This article appeared in the
"Editor's File"
in The Textbook Letter, March-April 1998.
Prentice Hall is a unit of Simon & Schuster, and Simon & Schuster is in the astrology business. By that we mean that other units of Simon & Schuster -- Fireside Books, Touchstone Books and Pocket Books -- publish and sell astrology books, with titles such as Love Planets, Black Sun Signs, The Mind of God, Power Astrology and Spiritual Astrology. Perhaps some officer of Simon & Schuster has instructed the Prentice Hall people to plug astrology to young students, in the hope that some of the students will eventually become customers for Simon & Schuster's books of superstition.
Since then, Simon & Schuster has diversified its stock of occult trash and has scored a commercial success by publishing The Bible Code, a book that deals not with astrology but with numerology and phony "prophecies." This matter is worth examining, I believe, because Simon & Schuster (which controls Globe Fearon and Silver Burdett Ginn, as well as Prentice Hall) is a major producer of schoolbooks. We should discover as much about Simon & Schuster as we can, and we certainly should pay attention to a case in which the company has staged a scam and the scam has been exposed. Moreover, this affair provides material that some teachers can employ advantageously in their classrooms.
The author of The Bible Code, one Michael Drosnin, claims that the ancient Hebrew Bible contains encoded messages which refer to such modern events as World War 2, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, the assassination of Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and even the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The underlying notion is that the messages must have been put into the Hebrew text by someone who knew the future -- which implies, of course, that the persons who wrote the Hebrew text must have received dictation or "inspiration" from a god. Not surprisingly, Drosnin's book has been widely publicized in the vulgar media.
The numerological maneuvers by which Drosnin discovered his so-called messages were arbitrary and tortuous, but his essential technique was this: He used a computer to run through all the characters in the Hebrew text, to mark every nth character, and to assemble the marked characters into combinations that might form words. He did this again and again, using a different value of n for each run -- for example, the computer marked every 10th character during one run, then every 11th character during another run, then every 12th character during another run, and so on. By repeating this process indefinitely, Drosnin eventually produced a great heap of "hits" -- i.e., character-combinations that formed recognizable words or phrases. (He ignored all the combinations that formed gibberish.) Then he picked through the heap of hits to find words or phrases that, when interpreted with unfettered imagination, could be depicted as prophecies.
As you already have discerned, the whole thing was nonsense. The same process that Drosnin used on the Hebrew Bible can be employed to generate occult "messages" from any large body of text, in any language -- and critics pointed this out as soon as The Bible Code appeared.
Drosnin then made the bad mistake of trying to defend his nonsense and cow his critics by issuing a challenge, which was quoted in Newsweek: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick," he brayed, "I'll believe them."
No sooner said than done! At Australian National University, the mathematician Brendan McKay and his colleagues applied some Drosnin-style diddling to the text of Melville's novel, and they produced a message foretelling the murder of Indira Gandhi (who was shot by assassins in 1984). They also extracted messages in which Melville had prophesied the assassinations of Austria's chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (in 1934), Lebanon's president Rene Moawad (1989), Abraham Lincoln (1865), John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968) and Yitzhak Rabin (1995).
In the United States, the physicist David E. Thomas has deftly debunked Drosnin's antics and Drosnin's book, and he has written a definitive article -- "Hidden Messages and the Bible Code" -- that ran in Skeptical Inquirer for November-December 1997. Thomas explains Drosnin's methods and shows how Drosnin used various tricks to boost the chances of generating hits. Then he describes some results that popped up when he applied Drosnin's techniques to an English translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace and to the most popular English rendering of the Holy Bible, the King James Version. He found, for example, that Tolstoy had predicted the rise of Hitler and had explicitly linked the name Hitler to the word Nazi, while the authors of the King James Bible had prophesied the arrival of Comet Hale-Bopp and the mass suicide of members of the Heaven's Gate cult, among other events.
Thomas's piece in Skeptical Inquirer is well done and will be particularly valuable to teachers of mathematics or science, who will find information here that can be used in fashioning timely lessons about probability and about pseudoscience.
William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes often about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.
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