Bible Code II

Penguin Books

Chapter One

At 8:48 A.M. on September 11, 2001 I was awakened by the sound of an explosion that changed the world forever.

I turned on my clock radio and heard a news bulletin-a jumbo jet had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.

I ran up to my roof just in time to see a second Boeing 767 fly right into the second of the Twin Towers, setting it ablaze. It was obviously no accident. The two planes had been hijacked by terrorists. New York was under attack.

For more than an hour I stood alone on my roof and watched with increasing horror and disbelief as those two 110-story buildings, the silver monoliths that loomed over Lower Manhattan where I live, continued to burn, shooting giant orange flames out of the gaping holes, spewing huge plumes of black smoke up into the sky.

Suddenly, one of the towers collapsed. It just fell straight down. And then the second tower also imploded. They both disappeared in a cloud of dust that rushed up the street right toward me. In an instant they were gone.

My mind could not take in the scale of the destruction my eyes had seen. It was on a scale only captured in Biblical prophecy.

I ran down from the roof and immediately searched the ancient code on my computer, the Bible code. It was the one place I might find confirmation of the full danger, and a revelation of what was yet to come.

The hidden code, discovered in the Bible by a famous Israeli mathematician, had already revealed other world-shaking events that took place thousands of years after the Bible was written.

Now it revealed the entire event I had just witnessed. What I watched from my roof only minutes earlier, was there in detail on my computer screen in ancient Hebrew characters.

"Twin Towers" was encoded in the 3000-year-old text. "Airplane" appeared in exactly the same place. "It caused to fall, knocked down" crossed "airplane" and "towers."

What I saw happen with my own eyes on September 11, 2001 was encoded in the Bible 3000 years ago.

As I watched it all happen, I had only one thought, and when the first tower fell I said it out loud-"Oh my God, it's real."

It was not this terrorist attack that really shook me. It was what the Bible code predicted was yet to come.

It had already predicted the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Yitzhak Rabin. Everything from World War II to Watergate, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, from the Moon landing to the Gulf War, had been foreseen. Sometimes the predictions were found in advance, and the events happened exactly as predicted.

And now every detail of September 11 was there, too. Suddenly, brutally, I had absolute proof that the Bible code was real.

So when the planes slammed into the towers, as I watched the horror begin to unfold, I also saw visions of a future too terrible to imagine, but clearly foretold in the code. And suddenly, it all seemed totally plausible.

For five years I had been warning world leaders that an ancient prophecy was about to come true, that the Apocalypse foretold by all the West's three major religions was encoded in the Bible, that we might face the real Armageddon-a nuclear World War starting with an act of terrorism in the Middle East-within a decade. But I could not fully believe it myself.

President Clinton had my book with him at Camp David, and my letter warning him that we faced a war in the Holy Land that could engulf the entire world.

"I hesitate to state it in detail, because it sounds so Apocalyptic," I told Clinton, holding something back even as I warned him. I could not bring myself to tell the President the world might come to an end.

Yet just within the past year I had finally told the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Israel, and the leader of the Palestinians that according to the Bible code we were already in the ultimate time of danger, the End of Days.

I had sat with Yasir Arafat in his embattled headquarters in Ramallah, and with Shimon Peres in Tel Aviv, and with Ariel Sharon's son in Jerusalem, and with Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff in the White House, and told them all that we might have only five years left to save the world.

But no one would heed the warning.

Just the day before the September 11 attack I had talked to the White House again to see if the new President, George W. Bush, had received a letter I sent him, warning that we might face World War III while he was in office.

My letter to Bush, sent more than a month before Arab terrorists struck New York and Washington, stated:

"Now the Bible code warns that the world may face its ultimate danger-a nuclear World War starting in the Middle East-while you are in office.

"This critical moment was without doubt clearly foreseen.

"'Bush,' 'Arafat,' and 'Sharon' are all encoded together by name in the Bible with the time of danger long foretold by all three major Western religions-the 'End of Days.'

"And the Bible code clearly states the danger in modern terms-'atomic holocaust' and 'World War' are both encoded in the Bible. And both are encoded with the same year, 2006."

On September 11 the President himself said that we were at war, that the "first war of the twenty-first century has begun." And a column in the New York Times was headlined "WORLD WAR III."

But until September 11 I never entirely believed it myself. I am not religious. I don't believe in God. I'm a secular, skeptical investigative reporter. I started out on the night police beat at the Washington Post, I covered corporate news at the Wall Street Journal, and I still have a flat-footed sense of reality. So although I wrote a book that made the Bible code known to the world, I woke up every morning doubting the danger was real.

On the morning of September 11 I was awakened by the event that proved it real.

Suddenly there was no room for doubt. It wasn't just Israel, it was the United States, it was New York. It was the city where I lived. It was just down the block. And I saw it happen with my own eyes.

The attack on New York, the attack on the World Trade Center, this unbelievable horror was not only encoded in the Bible-I had actually seen it in advance.

I had found it in 1993, right after the failed terrorist attack on the same two towers. "Twin Towers" was encoded in the Bible with "the warning, the slaughter," and that was crossed by "terror." "Terror" appeared a second time, and "it will fall, collapse" was also encoded twice.

But I assumed it was about the past, not the future. It never occurred to me that lightning would strike twice-that there would be another terrorist attack on the same two monoliths eight years later, that it would succeed, and knock both towers down.

And I never thought to look in the code for "airplane." As I explained to a friend at the CIA later that day, "No one could have imagined it would be done that way." "Someone did," he said.

After it happened, the warning was clear. It had been hidden in the Bible for 3000 years. Now it was obvious. Every detail was there.

The scientist who discovered the Bible code, Eliyahu Rips, found the same extraordinary code table on September 11 at his home in Jerusalem, and e-mailed it to me from Israel.

When I spoke to Dr. Rips, one of the world's leading authorities in group theory, a field of math that underlies quantum physics, he told me that he had calculated the odds.

The odds against the three key words-"twin" and "towers" and "airplane"-all appearing together in exactly the same place in the Bible, the odds against it happening by chance, were at least 10,000 to 1.

There was more. Osama bin Laden was named in the Bible code. Rips had found a single code sequence that declared him guilty-"the sin, the crime of bin Laden"-and it appeared in Genesis where the plain text told of "the city and the tower."

Also, in the same place, the original words of the Bible stated, "They saw the smoke rising above the land like the smoke of a furnace."

The leader of the hijackers, the pilot of the first plane that hit the towers, Mohammed Atta, was also identified.

"Terrorist Atta" was encoded in the Bible, and "Egyptian man" appeared in the same place.

There was another target, the headquarters of the American military in Washington. The Pentagon was struck by a third hijacked plane an hour after the first attack in New York. That, too, was encoded.

"Pentagon" appeared once in the Bible, crossed by "damaged." Again, the prediction in the 3000 year old text was exact. One of the five sides of the Pentagon had fallen, but the building itself still stood.

"Emergency" appeared with "Pentagon," immediately followed by "from Arabia." In fact, it was learned in the next few days that most of the terrorists had come from Saudi Arabia.

The warning of the greatest terrorist attack in the history of the world, of the first foreign attack on mainland America in modern times, had been encoded in the Bible for 3000 years. But we had missed it, until it was too late.

And now the code warned that it would.

Continues...
Excerpted from Bible Code IIby Michael Drosnin Copyright © 2003 by Michael Drosnin. Excerpted by permission.
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