This is part two of a documentary on the History Channel about the Bible Code -- a continuation of part one, The Bible Code: Predicting Armageddon, which apparently isn't listed the same way in IMDb, but can be found under "History's Mysteries."
The premise behind both films is that a hidden Code exists in the Torah, (the first five books of the old Testament) that tells of past, present and current events. That this code was thought to be in the Torah for centuries, and that only when the computer became available that professor Eliyahu Rips, a brilliant mathematician, discovered how to search the code. Then comes the various skeptics to debunk the Code, finding similar "codes" in everything from War and Peace to Moby Dick.
It is almost impossible to produce a documentary that will receive distribution without containing some sensational aspects -- end of the world, atomic holocaust, and so forth. This film suffers from that fact. There do seem to be Codes in the Bible, but the filmmakers didn't explore dual searches on the same topic in the Torah and a Hebrew edition of Moby Dick, for example -- side by side. That would have been revealing. Also, whether or not such searches are accurate are now being taken through various experiments to obtain their statistical significance. When this film was made, there wasn't nearly as much information available.
Professor Rips does not believe in using the Bible to predict the future. Although the original writer of the first mainstream book "The Bible Code," (author Michael Drosnin) hit the jackpot when he found the codes that Yitzhak Rabin will be assassinated, today much more stringent requirements are mandated to insure that the codes being found are significant. A new documentary needs to be forthcoming, and I believe it is already in production.
The premise behind both films is that a hidden Code exists in the Torah, (the first five books of the old Testament) that tells of past, present and current events. That this code was thought to be in the Torah for centuries, and that only when the computer became available that professor Eliyahu Rips, a brilliant mathematician, discovered how to search the code. Then comes the various skeptics to debunk the Code, finding similar "codes" in everything from War and Peace to Moby Dick.
It is almost impossible to produce a documentary that will receive distribution without containing some sensational aspects -- end of the world, atomic holocaust, and so forth. This film suffers from that fact. There do seem to be Codes in the Bible, but the filmmakers didn't explore dual searches on the same topic in the Torah and a Hebrew edition of Moby Dick, for example -- side by side. That would have been revealing. Also, whether or not such searches are accurate are now being taken through various experiments to obtain their statistical significance. When this film was made, there wasn't nearly as much information available.
Professor Rips does not believe in using the Bible to predict the future. Although the original writer of the first mainstream book "The Bible Code," (author Michael Drosnin) hit the jackpot when he found the codes that Yitzhak Rabin will be assassinated, today much more stringent requirements are mandated to insure that the codes being found are significant. A new documentary needs to be forthcoming, and I believe it is already in production.
