And so is just about everything else you'd choose to search for, since the "ELS" method used can produce such a vast amount of letter combinations that you could find significant portions of, say, the lyrics of the latest #1 pop song there as well.
Which, according to the surface text, would indicate that such is from Holy Spirit.
Hardly.
But authentic codes could be from NOTHING ELSE BUT HOLY SPIRIT BECAUSE THEY ARE SO INHERENTLY PART OF THE TEXT! SHEESH.
Calm down, no need to shout. And you're quite simply incorrect that such finds could be "from NOTHING ELSE" but "HOLY SPIRIT" -- quite clearly they could be (and mostly likely are) from combinatorial chance.
There's NO VOODOO STATISTICS INVOLVED.
Sure there is.
A fair-minded, thorough investigation of the current state of the science and art would have shown you that. The latest research is giving many atheist/agnostic mathematicians great consternation.
And giving many more of them a great deal of amusement. For example:
Drosnin's most chilling message was a prediction that World War III would start in 1996 with a nuclear attack on the state of Israel. [You'll note that this appears not to have occurred... *cough*. Ich.]The "Bible Code" is just a fancier version of playing records backwards and hearing "words" in the garbled sounds....
The Bible codes only worked well in hindsight when the searcher knew what words he might be looking for. Witztum pointed out that in addition to assassinations of Kennedy, Sadat and Rabin that could be found in the code, so could the assassination of Winston Churchill, who wasn't killed at all but died of natural causes.
Other critics found flaws not just with Drosnin's book, but with Rips, Witztum and Rosenberg's paper. Some were unable to duplicate the experiment with the same success as Harold Gans. Others pointed out that the bible in its current form is not letter by letter exactly the same as the original texts that have been lost to history. Even small variations would destroy codes, especially if those codes employed long skips between letters ( Drosnin's Rabin prediction employed a skip of 4,771)
Brendan McKay of the Computer Science Department of the Australian National University, in conjunction with Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel and Gil Kalai of the Jerusalem Hebrew University, wrote an article which appeared in the September 1999 Statistical Science entitled "Solving the Bible Code." The article refuted the original 1995 paper, claiming that the method used to establish statistical significance was flawed.
McKay also demonstrated that any large block of text will yield ELS codes with seemingly meaningful bunches of words. In the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea signed in 1982, he searched for words after making the text more hebrew-like (removing the vowels). In it he found the code:
Hear all the law of the sea
as well as:
Nato need an agreement on the sea
The probabilities of finding them in the document he estimated as 95 out of a million and 21 out of a million respectively. The article asserted the authors of the original paper made mistakes in the way they designed their experiment by choosing particular forms of words that "tuned" their method to their data, thus invalidating the test.
McKay also used the text of Moby Dick to find "predictions" of the assassinations of famous figures including Trotsky, Ghandi, Robert Kennedy and others. One prediction was for the murder of Drosnin himself.
The problem with the codes is that if someone was looking for a prediction of a particular subject in any large block of text, it would not take too long before he could find encoded words that seemed to be related to it. If the searcher was looking for a prediction about a flying saucer crashing in New Mexico he would find at least some of these suggestive words:
ROSWELL, UFO, FLYING SAUCER, COVERUP, ALIENS, 1947, DISC, CRASH, AUTOPSY
and others. While the probability of finding at least a few of these is pretty high, the probability of finding any particular one may be very low.
The Bible Code controversy is not over, though. Neither Eliyahu Rips nor Michael Drosnin have backed down on their claims. Professor Rips has stated that he believes that the evidence for the codes was "stronger than ever" and Drosnin has said the critics have "told a lie.
Either you are very ignorant of up-to-date research as well as a solid expose of McKay et al
or
your biases are causing you to distort reality 100% out of whack.