Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but certainly not very convincing, 2 Dec 2003
I had been meaning to read this controversial book for some time now, but only recently did I pick The Bible Code up to see just what all the brouhaha was really about. This is certainly an interesting subject, but I was a little disappointed in the theory, arguments, and proofs presented here. As the book progressed, the open mind I began the book with started to shrink, as Drosnin began to backpedal and hurt his own case. I don't doubt the author's faith in the method and results of his work, but this book falls way short of convincing me that the Bible Code exists and, if so, that its existence is even meaningful. The book has a number of weaknesses. First of all, Drosnin is a former reporter working outside of his trained field; The Bible Code is supposedly built on a sophisticated mathematical model, and its interpretation requires significant knowledge of the Hebrew language in its original form – the original language of the first five books of the Bible. He presents us with printout after printout of data, but all I can do is stare at the Hebrew letters; the actual scientific paper that first delved into this mathematical issue is included in an appendix, but the math is way over my head. Drosnin says other mathematicians have verified that the model is correct, but I just have to take his word for it. I simply don't have any significant data upon which to form an opinion yea or nay about the Bible code. Drosnin may actually have done better to include no illustrations whatsoever; what I see are foreign letters marked in areas all over a given page; it's like a find-a-word puzzle, only the letters of your words don't even have to be connected directly. Odds of given terms "crossing" one another on one page are given, but I still don't know how these odds were determined. Drosnin also indicates that the same model was run against two other long books and showed no kind of code whatsoever, but two books alone seems to be a small sample set, and I have no idea how many attempted searches were done in these limited sample sets.The "evidence" sounds pretty good at first. Drosnin constantly repeats the fact that the Bible Code predicted the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister Rabin, the collision of the comet Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter, the start of the first Gulf War, etc., all to the very day. Tell me more, you think to yourself. This is where Drosnin starts to slip, however. He spends most of his time talking about Armageddon, specifically how Jerusalem will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. He was certainly right in naming terrorist acquisition of weapons of mass destruction to be the greatest threat to the modern world, but prophesying trouble in the Middle East doesn't exactly require a Karnak. He predicts that then-Prime Minister Netanyahu will be assassinated and that Israel will be attacked in 1996. This book was published in 1997, completed after 1996 came and went. Suddenly we find Drosnin discovering that the word "delayed" just so happens to turn up alongside all of those dire predictions of his. He actually expresses the opinion that a delay in Netanyahu's visit to Jordan prevented the Armageddon he had predicted. The Bible Code, he now decides, must include eventualities, things that may come to pass, things that we can prevent from coming to pass. This back pedaling hurts his credibility quite a bit in my eyes. In summary, I can't argue the mathematical validity of The Bible Code in any way, shape, or form, but Drosnin's arguments fail to convince me that he is right about this subject. He can barely find anything in his code until that "thing" has already happened, and it seems to me that finding a few related words after the fact on a sheet full of letters is no difficult feat. I do know that there is one definite error in the book, as Drosnin (and the Bible Code) shows that FDR declared war on Japan on December 7, 1941, when war was not declared until the following day, December 8. As for the predictions he did make about the future, he doesn't exactly go out on a limb. There will be strife in the Middle East and a series of earthquakes in Japan. These things happen every year, so these are hardly convincing prophetic tests of his code. I can't say The Bible Code does not exist the way Drosnin says it does, but it will take a whole lot more evidence to ever convince me of such a fact.
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another Millenium Wagon Rider?, 9 Jan 2003
I'd read this book at the time of its first release (97-98?). While i found the reading experience fast-paced and exciting, the conclusions (as with most books on similar topics) generate more questions, and I was left thirsty for more follow up. The appendices to the book provide the mathematical and scientific methodlogy of the original 'Decoders' and subsequently there are are 5 software decoders i know of circulating on the Net. The main hitch to independent verification is learning/understanding Hebrew as it is a language that has many dualities in sounds for and meanings for different words and phrases... hence knowledge of context and word usage is also important. If you are so inclined, then you will have to research this and validate it for yourself. The original premise, though, is NOT a fantasy... ie. What are the chances of adjective words, statements or dates relating to a particular subject, appearing together in the Bible? eg. What are the chances of my name, birthdate, description of an event in my life, etc appearing in the Bible as opposed to any other Text/Book? The answer is obviously why the book was written, but the reader can easily get caught up in the politics and future-predictions, rather than digesting this eerie phenomena.As for challenging your belief systems, that is an open question you must ask yourself at the end of the book - why did i buy/read this in the first place? I guess that is where Bible Code 2 comes in... but as a reader, this book was one of a few that started me off on my own 'investigation' of the answers. Suffice to say that, while at the time of release there were plenty of 'Doomsday-ers' publicising the end of the world in 2000, Michael Drosnin presented a 'thriller' to the world under a subtle context that 'we can change the future', and in that regard i found reading this book rewarding. Unless you are inquisitive and open minded at the same time, once you have read it, leave it on the book-shelf. If you are, and don't mind buying the next book, then the Bible Code 2 has more material that will impact on belief systems - but you must have read Bible Code 1 first.
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't give this charlatan another penny of your money!, 11 Nov 2003
I've written an essay about this book for my Biblical Studies BA, and I'm learning the Hebrew langauge, so I feel at least partly qualified to write a review. So where to start?From the beginning. The first page reads like drivel and the rest follow suit. Mr Drosnin, whom you will not be surprised to learn is a former newspaper reporter, writes like his tabloid brethren - staccato, one sentence paragraphs with sensationalist rhetoric he cannot possibly back up. Although the study of Bible Codes is becoming a serious business, this is certainly not a serious book. He makes bizarre and patently untrue claims like the one about all Hebrew Bibles being exactly the same, word for word - they aren't, there are at least two major and differing versions (the Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Leningrad Codex), and it doesn't take a genius to see that if you have two different sets of letters, you're going to produce two different sets of results. Because many names and modern words are not rendered precisely in Hebrew and have to be transliterated, and the Tanak (Hebrew Bible) was originally written without vowels, he feels justified in making some incredible logical leaps. So, "Shakespeare" becomes "SHKSPYR" (okay, I guess), "MacBeth" becomes "MKBT" and "Netanyahu" becomes "NTNYHW". Umm, except sometimes "Netanyahu" becomes "NTNY-W". Now that's a flexible language! But can you guess who "'YYNSTYYN", "MKWWYY", & "'WZWWLD" are? (Answers below!) My favourite part is when Mr. Drosnin uses the code to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. You may remember the Bible, and how the dinosaurs put in a rather telling no-show. Apparently when God dictated the original Bible he didn't put the dinosaurs in, yet when he (supposedly) hid this code in the OT, he suddenly remembered them and stuffed the details in that way! Save your money and don't waste your time, and give this book the wide berth it deserves. And Amazon, why can't I give it no stars? (The answers, by the way, are "Einstein", "McVeigh" as in Timothy, the Oklahoma (or "'WKLHWMH") Bomber, and "Oswald", as in Lee Harvey)
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