'For 3,000 years a secret code in the Bible has remained hidden. Now it has been unlocked by computer - and it may reveal the future.'
This was the start of a series of articles in The Daily Mail, running from May 28-30, giving extracts from a book by journalist Michael Drosnin called The Bible Code (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson).
The code works by writing out all the words in the Old Testament in a line then picking every fifth (or ninth or 264th etc.) letter. The picked letters are then set out in rows - different lengths of rows are tried - then a computer is asked to find certain combinations of letters, such as 'Clinton', in among the rows, columns or diagonals. The claim is that if you look near these various names, you can find other words or dates which have special links with them. There is also a claim that this does not work with any book other than the Bible.
