. In any case, it was the paper by Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg that was published in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science, and none of these authors have endorsed Michael Drosnin's research.

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In 1994, Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg published a study in the peer-reviewed mathematical journal Statistical Science titled "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis". The authors argued that conceptually related words can be found encoded closer together in the Torah than would be expected by chance. This argument was supported by an experiment, and a below is a brief summary of their experiment as they present it in their paper.

1. The authors selected all 32 rabbis contained in the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel who had entries containing between 1.5 and 3 columns of text.
2. Shlomo Havlin compiled the appellations for each of these rabbis (that is, the various names and spellings used to refer to these rabbis).
3. The authors measured the closeness of the appellations to the birth or death dates of each of these rabbis using four different methods: P1, P2, P3, and P4. Each of these methods returned a value, and each of these values were compared with the values returned for 1,000,000 randomly shuffled lists of rabbis and dates.
4. The P4 rank had the highest rank of 4/1,000,000. This rank was multiplied by the number of tests run to reach a final probability of 16/1,000,000. In other words, the probability that the result occurred by chance is 1 in 62,500.

In 1999, Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai presented the results of a thorough analysis of the study of Witztum et al (1994). In their paper titled "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle" and published in Statistical Science, the authors concluded that the experiment is "fatally defective, indeed that their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting data for it." The authors presented a considerable amount of evidence to support this view, including (but not limited to) the following.

1. The authors show that in early descriptions of the experiment, Witztum et al never claimed that the appellations were compiled independently by Shlomo Havlin.
2. By replacing some of the appellations used by Witztum et al with other equally valid appellations, McKay et al were able to find hidden codes in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace.
3. The authors show that Witztum et al tended to choose options more favorable to their results when a choice was available. The same was found in numerous other experiments by Witztum et al, such as their 70 nations experiment.
4. The P2 value, a measurement used by Witztum et al, was closer to each other for the two lists of rabbis than what would be expected by chance. Having them close together makes it appear that the results are consistent. However, McKay et al found that when shuffling the two lists of rabbis together and splitting them in half, the results were only equal around 1% of the time. The same analysis was performed on the rabbis in Gans' cities experiment and found similar results.
5. McKay et al conducted several of their own independent studies using data collected by specialist Simcha Emanuel and found no traces of hidden codes in Genesis.

In short, McKay et al have demonstrated that Witztum et al were indeed correct that their their result did not occur by chance. Yet they were incorrect in attributing this result to remarkable properties in Genesis; rather, the result was caused by inappropriate manipulation of the experiment's data and design.

These findings, as well as subsequent findings that undermine the reliability of Witztum et al's results are discussed later in this index.
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After some aspects of the great rabbis experiment of Witztum et al were criticized, Witztum et al presented a new experiment which they claimed could not have been biased as the original experiment could have been. This new experiment appeared to show a tendency for the Seventy Nations of Humanity (according to Jewish tradition) to be encoded close to the actual names of these nations in Genesis chapter 10. Below is a brief summary of this experiment, as it is described in their paper.

1. The authors selected the names of the seventy descendents of Noah listed in Genesis chapter 10. According to Jewish tradition, these individuals are the ancestors of the Seventy Nations of Humanity.
2. The authors added the prefixes "the nation of," "the country of," "the language of," and "the script of" to each of these nations. In some cases, the original name of the nation was replaced with a more recent name derived from another Jewish source.
3. The authors used a method to compare the closeness of each ELS of a nation's name with an added prefix to the actual text mentioning the nation's name in Genesis 10.
4. The authors found that the ELS's of each nation with a prefix added tended to be closer to the nation's name in Genesis 10 than would be expected by chance. They concluded that the probability that the result was obtained by chance was 0.000000004.

After studying this experiment, Bar-Natan, McKay, and Sternberg demonstrated that like the original great rabbis experiment, the remarkable results of the Nations experiment were caused by choices made in conducting the experiment. That is, despite the claims of the experimenters that the experiment had little to no room for tuning, the analysis of Bar-Natan et al unambiguously demonstrates that room for tuning the results was available and was used. In short, below is a list of the evidence presented by Bar-Natan et al:

1. To support their choice of prefixes, Witztum et al cite the Vilna Gaon's commentary on Job in which he lists the four characteristics that define nations: name, country, dialect, and script. However, instead of using the Hebrew word for dialect Witztum et al actually used a different Hebrew word that translates as language. They also used the Hebrew world for nation as a prefix instead of the Hebrew word for name. Correcting these errors make the results considerably less remarkable.
2. In his commentary on Isaiah, the Vilna Gaon lists different characterists of nations than he does in his commentary on Job. Yet if these characteristics are used as prefixes the results are much less remarkable.
3. The prefix "the people of" was added some nations and not others. Yet there are several equally valid ways to spell "the people of," and the spelling used by Witztum et al achieves the most remarkable results.
4. At least 136 reasonable prefixes exist, but the three that perform the best are among the four Witztum et al chose to use.
5. By modifying the experiment using alternate prefixes, Bar-Natan et al achieved remarkable results in the Hebrew text of War and Peace and mundane results in Genesis. (As evidenced below, this does not take advantage of the full flexibility available in the experiment.)
6. After Bar-Natan et al fixed several grammatical errors, the results became much less remarkable in Genesis.
7. Many arbitrary choices were made in the decision process of replacing the names of nations. When almost any other equally valid choices were made in this decision process, the result were weakened.
8. Witztum et al used the edition of Targum Yonatan by Ginsburger to update the names of the nations. Yet among the many different editions of Targum Yonatan, the Ginsburger edition is one of the poorer ones. When other editions were used, the results became much less impressive.

The items above are an incomplete summary of the findings by Bar-Natan et al. Perhaps the most appropriate way to conclude their findings is by quoting a caption from the paper:

"King Midas of Phrygia ... Helenic tradition tells us that anything that King Midas touched turned into gold ... Do Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg have similar powers over significance levels?"

Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Shlomo Havlin have claimed that Havlin compiled the appellations independently, and that Witztum and Rips used this data without making any changes. The available historical evidence does not support this conclusion, however:

1. In the 1986 and 1987 preprints of the Great Rabbis experiments, Shlomo Havlin is thanked for "valuable advices," and there is no claim that he compiled the appellations independently. The same is true for Witztum's 1989 book.
2. In 1985 Eliyahu Rips described the appellation collection process of a similar experiment as using "every possible variation we could think of ... If any additional variation comes to mind, we must include it. We simply took every possible variant that we considered reasonable."
3. Witztum and Havlin do not agree on who compiled the dates. Witztum has written that "Havlin's job was to prepare lists of names and appellations and nothing else ... I explicitly wrote that I amended the dates myself ..." Yet Havlin claims that he was responsible for the dates. Therefore, either Witztum or Havlin is making at least one false claim concerning the data collection.

Harold Gans has made the claim that the arguments of the skeptics imply an elaborate conspiracy:

As we shall see, if there is a conspiracy here the number of people necessarily involved in it will stretch the credulity of any reasonable person.

In this scenario, the conspiracy has grown to include Witztum, Rips, Havlin, Rav Deutch, Rav Fisher, and Zvi Inbal, who provided the list of cities to Gans, as well as Gans and Bombach who verified the authenticity and accuracy of the protocol and list.

This claim is unfounded, however. Nowhere in the literature on the Torah Codes do the skeptics claim such a remarkable conspiracy. There are far more plausible explanations for the outcome of the Torah Codes experiments than such a conspiracy.

Most likely, Witztum consulted with Havlin for "valuable advices" during the preparation of the lists for the Great Rabbis experiment, and that Havlin only later repeated Witztum's claim that Havlin prepared the lists independently to avoid destroying Witztum's credibility (and hence the experiments).

Gans' Cities experiment does not indicate the existence of an elaborate conspiracy either. Upon Gans' request, Zvi Inbal produced a list of guidelines that he claims he used to obtain the data for the Cities experiment. Many people agreed that these guidelines made historical and linguistic sense, and were specific enough to reproduce the same data. Therefore, argues Gans, if the skeptics are correct that the data was manipulated, all these people must be involved in a conspiracy. A more likely explanation, however, is that the rules do make historical and linguistic sense, but that they are arbitrary. In other words, when two equally valid choices were available, the choice that improved the result was selected.

This reduces the necessary people involved in the "conspiracy" to Doron Witztum and Zvi Inbal. (And, most likely, a few other individuals are withholding information, presumably with good intentions. This, however, does not constitute a conspiracy.)
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