JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ible societies
bis and dates were actually discovered. Barry Simon writes,
“…the complexity of the experiment suggests that the result
may be sensitive to changes of the method of measuring distances
and the statistical method used” (http://www.wopr.
com/biblecodes/). Simon, along with others, have used the
Bible Codes system to discover rabbis’ names and other word
sets in both English and Hebrew texts other than the Bible.
Bible
Jewish Bible scholars, such as Menachem Cohen of the Hebrew
University (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/cohen_
eng.html), and Christian Bible scholars, such as Richard Taylor
(Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, December
2000), of the Dallas Theological Seminary, have been very
critical of the Bible Codes. Taylor writes, “…most important,
I do not believe that the real issues in this discussion actually
lie in the discipline of mathematical probability. Bible code advocates
have based much of their theory upon arguments from
statistical probability. However, the Bible code phenomenon
is ultimately an issue of Old Testament textual criticism, and
no amount of statistical probability or mathematical speculation
can alter that fact. Any Bible code theory that plays loose
with known facts concerning the transmission of the Biblical
text is working with an inherent flaw that is actually fatal to
its claims and conclusions” (ibid.). Put simply, the Koren edition
of the Bible is in no way the “authoritative” text of the
Bible, for there is none. For instance, there are variant spellings
of words throughout the bible that appear in the Aleppo
Codex, the Leningrad manuscript, the Sassoon Manuscript,
and the original printing of the Mikra’ot Gedolot in Venice.
These variant spellings, along with other textual phenomena
in the Bible, such as ketiv and qeri, certainly affect the results
of a code based on equal distances between letters. Taylor
sums it up by saying, “If there are significant textual problems
in the Hebrew Bible – whether in the form of pluses, or
minuses, or substitutions, etc. – such a problem causes a fatal
disaster for any theory of ELS, even if it were theoretically
possible to allow for such a phenomenon in the non-extant
original text” (ibid.).
Education
The only Jewish organization that is actively using the Bible
Codes as part of their educational curriculum is *Aish HaTorah.
A lesson about the Bible Codes is included in their Discovery
seminars, the purpose of which is to prove the Divine
origin of the Torah. An active defense of the Codes and their
use is found on their website (http://www.aish.com/seminars/
discovery/Codes/codes.htm#prime). Many Jewish educators
object to the use of the Codes, especially in teaching those who
are relatively uninformed about Judaism (the target population
of the Discovery Seminars), given the debate surrounding
the validity of the Codes themselves.
In recent times, numerous people have written books
purportedly predicting future events on the basis of the Codes,
particularly Michael Drosnin (The Bible Code, 1997, and The
Bible Code 2, 2002). Such works have been rejected by both
sides of the scholarly debate. It is interesting to note that a
Google search of “Bible Codes” reveals 990,000 related websites,
the overwhelming majority of which are Christian sites.
The Christian community has eagerly accepted the Bible
Codes while the broader Jewish community has expressed
a greater skepticism. Bible Codes computer programs can
be purchased so consumers can run their own Bible Code
searches.
Bibliography: E. Rips, D. Witztum, and Y. Rosenberg, in:
Statistical Science 9:3 (1994), 429–-38; D. Witztum, at: http://www.torahcodes.co.il/;
B. McKay et. al., at: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html;
B. Simon, at: http://www.wopr.com/biblecodes/; M.
Cohen, at: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/cohen_eng.html; R.
Taylor, in: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (Dec. 2000);
http://www.aish.com/seminars/discovery/Codes/codes.htm#prime;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code; D. Thomas, in: Skeptical Inquirer
(Mar.–Apr. 1998); idem, in: ibid. (Mar.–Apr. 2003).
[David Derovan (2nd ed.)]
BIBLE SOCIETIES, associations intended to propagate the
Christian Bible, i.e., the Old and New Testaments. The first
association of this kind was founded in 1719 in Halle an der
Saale, and from 1775 was called the Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt.
Numerous Bible societies were founded from the beginning of
the 19th century in the wake of the missionary societies established
between 1792 and 1800 in England, Holland, and Germany.
The British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in
1804, the Bible Society of Basle in 1804, that of Berlin in 1805,
Holland in 1814, Norway in 1815, the American Bible Society
in 1816, and the Société Biblique de Paris in 1818. Other important
societies are the American Board of Commissioners
for Foreign Missions, the American and Foreign Bible Society,
the Baptist Missionary Society, the Bible Translation Society,
the Church Missionary Society, the National Bible Society of
Scotland, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,
and the Trinitarian Bible Society. In general, these societies
publish the biblical texts without commentaries, but they have
also issued emended texts of existing translations and editions.
They have also published the Greek and Latin editions
of Nestlé (1879), Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica (1905; the Bible Society
of Wuerttemberg), and the Bible du Centenaire (1916–48;
Société Biblique de Paris). Photographic reproductions of the
British and Foreign Bible Society Hebrew Bible have been issued
in various formats by some Jewish publishers. The masoretic
Bible of C.D. *Ginsburg was published by the same society
in 1926 in London.
Bibles published by these societies are disseminated by
the mission societies or by large-scale retailing. Since the beginning
of the 19th century, over a thousand million copies
of biblical texts in over a thousand languages have been thus
published and distributed. The British and Foreign Bible Society
alone has published texts in 700 languages and dialects
and distributed a total of 550,000,000 copies, 130,000,000
of which were of the Old Testament. In a single year before
World War II, this society distributed 11,000,000 copies of
680 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3