End of Days, Part 2

Bible Code II: The Countdown
by Michael Drosnin

(Page 2 of 2)

There was another target, the headquarters of the American military in Washington. The Pentagon was struck by a third hijacked plane an hour after the first attack in New York. That, too, was encoded.

"Pentagon" appeared once in the Bible, crossed by "damaged." Again, the prediction in the 3000 year old text was exact. One of the five sides of the Pentagon had fallen, but the building itself still stood.

"Emergency" appeared with "Pentagon," immediately followed by "from Arabia." In fact, it was learned in the next few days that most of the terrorists had come from Saudi Arabia.

The warning of the greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world, of the first foreign attack on mainland America in modern times, had been encoded in the Bible for 3000 years. But we had missed it, until it was too late.

And now the code warned that it would lead to war. "The next war" crossed the Hebrew name for the World Trade Towers, "the Twins." "Terrorist" was encoded in the same place.

The statement in the code was chilling. This terrorist attack was the start of a new war, the war that Bush declared, a war against terrorism that many were predicting would last years.

And now I saw the encoding that captured the full horror of this moment. "Towers" and "the Twins" again appeared together in exactly the same place as the words in the plain text of the Bible that again made clear that the final countdown had begun-"in the End of Days."

For years I had been warning top government leaders in Washington and in the Middle East that the world might be facing danger on a scale only captured in Biblical prophecy, and now I had seen the reality begin to unfold with my own eyes, just down the block from my home in New York.

And I was certain that this was the beginning of something too horrible for any of us to fully imagine, not the end.

"A cryptogram set by the Almighty," the "riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely fore-ordained."

That's what Sir Isaac Newton called the Bible code. Three hundred years ago Newton, the first modern scientist, the man who discovered gravity and figured out the mechanics of our solar system, who single-handedly invented advanced mathematics, searched for a hidden code in the Bible that would reveal the future of mankind.

For more than 3000 years, ever since there's been a Bible, people have believed there was something hidden in it, great secrets that were known only to the high priests, new revelations that could be found using some esoteric formula, some form of magic, some new science.

But it remained for a Russian immigrant to Israel, Eliyahu Rips, a mathematician freed from a Soviet political prison, to find the code that had eluded everyone for millennia.

Rips succeeded because he had the one essential tool that everyone before him lacked-a computer.

The Bible code had a time lock. It could not be opened until the computer was invented.

It was designed, apparently by some intelligence that could see the future, to be opened now. That much seemed clear. The code could have been designed to be found by Newton 300 years ago. Or it could have been designed to be found 300 or 3000 years in the future, by a technology that would not exist until then.

Instead, some intelligence that could see across time encoded the Bible in a way that allowed us to crack the code at this one moment in human history.

"That is why Isaac Newton could not do it," said Rips. "It had to be opened with a computer. It was 'sealed until the time of the End.'"

But when Eli Rips began his search for the Bible code nearly twenty years ago, he was not thinking about the "End of Days."

He was just solving a mathematical puzzle. "I found words encoded far more than statistics allowed for by random chance, and I knew that I was on to something of real importance," recalled Rips. "When I applied a computer, I made the breakthrough."

Rips discovered the Bible code in the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament, the Bible as it was first written, the words that according to the Bible itself God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai 3200 years ago.

Rips eliminated all the spaces between the words, and turned the entire original Bible into one continuous letter strand, 304,805 letters long.

In doing that, he was actually restoring the Bible to what ancient sages say was its original form. According to legend, it was the way Moses received the Bible from God-"contiguous, without break of words."

Rips wrote a computer program that searched the strand of letters for new information revealed by skipping any equal number of letters.

Anyone could make up a sentence that would tell one story on the surface, but another story hidden in a simple skip code. For example:

Rips explained that each code is a case of adding every fifth or tenth or fiftieth letter to form a word.

Now read that same sentence as a four-letter skip code:

Rips ExplAineD thaT eacH codE is a Case Of adDing Every fifth or tenth or fiftieth letter to form a word.

The hidden message-READ THE CODE.

But no one, not even Newton, could go through the whole Bible counting letters by hand, checking every possible skip sequence, starting with every letter from the first verse to the last verse, backwards and forwards, from the beginning of the Bible to the end. Only a computer can search fast enough to make the job possible.

And only a computer could find the complexly interwoven information in the Bible code. Time after time related words, names, dates, and places are, against all odds, encoded together.

The words form a crossword puzzle. Each time a new word or phrase is discovered, a new crossword puzzle is created. And the connected words reveal accurate, often detailed information about modern events.

It's what makes the Bible code unique. In another book one might find a random skip sequence that spells "Twin Towers"-but not with "airplane." One might find "bin Laden"-but not with "the city and the tower." One might find "the Twins"-but not with "the next war," or "the End of Days."

"Only in the Bible code is there consistent, coherent information," said Rips. "No one has found anything like that in any other book, in any translation, or in any original Hebrew text, except the Bible."

When Rips reported his discovery in an American mathematics journal, many scientists were skeptical. They couldn't fault his science, but they couldn't believe his results. The claim was just too amazing-a code in the Bible that revealed events that happened after the Bible was written.

A senior code-breaker at the top secret National Security Agency, the clandestine U.S. government listening post near Washington, heard about the startling claim, and decided to investigate.

Harold Gans had spent his life making and breaking codes for American military intelligence, and he was sure the Bible code was "off-the-wall, ridiculous."

He wrote his own computer program, and set out to prove it was a hoax. Instead, he replicated the results of Rips's experiment. The names of 66 sages who lived and died long after Biblical times were indeed encoded with the dates they were born, and the dates that they died. Gans could not believe it. He thought that the experiment must have been rigged. He looked for new information, encodings that Rips never tried to find. He was sure that the names of the cities where the 66 rabbis lived and died could not be found in the code. He found them.

Gans had set out to debunk the Bible code. Instead, his 440-hour experiment proved it was real.

"It sent a chill up my spine," recalled the code-breaker.

No man could have encoded the Bible with information about people who lived, events that happened, thousands of years after the Bible was written. But someone did.

If not one of us, then who?

Copyright © 2002, Viking Press, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Michael Drosnin is a reporter, formerly at The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Citizen Hughes and The Bible Code. He lives and works in New York City.