By any reasonable definition, The Torah (which, when translated into English, makes up the first 5 books of The Old Testament for Christians) is of enormous importance. Tradition has it, that it was written by Moses and also that it was written in a divinely inspired way that buried within it whole layers of meaning.

The idea of divine origin for The Torah has led to computer analysis of it and claims that it can be used as an oracle (to predict future events) and, naturally, has also led to a best selling book (The Bible Code) for those who like their divination done in Hebrew. If you really want to investigate this claim, then you can buy the software, learn Hebrew and test it out yourself. Good luck to you. I’ve decided not to bother. I thought French was too hard and that didn’t involve a whole new alphabet

Firstly, take the gullible view that the Bible Codes are foretelling the future, then you can get the bad news right off the web without any need to fracture your software budget.

Here’s what was predicted in 2004:

• December 2005 – big earthquake (it didn’t say where, but er.. I don’t remember one).
• 2006: an absolutely terrible year with a world war breaking out (I seem to have missed that one).
• There are no specific end of days entries between 2006 and 2010 so I’m assuming there’s an R&R period before things get wild.
• In 2010, expect Iran and America to be destroyed by holocaust (try moving to Switzerland, but Argentina may also be attractive).
• After 2010 comes 2012; Day of Judgement. Bad news, I’m afraid. Think, before you start building that fall-out shelter – I can find no reference to 12 ft of concrete being proof against a Day of Judgement. You may as well line up with the rest of us.

Or alternatively, why not simply conclude that it’s all bunk on the basis of it getting 2005 and 2006 completely wrong.

There are Google pages full of web sites that give more credence to Bigfoot than to the Bible Codes. Reading the strained attempt to make a Bible Code pattern match an event (that has already happened) puts one in mind of the Nostradamus fans. (The 3 brothers must be the Kennedys because, er, there were four of them).

The Bible Code idea is that something divine (God, Angel or whatever) buried hints of future events in text created by taking equidistant spaces between letters. Sounds unlikely to me. (Surely geometric progressions or progressions of prime numbers or Fibonacci series is equally valid). How many patterns can you generate that way? Think of a very large number.

Skeptics have played a similar game of prediction using Moby Dick and found predictions of, for example, the assassination of Indira Ghandi. I prefer Moby Dick as the source for predictions, myself, on the grounds that at least it’s written in English, so no need to learn a foreign language. Also there’s no end of days in Moby Dick, and the whale lives to fight another day.

Now it’s also possible that something divine (God, Angel or whatever) also inspired Moby Dick, but did so on the sly without any PR. I think so. It allows me to argue that it’s more up-to-date and therefore its lack of end of days proves that the future has been rewritten to provide a more positive ending for us all.