DECIPHERING GOD'S PLAN

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That is hardly a unanimous position. Shlomo Sternberg, a Harvard mathematics professor and a rabbi, calls Drosnin's book "complete nonsense" and is not much more complimentary toward Rips' work. The history of biblical transcription, he argues, precludes the possibility that the text Rips analyzed, with its all-important sequence of characters, could be identical to that traditionally described as having passed from God to Moses. He suggests that Rips and his colleagues did not properly observe their experiment's protocols. Brendan McKay, a computer-science professor at Australian National University, claims to have attempted two rigorous versions of the same project, and, as he emphasized in an E-mail, "failed to find any trace of the claimed phenomena." A creative debunker, McKay applied ELS to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Result: several "hidden" statements, including "Hear the law of the sea." The probability of those words' turning up, McKay notes, was a spooky 95 out of a million. But claiming divine authorship for them posits a very playful deity.

Beneath the claims and counterclaims, beneath (if possible) the profit motive, lies an argument about the nature of God in an anxious, computer-fascinated age. The great religious traditions all encourage an active, complex relationship with the transcendent. Even the most esoteric of classical mystics, notes Shaul Magid, an expert in the field at New York City's Jewish Theological Seminary, assumed "a triad between God, the human being and the text." The Bible Code (and no doubt many similar efforts to come) knocks out the human leg to offer a sort of automatic God. Rips' claims should certainly be carefully examined, and if all the omens in Drosnin's book start coming to pass, massive rethinking will no doubt occur. But believers seeking divine enlightenment may not want to substitute code for prayer just yet.

--With reporting by Lisa McLaughlin/New York