DECIPHERING GOD'S PLAN

Imagine that the future can be foretold. Not only that, but that it can be divined systematically via a pattern of words in the Bible. Imagine that the system seems to have been sketched out in a respectable academic journal. Don't forget the approaching millennium. Now imagine a lot of money.

Simon & Schuster has. Last Thursday the publisher took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to celebrate the debut of The Bible Code, a book by Michael Drosnin that, it claimed, would "completely change the way we view the world." The volume would unveil a code "broken" by Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips that extracts startling predictions from the Jewish Torah, which corresponds in some ways to the Christian Old Testament. The code predicted the Gulf War and Bill Clinton's 1992 election. Chillingly, it yielded the words "Assassin that will assassinate" along with the name Yitzhak Rabin--a year before Rabin was killed. That was just for starters. Drosnin warns of several different doomsdays and suggests that the code might be the "secret book" promised in Daniel and Revelation. The mix of Scripture, Jewish mysticism, cyberwizardry and existential dread is year 2000 catnip; Warner Bros. reportedly snapped up the movie rights.

What the book failed to foretell was the reaction by Rips when he finally surveyed his alleged brainchild. In a fax, the respected professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University denounced Drosnin's work on the code, calling its use to predict the future "futile." Drosnin, on the defensive, claims to prefer the word suggestions to prophecies, but maintains that "this is a new scientific discovery--we are just starting to understand it."

Rips' repudiation of Drosnin's book has the peculiar effect of moving his controversial code theory closer to what might be called "millennial mainstream." For hundreds of years certain rabbis practiced biblical gematria as an aid to textual interpretation, assigning a numerical value to each of the Hebrew letters and positing a correspondence between words with identical totals. In the 1950s, a few interpreters revived a variant they call equidistant-letter sequence, pulling together letters separated by a given number of characters and seeing what emerged. Computers facilitated mightier crunching, and in 1994 Rips, writing with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg in the journal Statistical Science, claimed that Genesis includes the names of rabbis who were not born until centuries after its transcription concealed in a way the authors suggested was extremely unlikely to have occurred randomly. Aish HaTorah, one of several Jewish groups attracted to the technique as likely proof of God's existence and the Torah's divine nature, showed the data to Harold Gans, then a senior mathematician with the U.S. government's code-cracking National Security Agency. Although he belittles Drosnin's prognostications ("They have no mathematical basis"), Gans supports the validity of ELS. "There is very strong evidence that there is some information encoded in the Bible," he says.