Code Breakers.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Author believes Bible contains coded predictions of future events - Brief Article

Cabalists, Jewish and Christian, have had the Book of Splendor to ponder since the 13th century, and the truly wise among them have said that it is a work of such wisdom that nothing can be understood of it at all. They have used such hermeneutical tools as gematria, by which the words of scripture are converted into numbers and the secrets of the divine are revealed to those who can see them. They have used formulae, tradition, and exegesis to guide them on their search for the hidden and the holy. What they didn't have was equidistant letter sequence (ELS) technology, computer-based calculations capable of finding patterns of equally spaced letters.

In 1994, they got ELS. That year, researchers announced in the journal Statistical Science that a computer search of Genesis revealed many famous rabbinical names "hidden" in the text, along with the dates of each rabbi's birth or death. Three years later, Michael Drosnin's best-selling The Bible Code asserted that Hebrew scripture contained forecasts of innumerable historical and future events, including wars, assassinations, and earthquakes. Drosnin's book inspired a wave of media coverage, copycat books, bible software, and at least one movie (The Omega Code).

Last fall, however, another group of researchers announced in Statistical Science that Leo Tolstoy had apparently left us similarly encrypted messages: An ELS...