Talk:The Bible Code (book)

Undated comments
Nice start for an article. Be sure to include links to this article, however, or else it will be considered an "orphan" article. Best thing to do is look for other Wikipedia articles that would be related to this topic, and add links to here, in those other articles. Modemac

Has Drosnin ever responded to the scientific criticisms leveled against him? --Eloquence

Yes, an appendix in his followup book (The Bible Code 2), reports the attempts made by him (or rather the professor responsible for the original paper) to answer the critics. Apparently while the journal which published the original paper was also happy to print the rebuttal, it was not willing to publish a rebuttal of the rebuttal. -- Derek Ross


 * That's interesting, Derek. Do you have the followup book, i.e. could you provide a relevant quotation? I think this would be good to have in the article. --Eloquence

What did the hidden messages say? This article is almost all refutation, but don't you think there ought to be a paragraph or two summarizing the contents of the book? "The hidden messages predicted that when they were finally discovered, scholars would discount them." Ortolan88

I don't know very much about this subject (which is largely why I was reading the article), and I thought the article is a good start. There's a couple of things that are discussed, though, that I'm not sure if I understood. I hope someone who knows the subject could make these issues more clear in the article.
 * The cryptographic argument seems irrelevant. From what I understood it seems like the Bible Code proponents are saying "look: I found messages using a particular code (an acrostic code)", while the cryptographers counter "hey, but a method for finding a general class of codes doesn't uncover anything".  It seems to me that the cryptographers' technique described in this article wouldn't necessarily catch instances of the code: the insertion of a relatively small number of words wouldn't necessarily be significant enough to provide evidence of "linguistic information".  So, it doesn't seem like the claims for the Bible Code contradict the negative result of the cryptographers.  Did I understand things right?  What would the cryptographers like say to this?
 * The article describes a class of statistical errors that can be made, but I wasn't clear on what exactly the Bible Code proponents are alleged of doing. I get the sense that the allegation is that the Bible Code "discoverers" tested for the existence of many words, and only reported the words that were present (and neglected to mention words that were not present.)  Is this what's claimed?  If so, the article should state that and actually, I think the statistics in this case is not so subtle, and could be explained directly.
 * Another possible interpretation is that, for example, the calculation of the probability of the occurrences of the various words in the Bible neglected to take into account the fact that they could use any interval length between letters (or whatever adjustable parameters there are in the code). Anyway, I think it'd be helpful to more specifically state what mistake the Bible Coders are alleged to have made (even at the expense of this not being easy to understand -- at least maybe someone can later explain it for non-statisticians)

Hope this helps

--User:zashaw

I removed the part about acrostic codes because that is something different. An acrostic is where the initial letters of some words (or verses) form a new word or phrase. It is slightly similar, but not the same.

zashaw is right about the "cryptology" paragraph being irrelevant, but I didn't touch it.

One thing that I think is not right is the name of this page. It is just the name of a certain book (out of many books) that concerns this subject. The content is about the codes themselves and not just the book. I think the correct name is "Bible Codes" with a redirect from "Torah Codes". The singular versions of those would also be ok and more in line with Wiki philosophy, but less in line with common usage.

Before anyone does major surgery on this page, I'll mention that I intend to rewrite it with a history and an example or two. The "scientific" debate about the codes is not mentioned here, but it should be covered in addition to the "junk" part represented by Drosnin's books. Notice my name in the references.

To answer zashaw's questions, the problem with examples like in Drosnin's book is that they can be made using any text at all, not only using the Torah. Where remarkably small probabilities are claimed, they are not properly calculated. The problem with the scientific evidence is that the experiments do not appear to have been conducted correctly and other experiments failed to achieve the same result.

-- Brendan McKay.

I have initiated a completely new version of this page at Bible code. My intention is for it to completely replace the current page after allowing a few weeks for discussion. Please note that I am one of the protagonists in the Bible codes debate---I have tried hard to stick to the facts and maintain a NPOV, but I mention my involvement just to be transparent about it. -- McKay 08:27, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I have (boldly) supported McKay's decision by removing the part of this page that's about bible codes in general. I agree that this page is logically a discussion about the book The Bible Code, and that there should be another page about bible codes in general. Moreover, I think that the newly written Bible code page is actually in better shape than this one. Mainly it has a nice description of the kinds of codes that we're talking about, and is more specific about what claims have been made. The original The Bible Code page, on the other hand, is much more vague.

I think McKay's page is pretty NPOV (although, I'm probably predisposed to be skeptical of these codes, so maybe I'm not the best judge). Overall, I think the new Bible code page is more complete, and a better skeleton for any info people would like to add, or any NPOV edits.

Zashaw 01:26, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Why is there a link from mathematics to this page ?

Athor 21:38, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)

Too many critical links
I am not a fan of Bible Codes, but I am less a fan of too many external links, especially for such a short article, especially when challanges and criticism are covered in another article i.e [bible codes]. I propose slimming them down. Any thoughts?Sethie 06:50, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Planned for 2007?
The article states that the third book is planned to be released in 2007, but they claim the apocolypse will occur in 2006. This doesn't really make sense. Titanium Dragon 09:57, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Wait, you expect sense from prophecy ? :-) I'm writing this in 2007, I guess the apocalypse was rescheduled :-D

xerces8

This Book Is A Load Of Crap —Preceding unsigned comment added by ServantOfJesusChrist (talk • contribs) 23:49, August 25, 2007 (UTC)

Codes in Other Bibles or Testaments
Has there ever been any research into possible codes existing in other religious writings, such as the Koran or the Book of Mormon? Has Drosnin been the only person who has written about bible codes? There's been much criticism of Mormonism, haven't any of the critics seen any relationship between the numerous grammatical errors or typos that appear all through the LDS testament?

Perhaps a bible code doesn't have to be so mathematically complex to aid a religion in its expansion. A code could be simply words sprinkled through a bible or testament, words that can be picked out of passages to convey a deeper religious meaning than what the actual verses contain.

Hard to believe that Drosnin's the only author who's done a work like this. And that's probably why there's a link to this page from the Mathematics page, in partial answer to the question above. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.212.158.166 (talk) 06:11, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Critisism
There needs to be a section in this article. I've read about this quite a bit and it is very clearly a bunch of bogus. It is based on taking every nth letter (eg, every 5th letter, every 39th letter, etc) and turning that into a block of jumbled letters. You then try to find words in that block. Its nonsense. The bible is so long that if you do this, you are bound to create words. You could do it with any book, you could do it with Harry Potter and you would get the same effect. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.210.64.214 (talk) 07:24, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, the author attempts numerous times throughout the book to use this same method for War and Peace but doesn't succeed. Bzweebl (talk) 00:49, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I think basically the book is (well BS, but let me explain) an example of paredolia, I've heard what they did was take Moby Dick and do what they did with the bible code and get the same results! Just like faces in clouds it has no real meaning. 71.174.126.186 (talk) 00:09, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

In-line Citation
There are plenty of links under the article, but no in-line citations supporting the comments. There are no comments from reliable independent secondary sources such as reviews. Is this book notable and if so, can the claim of being a 'best seller' be supported by link showing inclusion on say the New York Times best seller list? Kooky2 (talk) 19:44, 9 December 2011 (UTC)