Not long ago, our staff spent an afternoon in a spirited discussion with Dr. Satinover at the offices of William Morrow & Co. in New York. We pick up as the conversation was winding down...

Q: You've said that the jury is still out about the codes. Let’s assume that they are real. Could they be used to predict the future?

A: The answer is unequivocal: “No.” In order to search for an encoded piece of information, the details must already be known to be accurate--so the information must already have come into existence. If a bit of the future is guessed at and found in the text--and even if it comes to pass--that fact alone leaves you with no way of distinguishing this “amazing prediction” from a mere coincidence. That’s why daily horoscopes are so popular--and so mistaken. The codes can tell us nothing about the future. Besides, the very text in which the codes have been found expressly forbids trying to predict the future.

Q: Then what do they tell us about the past?

A: It may sound strange to put it this way, but the answer is again “nothing;” that is, nothing we don’t already know. So, for example, the codes could not be used to prove that we’re “right” about something that happened long ago--or prove that we’re wrong.

Q: But that makes it seem like even if they’re real, they’re useless! Is that true?

A. Yes. They’re useless--but for one thing. If the codes are genuine they tell us that the past that has actually occurred was known in advance to the author of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible, considered sacred Scripture to Jews, Christians and Muslims). To confirm that on a scientific basis would be to give an almost definitive answer to mankind’s most burning question: “Is there a God who is interested in us and involved in our lives?”

Q: So it was God who created the codes?

A. It was someone with the almost unimaginable ability to encode a vast amount of information into a surface text that is itself coherent and meaningful--including information that did not come into existence at the time the Torah was written. Someone who expressly states in the text his concern that we take the surface content of the document very seriously. Indeed, someone who seems to have made certain that the codes could be used to no other end than making us wonder who that someone could be.

Now, I suppose it’s possible to concoct some far-fetched alternative to the simple answer, “God,” say aliens from an unimaginably advanced civilization; or maybe us, from our own future when we’ve learned how to travel backwards in time. But there’s something “off” about these explanations. First, it sounds like someone desperately avoiding the obvious: “God? Horrors! Anything but that.” Second, the text of the Torah itself claims to have been authored by God. So if someone else created the codes, that someone is not only prescient and stupendously intelligent, but a liar as well.

Q: Who "cracked" the codes?

A: A long line of Jewish sages and scholars beginning in the first century AD, perhaps much earlier, and continuing through the middle ages into our own era. The man responsible for rescuing the codes for the modern era to examine critically is Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, whose greatest achievement, however, was not the codes. Rather, it was his dramatic rescue of tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.

In the past twenty years, a small but growing group of researchers in Israel and the U.S. have been chiefly responsible for putting the codes on a scientific footing. This allows them to be subject to rigorous scrutiny of a sort which sooner or later--and most likely only after a great deal of heated debate and many further tests--will either confirm or disconfirm their reality. This group of researchers includes Daniel Michaelson, formerly of the department of mathematics at UCLA; Prof. Eliyahu Rips of the Einstein Institute for Mathematics at the Hebrew University; Harold Gans, until last year Senior Cryptologic Mathematician at the U.S. National Security Agency (the world’s largest cryptologic establishment); more recently, Robert Haralick, Boeing Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Seattle, developer of the Unix image processing system and Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. But the pre-eminent codes researcher who over the past twelve years has most powerfully advanced the field is Doron Witztum, formerly of the Jerusalem College of Technology. There have recently arisen many other qualified individuals now engaged in serious codes research. Some are complete skeptics; some are certain the phenomenon is real; some are as yet uncertain.

Q: Who knows how to “read” the codes?

A: The codes really contain no “messages,” so it wouldn’t be quite accurate to speak of "reading" them. But the scientists who developed the methods are the ones most familiar with the fine details of extracting what seems to be actual information from a great deal of “noise.” These would be Witztum above all, then Rips, Gans and Haralick.

Q: What’s the difference between these codes and Nostradamus?

A: First and foremost, Nostradamus claims to have a method for unlocking knowledge of the future. Not only is this impossible with codes, as I explained before--and forbidden by the Torah altogether, whatever the method--it is actually inconsistent with the spiritual implications of both the codes and, more importantly, the Torah. The peculiar nature of the codes makes it clear that the future is not predictable because it isn’t fixed ahead of time. Most importantly, we are ourselves active agents in creating our own future, for better or for worse.

That’s the answer in terms of principle. In terms of method, Nostradamus “interprets” one thing (a phrase of text he wrote) as metaphor for another (some future event). The Bible codes involve no metaphors or interpretation--at least, not those that are subject to rigorous validation or refutation. They involve clusters of words selected ahead of time from the text (but words created by skipping letters), whose relationship to one another is known and fixed. The general tendency of such words to in fact form clusters -- however imperfectly; that is, to form clusters more frequently and more tightly than can be expected to happen just by accident (though this happens often, too) -- strongly suggests that the clustering is deliberate. To create such clusters, the author would have had to know of events that had not yet occurred when he wrote them.

Q: Is it true that Rabin’s assassination was predicted in the codes?

A: If I rattle some dice, call out, “double-sixes!” and then get them, may I properly claim that I "predicted" it? Not really. I just guessed, and got lucky (or loaded the dice). Maybe I really do have ESP, but the fact is that you will have no way of telling the difference between a single lucky guess (or even a run of them) and a genuine prediction. Once a potato grew to resemble a beloved religious figure. Was this deliberate? Not likely. It is true that one may extract from the text (in this case, of Genesis) words and phrases that arguably relate to Rabin and assassination. But there is no way of demonstrating that these are anything other than chance occurrences--like an arrangement of letters in alphabet soup. The entire subject of the codes’ validity stands or falls on whether at least certain of the codes can be shown to be very unlikely by mere happenstance. But no proper analysis even could be carried out on the Rabin “code,” so there is no way of distinguishing it from mere chance.

Q: What significant events are found in the codes?

A: Details about contemporary individuals (certain sages), major historical events (the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Gulf War), events from the ancient past (the history behind the holidays of Hanukah and of Purim), the discovery of the treatment for diabetes and the ravages of AIDS, the French revolution and the Oslo peace accords may be found. On the other hand, seemingly similar details can be extracted from almost any text, and incorrect facts can be extracted as well--from the Bible, too. But I emphasize “seemingly.” The validity of the phenomenon depends entirely on whether it can be shown that the amount and specificity of such details extracted from the Torah exceeds what is produced by simple chance. The researchers responsible for developing the decoding method are convinced from long experience, as well as by formal investigation, that the phenomenon is genuine and that information of the above sort is indeed contained in the Torah and nowhere else. There exist many skeptics who are not convinced, even though they may not yet have found the error in the research they are certain is there, waiting to be found. Some think they have found the error, and a dispute over whether they have forms part of the current debate.

Q: What about similar "codes" that skeptics claim they've found in Moby Dick, in War and Peace--even in the newspaper?

A: It's true. You can find similar-looking "codes" just about anywhere, including the other books of the Bible outside the first five. But the claim of the qualified researchers is this: a careful, sufficiently deep and dispassionate examination of these other codes will eventually turn up a profound difference. The genuine codes actually conform to far stricter limits and are therefore not expected to appear merely by chance anywhere as often as they actually do. The false ones conform to criteria lax enough to make them wholly unexceptional. Critics, of course, will claim there are no salient differences in these criteria. In part that's what the debate is all about. Unfortunately, the nuances of the debate are beyond a lay understanding of statistics. Indeed, it is at the very frontier of signal-detection theory. This has left the field wide open to claims at both extremes that the general reader has little chance of sorting out on his own. Without going too deeply into the technical details, in Cracking the Bible Code I've tried at least to alert the reader to what some of these hidden "landmines" are. Indeed, even had I wanted to, I could have gone only so far into these details and no further, since many reach beyond my expertise as well. The original researchers are themselves preparing a careful rebuttal of various types of false codes, for a general readership, in addition to their ongoing, more rigorous experimentation. (They've pretty much stopped doing so on-line, by the way.)

Q: How did you become so knowledgeable about the codes--and why?

A: I have a strong background in both religious studies and science. For as long as I can remember--going well back into childhood--I’ve been on the lookout for testable evidence for the reality of God. I found sufficient indicators of such evidence in the codes to warrant a long and careful study which I have been engaged in since 1992. During that time I’ve been in communication with almost all of the individuals responsible for developing the modern codes research and teaching others about it, as well as with numerous critics who have the scientific skill to scrutinize the codes seriously and professionally. I’ve also been privileged to hear first hand from his descendants and friends about the life and studies of Rabbi Weissmandl, who really brought the phenomenon into the twentieth century. He did much else besides, of even greater importance. He was quite an amazing man, and insufficiently known and honored.

Q: Do you ever worry about being associated with a subject that could easily be tarred as "fringe"?

A: Of course. But look. To take the skeptical position on this is pretty easy. Knowing nothing about the subject in detail, a betting man would be a fool to gamble that something this wild is real; he'd feel that he was risking almost nothing to insist that the codes can't possibly be real, don't deserve a minute of his time, and anyone who thinks they might be real is an idiot! But what happened is this: some pretty careful researchers took the long shot and invested a lot of time and intellectual capital in a long exploration of the crazy possibility that they might just be real. (Doron Witztum and Eliyahu Rips, in particular) Maybe, given the odds, and not yet knowing the outcome, they were foolish in doing so. But they did, and their efforts produced some tantalizinging results. Not that they came up with the absolute evidence, let's say, to convince everyone that the codes are genuine--but with more than enough evidence to make them worth looking into.

Now "looking into them" doesn't have to mean even that you think it's more likely than not that the codes are real; it's worth taking the gamble even if the odds against them are a hundred to one. Why? Because if they do prove real, the benefit is so enormous! I'd guess that's why four top-flight mathematicians from Harvard, Yale and the Hebrew University went on public record as cautioning that the research should not be dismissed out of hand, as would surely seem reasonable to most people--the easy bet. They weren't saying the research had finally proved itself; they were saying that it was worth taking seriously, resisting the easy temptation to dismiss it without a hearing, beacuse the time spent just might end up being worth it. Theirs was really a pretty nuanced response, and courageous, too. So, yes, there's the risk that critics will take the easy road and try to make you look foolish even for taking the codes seriously. But that's human nature.

Q: Last Question. Do you think the codes really exist?

A: Of course, right now this is the most important question of all. First of all, I must admit to a bias: I want the codes to exist. (I’ve met many others with exactly the opposite bias--they want them not to exist!) If the codes do exist, it seems to me they would force us to take very seriously indeed what the first five books of the Bible have to tell us about the world and about how best to live our lives (including, by the way its prohibition against trying to divine the future.). But personal preferences aside (mine or anyone else’s), the high seriousness of the subject demands a scrupulous examination of the evidence for the codes and against them.

Here’s where matters stand at present, in my opinion. There does exist solid scientific evidence for the codes. There also exist cogent arguments disputing the adequacy of this evidence. I know of a number of forthcoming as well as already completed extensions of the codes research that will provide impressive additional evidence on their behalf. I also know of well-trained skeptics who are developing serious, ever-more complex counter-arguments. Some critics claim already to have found the "smoking gun," the fatal error in the researchers' analysis. I'm unimpressed, in spite of these critics qualifications. They seem not to have carefully understood the original material--perhaps because they are so certain from the start that the work can't possibly be valid. In any event, over the next few years the level and intensity of what can already be called a scientific battle will rise--and that’s exactly as it should be. As I say, I for one want the codes to be what the balance of evidence to date seems to show: the real thing, at least for some of them.

But as I wrote in a recent article, if the codes are false it would be best for this to be demonstrated not merely quickly, but well. If they prove real, the consequences will be unimaginable.

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