History
As far as is known, the 13th-century Spanish Rabbi Bachya Ben Asher was the first to describe an ELS in the Bible. His 4-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Jewish calendar. Over the following centuries there are some hints that the ELS technique was known, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by the Slovakian Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known only to a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of an Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partner Doron Witztum and several others.
Rips and Witztum invented the ELS letter array and used a computer to find many examples. About 1985 they decided to carry out a formal test and the great rabbis experiment was born. This experiment tested the hypothesis that ELSs for the names of famous rabbis could be found closer to ELSs of their dates of birth and death than chance alone could explain. The definition of "close" was very complicated, but roughly two ELSs are close if they can be displayed together in a small rectangle. The experimental result suggested very strongly that the Bible codes phenomenon was real.
The great rabbis experiment went through several iterations but was eventually (1994) published in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. Although neither the Editor nor the referees were convinced by it, neither could they find much wrong with it, so the paper was published as a "challenging puzzle".
Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none of them were published in journals. Another successful experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places (rather than dates) of the famous rabbis, was conducted by Harold Gans, an employee of the United States National Security Agency.
The Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries. Drosnin's most famous success was to predict the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, allegedly using the Bible code. Opponents claim that in the political atmosphere of the time, predicting the fact that Rabin would be assassinated with no additional details is hardly impressive. In 2003, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject.
Practice of the Bible codes also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, a "Messianic Jew" (or a Jew that believes Jesus was the Messiah) and Grant Jeffrey. By 2000, most books and most web sites devoted to the codes were produced by Christians.
