Thanks for the info Mike, like I had mentioned I hadn't really looked at it other than a cursory viewing. As far as the Kaballah it seems that it is closely tied with many forms of occultism. Here is an overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah
as far as the accuracy of the bible codes it is questionable at best as demonstrated here:
Criticism
The primary objection advanced against Bible codes of the Drosnin variety is that
information theory does not prohibit noise from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, similar patterns can be found in books other than the Bible. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words are completely expected to appear.
Drosnin has been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future.
[7] Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community,
[8] mistranslating Hebrew words
[4] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes.
[9]
Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as
Moby Dick could not yield ELS, Australian mathematician
Brendan McKay found many ELS letter arrays in
Moby Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive ("Oslo", relating to the
Oslo accords).
[10] Drosnin has responded to these claims, saying that Moby Dick code results are simply "nonsense"; he said codes found in the Bible Code were "truth" and contained real predictions.
[11]
Other people, such as US physicist
Dave Thomas, found other examples in many texts. In addition, Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew
orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate
i and
u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his
television series John Safran vs God,
Australian television personality
John Safran worked successfully with McKay to look for evidence of the
September 11 terrorist attacks on
New York in the lyrics of
Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, the known coded references in Bible texts, as for instance the famous
Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (eg, misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text.
Code proponents respond by claiming that the ELS letter arrays appearing in the Bible are better in some way than those appearing in other books. They also investigate alternative types of codes and cyphers to stay ahead of criticism. However, in the absence of an objective measure of quality, and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.
In 1999, McKay, together with mathematicians
Dror Bar-Natan and
Gil Kalai, and psychologist
Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in
Statistical Science which they claim provides an adequate refutation of the earlier paper of Witztum and Rips. The paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians who found their refutation completely conclusive.
Their main points were:
- The data used by Witztum and Rips was a list of rabbi names in Hebrew. The Hebrew language is somewhat flexible as far as name spelling goes, and each rabbi has several different appellations (aliases and nicknames), so special care should be taken as to how to choose the particular names searched for. So their result could be explained by claiming the data was not collected properly. From the paper: "...the data was very far from [being] tightly defined by the rules of their experiment. Rather, there was enormous "wiggle room" available, especially in the choice of names for the famous rabbis".
- There is indirect evidence that the data were not, in fact, collected properly; that is, the choice of names and spellings was somehow biased towards those supporting the codes hypothesis.
- Attempts at replicating the experiment, while being similar in the large, failed to achieve the exactly same results to the last digit. From the paper: "A technical problem that gave us some difficulty is that WRR have been unable to provide us with their original computer programs. Neither the two programs distributed by WRR, nor our own independent implementations of the algorithm as described in WRR's papers, consistently produce the exact distances listed [by WRR]".
The McKay paper did not go so far as to accuse Witzum and Rips of falsifying their experiment, instead it argues that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations. This fact, when combined with available wiggle room, was exploited by McKay et al. to duplicate the Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace.