SATINOVER'S "Cracking the Bible Codes,"

or, Abracadabra and Ethnocentrism

Bruce David Wilner
December 1997

"Eliyahu Rips" "Doron Witztum" "Yoav Rosenberg" "Michael Drosnin" "Bible code" "Torah code"

Once again, some know-it-all has come along to deliver to the world the last word about the Bible codes. Just as in my last Web page on this topic, which responded to the Drosnin work, I feel I have to criticize the book, not because I do not believe in the Bible codes, but because the argument presented in the book is weak and reads more like sleight than like insight. Here are my problems with the book:

• The author humbly slaps "Jeffrey Satinover, M.D." on the jacket of the book, as if his medical degree authorizes him to dictate from the mountain top on theological issues. I couldn’t care if the author is a gravedigger. However, I do care if the author starts right off the bat by bandying about his completely extraneous degree as if to say, "Hey, I’m a doctor, so I know what’s what."

• The author goes on and on about totally irrelevant issues, including some weakly philosophical, and even elenchic, diatribes about quantum physics. I am impressed with the author’s depth of learning in various sciences, but he has not established to my satisfaction that he is qualified to give an impartial opinion on theological and eschatological issues.

• I was surprised to find no mention of the work of Nostradamus in Satinover’s work. It has undoubtedly occurred to many of us that there are tremendous overlaps between the Nostradamian predictions and the materials purportedly embodied in the Bible codes. Obviously, Nostradamus did not pull his predictions out of a hat. Equally obviously, Nostradamus was well versed (for his day) in the Bible, Jewish mysticism, and cryptology. The fact that no relationship is even mentioned demonstrates gross ignorance.

• The author often cites the remoteness of the probability of finding this item or that in the Biblical text as proof that the item was placed there by God. It is crucial to note that the probability of finding an item is a meaningless statistic when discussing patterns in lengthy texts; what is important is the relative likelihood of finding that item as opposed to another item. As an example of this, the other day I saw a car drive past with the license plate DPJ-406. Since there are 26 letters and ten digits, I can correctly state that the probability of seeing this license plate is one divided by 260 cubed, or about one in eighteen million. Despite these seemingly astronomical odds, I did, in fact, see that incredibly unlikely license plate on an ordinary day in December. Should I have telephoned the newspapers to report my incredible luck at seeing that astronomically rare license plate? Of course not! The critical point is that the "unlikeliness" of that particular license number in absolute terms is meaningless; what is important is that the license number was neither more nor less likely than any other.

• The fact that all of the "scientific" analyses of Bible codes overlook this important mathematical subtlety points out a sad reality: many mathematicians and scientists, whose colleagues mistake their mastery of the mechanical details of their craft for professional brilliance, are lacking when it comes to conceptual understanding of the material. The probability of an event and the likelihood of an event with respect to another event are completely independent concepts, a distinction that seems nearly as difficult for the analysts to understand as it is for their lay readership.

• The author points to various analyses by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and shows how they have the last word on everything. I have read some of CSICOP’s materials and find them to be scientifically weak. Like many apologists, CSICOP "investigators" dismiss controversial issues by examining thousands of pages of material, ferreting out a single snippet of provably hoaxed evidence, and thereby declaring all the mountains of evidence completely unreliable. The CSICOP’s work includes, in their own words, "having debunked" such cryptozoological tidbits as sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster. It is unfortunate that the CSICOP is so weakly informed about these issues, yet they dismiss out of hand lifetimes of work by some of the world’s most renowned paleontologists, anthropologists, and lay investigators, and reams of evidence dating back many centuries.

• The author, who professes his strong Jewish faith throughout the book, once again dismisses out of hand the work of those who have found pro-Christian Messianic codes in the Bible. Instead of devoting serious analysis to their work, he makes glib statements about how the Bible code "cannot be used to settle the truth or falsehood of theological assertions, only to prove that the assertions are important to the Bible’s audience." What total poppycock and ethnocentrism! In Satinover’s "balanced" world view, if the Bible code proves a Jewish assertion, it’s inviolable, but if it proves a Christian assertion, we’re back to the drawing board.

I am pretty much convinced that the Bible codes are real. I am pretty much convinced that the Torah was dictated by God. However, I am also pretty much convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. As an observant Jew, I am waiting for the feathers to fly upon making this bold statement . . .

Afterword

In September 1999, a Hasidic rabbi engaged me an e-mail flame war over the illegitimacy of my identification of Jesus as the Messiah. His dialogue enlightened me on the following fascinting points:

• The proper way to get one's point across is not to reason, but to ridicule. Indeed, the rabbi told me that I "have such an open mind that my brains are falling out," as well as that "putting tallit and tefillin on a pig does not make it kosher."

• The Messiah was not Jesus: indeed, it was the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The rabbi cited one of those free, roll-your-own Web sites as proof. This Web site discusses Maimonides' (alternatively—and affectionately—known by the Hebrew acronym Rambam) criteria for identifying the Messiah. Even though one of the Rambam's criteria is that the "Messiah" will rebuild Solomon's Temple—and Schneerson obviously did not do this—the site also discusses why this glaring hole in the argument is irrelevant. (Oh, of course, "rebuilding the Temple" is figurative! I guess making a peanut butter and frog sandwich qualifies as "rebuilding the Temple.") Indeed, the Web site teaches us the proper way to think. (God forbid we should use our own lifetimes' experiences and educational backgrounds to determine how to think!) And this rabbi has the chutzpah to criticize the supposed dogmatism of Christians!

• A fortiori, since one must know how to think and how to interpret, the Kingdom of God is not meant for everyone: it is only meant for erudite religious scholars. What makes the rabbi's reasoning so utterly hysterical is that the very raison d'être of the Hasidic movement was the fear that arcane rabbinic scholarship was being overstressed at the expense of simple-minded zeal and pietism, alienating the masses from the core of Jewish ecclesiastical life.

Of course, the rabbi cautioned me in his introductory e-mail that his arguments would not be ethnocentric. I thank him most heartily for his adoption of such a cautious tone.

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