Deciphering God's Plan

Deciphering God's Plan Excerpted from Time Magazine - June 9, 1997

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...

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.