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that within the cacophony of biblical voices lies a single prose masterpiece that, in the editing process, had been fractured into what we know as the Old Testament. Our Bible is anything but a letter-by-letter transcription from ancient Hebrew. Ronald Hendel adds: “We do not have the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament, and all ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible that we do have differ in the number of letters.” Most biblical scholars now believe that the Torah was written by more than one individual, thus accounting for the different styles, the two different creation stories in Genesis, and other inconsistencies, and that there was a “redactor,” or editor, who coalesced the multiple writings into one tome. Biblical archaeologist Gerald Larue also notes that even allegedly original biblical documents are anything but—quotes may be from memory or a compilation of several sources, errors are faithfully reproduced from one manuscript to another, and Hebrew letters look enough alike that names and words can be easily confused with others that are similar. Concern for accuracy and preserving the original text of the Bible came nearly 1,500 years after the originals were dictated (itself an oral tradition known for generating inaccuracies). All of these problems undermine the belief that the Torah was written by Moses, as inspired by God. Without this foundation, the Bible as an encrypted code of prophecies falls apart, and with it the claim that it provides evidentiary proof of God’s existence.

5.

The Translation Problem. In reading Drosnin’s book in English, it is reasonable to wonder what we are losing in the translation from Hebrew. Ronald Hendel points out that the phrase “assassin that will assassinate” near Rabin’s name is more properly translated as “murderer who murders inadvertently.” Can you have an inadvertent assassination? Hendel identifies other translation howlers by Drosnin: “After the death of Abraham” (Genesis 25:11) is rendered as “after the death (of) Prime Minister”; “[Jacob] set it up as a standing stone” (Genesis 31:45) is rendered as “shooting from the military post”; and “Which she [Rebekah] has made” (Genesis 27:17) is rendered as “fire, earthquake.”

6.

The Prediction–Free Will Problem. In The Bible Code Drosnin tells the dramatic story that he tried to warn Rabin a year before his assassination. In his claim that the Bible Code predicts such future events, Drosnin has unknowingly wedged himself into an insoluble paradox. Consider the implications: Say Rabin took the warning seriously and changed his schedule and was not assassinated. Would this mean that humans are more powerful than God, or that some statistician can rerun the universe to produce a different outcome? Does this mean that biblical prophecies are self-fulfilling prophecies, or that they are not prophecies at all, but warnings? Drosnin tries to solve this problem through an awkward blend of pop-science, pseudoscience, and hand-waving that is typical of most of the modern arguments for God. In his last chapter—“The Final Days”—Drosnin says the Bible Code predicts that the end of the world will occur in 2000, or 2006, or it will be delayed until a later date, or it might not happen at all. Some prediction! He gets around this problem by applying chaos theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Feynman’s quantum physics: “There isn’t just one real future, there are many possible futures.” In fact, he concludes, “the Bible Code revealed each of them.” None of this works. Remarkably, after 178 pages of breathtaking revelations about biblical prophecies, Drosnin confesses that the Bible does not actually predict anything: “It is not a promise of divine salvation. It is not a threat of inevitable doom. It is just information.” Even Rips has cut the tether in a public statement: “I do not support Mr. Drosnin’s work on the codes, or the conclusions he derives. I did witness in 1994 Mr. Drosnin ‘predict’ the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. For me, it was a catalyst to ask whether we can, from a scientific