Speaker 1: Okay, So, like, have you ever thought about, like what
if there was you know, a secret code hidden inside
a book, a book you thought you.
Speaker 2: Knew, uh, like a hidden language or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, a language that get this, some people believe
has been like whispering about the future for thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Oh that's kind of freaking you know, right.
Speaker 1: And we're not talking metaphors or you know, vague prophecies here.
It's like straight up literal messages encoded in the text,
like information deliberately planted there waiting to be unlocked. So
like a code then, exactly, and not just any book.
We're talking about the Bible, specifically the Old Testament and
these alleged secret messages. While they're called Bible codes, we're
doing a deep dive on this today.
Speaker 2: Interesting, So we're ditching symbolism and deep interpretation and jumping
straight into like deciphering literal messages.
Speaker 1: You got it. It's a totally different way of looking
at these ancient texts. I mean, for centuries people have
been trying to understand the Bible through like context symbolism,
the historical background, all that jazz. But the Bible codes
they suggest there's a whole other layer underneath, like a
deliberate encoding of information hidden within the actual words themselves.
Speaker 2: And we're talking about the Hebrew text, right, the Old Testament,
those twenty four books written over like thousands of years.
Speaker 1: That's right. And here's the thing. Those ancient scribes, the
guys who copied those texts, they were like obsessed with accuracy.
They believed that even a single letter out of place
could make the whole scroll like religiously unusable.
Speaker 2: Right right, I mean you have to think about it,
that kind of meticulousness, that level of precision. It wasn't
just about preserving the words. It's like they were like
safeguarding something, maybe even unintentionally, for future generations exactly.
Speaker 1: And that leads to this crazy idea. What if that
crazy level of accuracy was like totally necessary to preserve
some kind of hidden code within the text.
Speaker 2: Itself, because even a smell change, a single letter difference,
could throw the whole thing off gramble the code. That's wild, totally.
Speaker 1: And you know, this whole concept of hidden messages, it's
not some new age digital thing. It actually goes way back.
I mean way way back.
Speaker 2: Really, Like how far back are we talking?
Speaker 1: Like thirteenth century, there was this rabbi Bacia ben Asher.
He lived way before computers, obviously, and he supposedly found
something remarkable in the Book of Genesis.
Speaker 2: Oh what did he find?
Speaker 1: Okay? So he used this like early version of what
we now call a skip code. Basically, you pick a letter,
skip a set number of letters, pick another, and keep going.
You know, kind of like connect the dots, but with letters.
Speaker 2: Okay, I get it. So what did he find with
this skip code thing?
Speaker 1: Well, reportedly he found a reference to the creation of
the moon. And not just that, it also like specified
the exact length of the lunar month. Get this, twenty
nine point five three days.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's pretty specific.
Speaker 1: And here's the kicker. NASA, with all its fancy technology,
didn't confirm that precise figure until like nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 2: So this rabbi back in the third teen hundreds figured
out something that took NASA like centuries to confirm.
Speaker 1: You got it. It's almost like he was tapping into
some kind of hidden knowledge, right.
Speaker 2: That's that's pretty mind blowing. Imagine trying to do that manually,
I mean, using skip codes to search through the entire
Old Testament by hand.
Speaker 1: Oh, I know, it would be like insanely tedious. You'd
probably do cross eyed before finding anything meaningful. It would
be like finding a needle in a haystack, but the
haystack is made of letters, and the needle is also
made of letters.
Speaker 2: It's like you'd need a lifetime to do it. But
then boom, computers come along and change everything.
Speaker 1: It's a total game changer, right. Suddenly you don't need
years and years of painstaking manual work. You can run
complex calculations in like seconds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, computers basically took this like super niche almost impossible
task and made it well possible. It's like, now you
can search for these Bible codes systematically at a scale
that was just unimaginable before.
Speaker 1: Right, And it wasn't just about like finding words hidden
in straight lines anymore. With computers, you could take those
long strings of letters you get from the skip codes
and you could arrange them into grids. Think of it
like giant crossword puzzles filled with letters from the Bible.
Speaker 2: Oh I see. So, Like instead of just looking for
words in a straight line, now you can search horizontally,
vertically diagonally, like a word search that opens up a
whole lot of possibilities it does.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to this pivotal experiment that happened
back in nineteen eighty five. It's called the Great Rabbis Experiment.
Have you heard of it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've come across it in my research. It was
a pretty big deal, right, because it tried to go
beyond just anecdotal evidence and like apply a statistical framework
to these Bible.
Speaker 1: Codes exactly Like they wanted to see if there was
any real provable evidence that these codes existed. And their
focus was on, get this, the names of famous rabbis.
Speaker 2: So these researchers Eleah who Rips, darn zdem and jol Rosenberg.
They basically wanted to find out if the names of
these prominent rabbis were like encoded within the.
Speaker 1: Old Testament, right, and not just random names. They used
a specific list of thirty four super influential rabbis from
this book called the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel.
They took these names, programmed them into a computer, and
told the computer to search for them in the biblical text.
Speaker 2: But they didn't stop there, right, They also looked for
the rabbis as birth and death dates, yep.
Speaker 1: That was like the key to the whole experiment. The
idea was if they could find the names and those
specific dates intersecting within these coded grids, the chances of
that happening randomly would be like astronomically small.
Speaker 2: It's like finding your name in a crossword puzzle and
then having your birth date and death date also spelled
out in the same puzzle, all crossing your name. That
would be pretty freaky totally.
Speaker 1: And well, the results they reported were well, pretty mind blowing.
They said they found all thirty four names.
Speaker 2: Wow. And what about the dates?
Speaker 1: They claimed that the birth and death dates often intersected
with the names. And get this, They did another test,
this time with thirty two different names, and they supposedly
got similar results.
Speaker 2: That's that's pretty compelling. But I mean, couldn't it still
be just a coincidence.
Speaker 1: That's what they wanted to rule out. So they did
what's called a control experiment. They took other long texts
like War and Peace and some religious writings that aren't
supposed to have codes, and they ran the same program
on those texts.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see, So if they found similar patterns in
those other books, then it would suggest that maybe it
wasn't so special that maybe it was just random chance
at play exactly. But guess what did they find anything?
Speaker 1: They said, all they found were just random letters, no names,
no dates, no patterns.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that does seem to support their claim that
there's something unique about the Old Testament.
Speaker 1: It does, right, Doctor Rips one of the researchers, he
did some calculations and said that the odds of this
happening randomly were like one in ten million. That's that's
a pretty huge name.
Speaker 2: One in ten million. I mean, that's not just a fluke, right.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like it. And because of this, their
study actually got public in a pretty prestigious scientific journal
called Statistical Science.
Speaker 2: Wow, so it was peer reviewed by other scientists and
deemed credible enough to be published. That's a big deal.
Speaker 1: It was. Of course, it also created a huge controversy
in the scientific community.
Speaker 2: Oh I bet. I mean, if you believe their findings,
it kind of turns our whole understanding of the Bible
upside down right totally.
Speaker 1: And one of the people who was super skeptical at
first was this guy, Harold Dan's. He was like a
big shot mathematician working for the NSA, you know, the
National Security Agency whoa the NSSA.
Speaker 2: So this guy, he basically dealt with codes for a
living exactly.
Speaker 1: He was a codebreaker, a cryptologist. If anyone could debunk
these Bible codes, it would be him.
Speaker 2: And what did he think?
Speaker 1: He was, like totally dismissive at first. He even created
his own computer program, like specifically designed to find flaws
in the Bible code research.
Speaker 2: So he was actively trying to prove it wrong, not
just dismissing it exactly.
Speaker 1: But here's where it gets crazy. When he ran his program,
guess what happened?
Speaker 2: Did it like crash or something.
Speaker 1: It not only confirmed the names and dates from the
Great Rabbis experiment, but it also started finding like places
of birth and death for these Rabbis, all intersecting with
their names within the grids.
Speaker 2: So he set out to disprove it, but ended up
proving it even further. That's a huge turnaround.
Speaker 1: It is he basically became a believer all thanks to
his own investigation.
Speaker 2: That's pretty compelling, I have to admit. But so far
we've just been talking about historical figures, right, Yeah, what
about the future predictions that people talk about with Bible codes.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's where it gets even more well controversial.
It goes beyond the past and into like predicting future events,
even details about people who weren't even born yet.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm intrigued, tell me more so.
Speaker 1: Take Saddam Hussein, for example. In nineteen ninety, Doctor Rips,
the same guy from the Great Rabbis Experiment, said he
found Hussein's name encoded in Bible along with the prediction
that he'd attack Israel within three weeks.
Speaker 2: So a specific person and a specific timeframe. That's a
bold claim.
Speaker 1: It is right. And what's really freaky is that while
Saddam Hussein did actually launch a missile attack on Israel
during the Gulf War, and it happened within that three
week window.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, So prediction and reality kind of lined up there.
That's pretty hard to ignore, right.
Speaker 1: It makes you wonder. And there are other examples too.
People claim they've found President Kennedy's name encoded with the
words to die and Dallas Shakespeare's name along with will
present plays on stage crossing Hamlet and Macbeth.
Speaker 2: Wow, I mean, if those are genuine encodies, it's like
the Bible is some kind of ancient crystal ball.
Speaker 1: It's almost like that, right. And then there's this other
example with Saddam Hussein. Some people claim to have found
the phrases Russian missile and fire on third Shabbat intersecting
with his name. They say those phrases perfectly match the
actual date and the type of attack that happened on
January eighteenth, nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2: Russian missile, but didn't a rock attack Israel not Russia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but remember back then Iraq was using Soviet may
Scud missiles, so the phrase Russian missile could technically apply.
Speaker 2: Oh right, Okay, that makes sense. It's all starting to
sound a little too coincidental.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what this guy, Michael Drawsnen thought. He
was an investigative journalist, super skeptical at first. He went
to meet doctor Rips in the early nineties thinking he
might write an article debunking the whole Bible code thing.
But then he.
Speaker 2: Got hooked, so another skeptic turn believer. What changed his mind?
Speaker 1: Well, apparently doctor Rips showed him just how many potential
encoding messages there could be, like billions of them hidden
within the Old Testament.
Speaker 2: Billions. That's like an unfathomable amount of information.
Speaker 1: I know, imagine all the possibilities. Drawsenen ended up working
with rips and they claimed to have found, get this,
over a thousand instances of encoded predictions for all sorts
of events. Some of the examples are like really specific,
really like what okay? So they claim they found the
Apollo eleven moon landing, like the date July twenty, nineteen
sixty nine, and the words spaceship and Apollo eleven were
found like intersecting in a passage about counting the stars.
Speaker 2: That's incredible. What else?
Speaker 1: Okay? So how about the nineteen twenty nine stock market crash?
They found economic crisis crossing paths with depression stocks and
the year nineteen twenty nine.
Speaker 2: Wow? And what about events that really shook the world?
Speaker 1: Oh, there are those two. They claimed they found encoded
references to the Oklahoma City bombing, where Oklahoma supposedly crossed
with Mura. The name of the building that was bombed
and that intersected with his name was Timothy, referring to
Timothy McVeigh, the bomber.
Speaker 2: That's that's incredibly specific.
Speaker 1: I know. And then there's the Shoemaker Lavy comet that
crashed into Jupiter back in nineteen ninety four. They said
they found the comet's name intersecting with will pound Jupiter
and the exact date of the impact.
Speaker 2: It's like they had a cosmic calendar encoded in the Bible.
Speaker 1: And probably one of the most famous examples, they claimed
to have found the assassination of Yetzac Rabin encoded in
the text. Like they found Ribbon's name cross with assassin,
will assassinate and the date and.
Speaker 2: Hebrew didn't Drasnen claim he tried to warn Raven about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he said that he saw the prediction, trying to
warn Raven but was ignored. A truly tragic event. And
those are just a few examples. They also claimed to
have found the rise of Libya, the threat of nuclear war,
Benjamin Netanyahu's victory in the nineteen ninety six Israeli election.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of predictions. Did they talk about Princess
Diana's death too, They did.
Speaker 1: They said they found Princess Diana and Spencer, her maiden name,
all with the same skip code, and these words intersected
with Wales, Paris, France, tunnel, and river, along with the
Hebrew date for August nineteen ninety seven, the month she died.
Even the names of Dotie Fade and Honri Paul, who
were with her, were supposedly found later.
Speaker 2: It's like a never ending list, all these major events, tragedies,
triumphs supposedly predicted in this ancient text. Drosenen wrote a
whole book about it.
Speaker 1: Right he did. It was called The Bible Code. That book,
it became a huge bestseller, brought this whole idea into
the mainstream.
Speaker 2: I can imagine it must have really captured the public's imagination.
Speaker 1: It totally did, and the claims just kept coming. People
said they found encoded references to like everything, the fall
of Saddam Hussein, the capture of Osama bin Laden, both
Gulf Wars, the two thousand and eight financial crisis, swine
flew all sorts of natural disasters.
Speaker 2: So basically, if something major happen in recent history, someone
probably claimed it was predicted in the Bible Code.
Speaker 1: Pretty much. But Drasenen believed that like the real test
of the Bible Code wasn't in explaining the past, it
was in predicting the future.
Speaker 2: Makes sense, I guess, But how do you predict the
future with something written thousands of years ago.
Speaker 1: Well, he believed there was a key, a literal key
to unlocking future predictions. He thought it was hidden in
a stone obelisk located in Jordan near the Red.
Speaker 2: Sea, like an ancient art fact that unlocks the secrets
of the Bible code.
Speaker 1: That's pretty wild, I know, right, And get this, he
actually got tremission from the Jordanian government to excavate the site.
Speaker 2: Did they find any thing?
Speaker 1: Nop. At the last minute, the permission was revoked, so
that whole obelisk thing remains a mystery.
Speaker 2: To talk about, a cliffhanger. So Drasenen spent years trying
to decode the Bible predict the future. Did he ever
come up with like a grand theory about where these
codes came from? Oh?
Speaker 1: He did, but it got a little out there. He
started suggesting that Moses didn't actually meet God on Mount Sinai,
but rather he met aliens.
Speaker 2: Aliens really yep.
Speaker 1: He thought these aliens were super advanced and used some
kind of crazy computer technology to encode the Bible with
all possible future timelines.
Speaker 2: So the Bible code is actually an alien message.
Speaker 1: That's what Drawsen came to believe, and even After one
of his big predictions about a global catastrophe involving Jerusalem,
New York and beIN Lauden in two thousand and six
didn't happen, he was still convinced. He thought maybe he
just got the timing wrong. He spent like twenty five
years researching this, even learn Hebrew. But even some of
the people who initially supported the Bible code, they started
to have doubts about Drawsnen's prediction.
Speaker 2: Wait so even doctor Rips, the one who did the
Great Rabbis Experiment, he didn't agree with Drawsnen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Professor Rips became increasingly skeptical of Drawsnen's claims. He
still believed in the results of the Great Rabbis Experiment,
but he thought Drawsen was like seeing what he wanted to.
Speaker 2: See, like cherry picking data to fit his own narrative exactly.
Speaker 1: And you know rips work. Even the Great Rabbi's Experiment,
it wasn't without its critics. Back in nineteen ninety nine,
an Australian mathematician Brendan McKay published a whole critique of
the experiment, pointing out flaws in the methodology.
Speaker 2: Oh so, he was saying that maybe those results weren't
as statistically significant as they seemed, right.
Speaker 1: He said that the criteria for finding a match were
way too loose. For example, they could count a name
as a match even if the year of birth or
death was wrong, as long as the month and day
were correct.
Speaker 2: Oh, so it wasn't a perfect match, just kind of
close enough.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And he also pointed out that they used nicknames, titles,
even initials as matches and because ancient Hebrew doesn't have
vowels to give them a lot of like wiggle room
when searching for words, so you could.
Speaker 2: Kind of make the letters fit the words you were.
Speaker 1: Looking for exactly drawsnen. Of course, he dismissed all this criticism.
He even challenges critics to find similar predictions in Get this.
Speaker 2: Moby Dick, moby Dick the Whale book.
Speaker 1: Yep. He basically said, if you think this is so easy,
go find predictions in a random book.
Speaker 2: And did anyone take him up on that challenge? Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Brenda McKay, the same mathematician who criticized the experiment,
he took that challenge and ran with it. He supposedly
found multiple predictions of Yitzak Rabin's assassination in Moby Dick,
as well as the deaths of Princess Diana, Robert Kennedy,
and a bunch of other events.
Speaker 2: Wait, so he found those predictions in a book about
a whale.
Speaker 1: Yep. His point was, with a long enough text and
a flexible enough program, you can find pretty much anything
you want. It's like, if you look hard enough, you'll
find patterns even in randomness.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. So it's not necessarily the Bible especial.
It's just that it's a long and complex techx and
you can manipulate the search to find what you're looking
for exactly.
Speaker 1: Another point that krets brought up was that, well, the
modern Hebrew text we use today, it's not exactly the
same as the oldest ancient texts.
Speaker 2: Oh right, like the Dead Sea scrolls.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, those are some of the oldest surviving Biblical texts.
And even though they're mostly the same as the modern text,
there are small differences like spelling variations, maybe a letter
added or missing here and there, and those.
Speaker 2: Small differences they could totally mess.
Speaker 1: Up the skip code, right exactly if the code relies
on skipping a precise number of letters, even a single
missing or added letter could throw off the whole thing,
making the code like useless.
Speaker 2: So it's a pretty fragile system.
Speaker 1: Then it is. So after all this back and forth,
the debate still continues. Are these patterns we see in
the Bible are they really divine messages or maybe alien
programming like Drasenen believed. Or are they just random noise
that our brains are trying to make sense of.
Speaker 2: That's million dollar question right looking it's some kind of
hidden code? Or are we just really good at finding
patterns even where they don't exist?
Speaker 1: I mean, we humans, We love to find patterns. It's
like hardwired into our brains. We see faces in clouds, animals,
and star constellations. Maybe the Bible code is just another
example of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like peridolia, our tendency to perceive a specific, often
meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. Maybe
that's a play here.
Speaker 1: But even with all the criticism and skepticism, the idea
of a hitting code it's just so alluring. It's like,
what if there are secrets hidden in plain sight, secrets
about our past, our future waiting to be unlocked. It's
hard to resist that kind of mystery. There's even that quote,
it is the glory of God to conceal a matter,
and it is the honor of kings to search it out.
Speaker 2: That's from Proverbs, right. It really captures that human desire
to discover, to uncover the truth, no matter how hidden
it might be.
Speaker 1: It does, And you have to give Michael Drawsen credit.
He was dedicated, even learned Hebrew to pursue this reas search.
He spent a big chunk of his life trying to
crack this code.
Speaker 2: It's hard to argue with that level of commitment. And
who knows, Maybe somewhere out there that stone obelisk is
still waiting to be found, holding the key to everything.
Speaker 1: Maybe. But what if instead of thinking about the Bible
Code as like a fixed bluefrit of the future, we
see it as a collection of possibilities, like not a
definite prediction, but more like a weather forecast. It tells
you what might happen, but you can still choose to prepare,
maybe even change the outcome.
Speaker 2: So instead of a set destiny, it's more like a warning,
a heads up about potential dangerous challenges, maybe even opportunities.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and even if those predictions aren't like divinely inspired
or whatever. Maybe just being aware of them can help
us make better choices.
Speaker 2: It's like having a glimpse into a range of possible
futures and then trying to steer towards the best one.
It's a pretty empowering way to look at it. It is.
Speaker 1: It makes you wonder, what if everything is connected in
ways we don't even understand. What if those connections are
like subtly reflected in these ancient texts The Bible cog
might not give us all the answers, but it definitely
makes you think about the nature of information and the
power of belief, and just how much we still don't
know about well everything. It's definitely a mystery worth pondering.
What do you think? Is there something to this or
is it all just a coincidence.
Speaker 2: It's a fascinating puzzle, that's for sure. And even if
it turns out to be nothing more than our brains
trying to make sense of random patterns, it still makes
you think, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It totally does, And that's what we're all about here,
making you think, exploring the unknown and keeping you curious.