The Real History of the End of the World (35 page)

Reading through some of the thousands of articles that were printed over the time of the siege, two things stand out. The first is that David Koresh did not seem to be eager to die for his beliefs. He put off surrendering over and over, but he never seems to have said that he wouldn't do it eventually. The other thing is that the most inflammatory comments that suggested that the Davidians were a suicide cult came from Marc Braeult, who had led the effort to break up the cult. He might very well have been giving an accurate account about everything that happened but, with Koresh and his most loyal followers dead, we'll never know.

1
John R. Hall, Phillip D. Schuyler, and Sylvaine Trinh,
Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe and Japan
(London: Routledge, 2000), 47.

2
Ronald Lawson, “Seventh-Day Adventist Responses to Branch Davidian Notoriety: Patterns of Diversity within a Sect Reducing Tension with Society,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
34, no. 3 (1995): 330.

3
The Symbolic Code,
10, no. 2 (Waco TX: Davidians, 1954). Available at
www.davidiansda.org/v10sc2.htm
. Accessed November 2009.

4
V. T. Houteff, “Tract No. 3: The Judgment and the Harvest” (np, 1934). Available at
www.davidiansda.org/tract_no3.htm
. Accessed November 2009.

5
George W. Reid, “The Branch Davidians/Shepherd's Rod—Who Are They?”
The Adventist Review
(1993). Available at
www.adventistbiblicalresearch.org/Independent%20Ministries/branchdavidians.htm
. Accessed July 2009.

6
Marc Breault, “Some Background on the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Movement from 1955 to the Early Part of 1991,” paper presented at the Biblical Research Institute General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventist, May 1991. Available at
www.adventistbiblicalresearch.org/Independent%20Ministries/branchdavidian.htm
. Accessed November 2009. As someone who at the time was eager to discredit the Branch Davidians, his testimony on some aspects of the organization needs to be corroborated. However, on the early stages of the organization, his comments seem to agree with Houteff 's philosophy.

7
Kenneth Samples, Ervin de Castro, Richard Abanes, and Robert Lyle,
Prophets of the Apocalypse: David Koresh & Other American Messiahs
(Grand Rapids MI: Baker Books, 1994), 40. This is also a book based on interviews with former Davidians.

8
Hall et al., 47.

9
Breault
.

10
Tim Madigan and Mede Nix,
The San Francisco Chronicle,
March 1, 1993.

11
“Cult Leader Says He'll Surrender,”
Chicago Tribune,
March 2, 1993.

12
Mary Jordan and Sue Anne Pressley, “Gruesome Contest to Raise the Dead Led to Koresh's Takeover of Cult,”
Washington Post,
March 7, 1993.

13
The New York Times
, April 7, 1993.

Now that computer programs are widely available to help
nearly anyone “mine” available data, there are wonderful new
possibilities for discovering misleading patterns.

—Professor Robert E. Kass,
Statistical Science
(1999)

 

 

 

 

I
n 1994 a paper was published in the journal
Statistical Science.
The authors, Wiztzum, Rips, and Rosenberg (hereafter WRR), proposed the startling idea that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, contained sequences of letters that, when arranged in a matrix, produced connected word groups that foretold major events.
¹
Well, actually, the first paper just said that the authors had found the names and dates of a number of famous rabbis linked closely in the book of Genesis.

The article attracted some interest among statisticians, but little more, until a journalist named Michael Drosnin became interested and wrote a best-selling book called
The Bible Code.
This was when the code began to be considered prophetic, including giving the date for the end of the world.

In reading the first article of WRR, it seemed to me that there were a number of problems with the theory. First of all, it entailed taking out all punctuation and laying out all the letters in order but as if wrapped around a cylinder. The authors state, “We may think of the two vertical edges of the array as pasted together, with the end of the first line pasted to the beginning of the second, the end of the second pasted to the third and so on. We thus get a cylinder on which the text spirals down in one long line.”
²
Okay, not the way most people read the Bible, but statisticians like to make things more interesting.

Having set up a two-dimensional grid, they then began by fixing the parameters for pairings. They decided that the letters had to be no more than a certain distance apart for a correlation to be noticed, but the words could go in any direction: backward, forward, or diagonally. Then they put in the names of famous rabbis through time, up to the present. Most of them appeared on the grid along with birth and/or death dates. Here is where I had another problem. The authors used a number of variations on the names of the rabbis such as alternate spellings and names, Moses, Maimonides and Rambam, for instance, are all names for the same person.
³
It seems to me that this would increase the chances of getting hits. Also, Hebrew numbers are also letters so one could simply decide arbitrarily to make a letter a number and vice versa.

Other statements that confused me included the authors' use of Yiddish names for some of the rabbis. These are written in Hebrew characters so that part is all right, but why use Yiddish? Every rabbi would have had a perfectly good Hebrew name as well. Wouldn't the Bible have used that? Yiddish wasn't a language until the thirteenth century at the earliest. WRR also programmed in several possible ways of writing dates. This makes the chances even better for one of them to show up in the grid. Added to this is the fact that Hebrew, like Arabic, doesn't usually include the vowels in its written form. One is supposed to understand words from context. However, when the context is taken out, groups of letters can have a wide range of vowels inserted to create words, thereby giving a wide range of possibilities. So, it would be odd if they weren't able to come up with names, dates, and events.

I have seen a couple of the television documentaries on the Bible Code, and they didn't mention any of the finer points illustrated in the article. I did hear that the fact that the authors had been published in a respected scientific journal gave their findings more credibility.

There's a problem with this, too. The editor of the journal
Statistical Science
was upset enough with the outside reaction to the theories of WRR that, in 1999, he wrote a piece explaining why he had accepted the paper. While the reviewers and editorial board had not found “anything amazing” in the paper, what intrigued them was “the difficulty of pinpointing the cause, presumed to be some flaw in their procedure that produced such apparently remarkable findings.”
⁴
In his original introduction, the editor had only called it “a challenging puzzle.”
⁵

The disclaimer was followed by a paper from several statisticians, three of them from Israel, who thought they had discovered the flaw.

Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai (MNHK) took a hard look at the variables and concluded that they were too inexact. Choices for words to enter into the program were not as random as WRR thought. Some of the dates that had appeared in the grid matched their list, but turned out to be the wrong ones. But MNHK reserved most of their disputes for the methodology of WRR.

MNHK tried the control test that WRR used for their calculations. They entered a list of rabbis, slightly different from the one that WRR used, into the Hebrew Book of Genesis and also into a Hebrew translation of
War and Peace.
WRR had also used
War and Peace
as a control and found no correlations. In the MNHK experiment, the connections on the Tolstoy grid were phenomenally close. The ones for Genesis were negligible.
⁶

Now, the same argument could be made for the second study, that it was biased and the data skewed, even unconsciously. However, MNHK followed this study with several more, using the same parameters, as far as possible, as WRR had done. The results still did not show any surprising connections in the texts. They tried the other four books of the Torah and found no correlations in them, either. The most important thing is that the independent readers who refereed the paper were all satisfied that MNHK had found the flaw in the work of WRR and explained it satisfactorily.

There is one other problem with the Bible Code. Which Bible? Today there is a standard text but in the beginning there were many variations on the Torah. Some added words or passages; some used different words. In the finds at Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls) several copies of the first five books of the Bible were found. Each one was slightly different. “[T]he Qumran scriptural scrolls . . . are characterized by extreme fluidity; they often differ not just from the customary wording but also, when the same book is attested by several manuscripts, among themselves.”
⁷
None of these changes significantly affect the sense of the text, but when the text is torn apart and put on a cylinder to predict the future, there will be different answers according to the text used. The Bible used by Samaritans to this day is based on one of these variations.
⁸
Have the Bible Code scholars tried using that version?

What bothers me the most about the Bible Code is the same thing that makes me uneasy about other biblical interpretations. It presupposes that all of history has been only a buildup to the grand appearance of us. I know the ways of God are mysterious and strange, but why would he have secret messages put into Genesis that could be found only by someone with a computer and too much spare time? Didn't he care about all the other generations? Apart from all the statistical objections, it just seems extremely arrogant to assume that we are the only ones who deserve to know the “secrets.”

1
Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis,”
Statistical Science
9, no. 3 (1994): 429-438.

2
Witztum et al., 430.

3
Witztum et al., 431.

4
Robert E. Kass, “Introduction to ‘Solving the Bible Code Puzzle' by Brendan McKay. Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai,”
Statistical Science
14, no. 2 (1999): 149.

5
Ibid.

6
Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai, “Solving the Bible Code Puzzle,”
Statistical Science
14, no. 2 (1999): 197.

7
Geza Vermes,
The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English,
rpt. ed. (New York: Allen Lane/ Penguin, 1997), 16.

8
Magnar Kartveit,
The Origin of the Samaritans
(Leiden: Brill, 2009), 259-309.

Evangelical leaders have declared that support for Israel has
moved to the very top of their agenda. Christian groups are
spending millions on everything from armored school buses
for Israeli children to halogen lights for the army's emergency-rescue
service. There are e-mail chains, prayer ministries and
grassroots efforts to get the word out that the U.S. must stand
united with its ally in the war on terror.

—Nancy Gibbs,
Time
magazine (2002)
¹

 

 

 

 

O
ne of the tenets of dispensationalist Christianity is the conviction that the Jews must return to their homeland before the end of the world can get started. This is an ancient belief that began with Paul's letter to the Romans in which he insists that Israel is not lost irrevocably and will one day be saved (Romans 12:25-26). In the Middle Ages this was used as a reason for allowing a “remnant” of Israel to live in Europe. If there were no Jews left to return to Jerusalem, then Jesus would not return. However, since the Church didn't want the Parousia right away, they made sure that Jews were allowed to live, even if they were not given the rights of citizens. And when Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders in 1099, one of the first proclamations was that no Jews could enter the city. The general feeling was, the Apocalypse could come, but not yet.

Things changed in the seventeenth century when many Protestants were looking forward to the millennium. It was the Puritan millenarian Oliver Cromwell who finally readmitted the Jews into England 350 years after they had been expelled. Cromwell, along with the Fifth Monarchists, subscribed to the idea that until the Jews returned to Jerusalem, Christ would not return. However, England under Cromwell was seen as the New Jerusalem. The Jews were readmitted in 1656 and, by 1657 had a synagogue and cemetery in London.
²
This situation did not change with the Restoration of the monarchy.

Eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestley wrote an open letter to the Jews, telling them to prepare for the time of returning to Israel under a ruler from the house of David.
³
Priestley was eager for things to get going.

In early-nineteenth-century America, there was much insistence that the new nation was, like England, under the Protectorate, God's country. We're used to that expression, but they
really
meant it. And the New Jerusalem could not be established in America unless the Jews were converted first. “We should remember,” the Worchester County Jews Society newsletter stated, “that the conversion and restoration of the Jews are most intimately connected with those glorious Millennial scenes, toward which the promises of Jehovah are now directing the eyes and hearts of his people.”
⁴
The society, by the way, was not made up of Jews, but of Christians eager to convert them.