HAVE you noticed how doomsayers are getting more sophisticated nowadays ? The man who used to parade in the city centre, with a billboard warning us to repent as “the End is Nigh”, has now been replaced by a computer expert who has delved into the Bible and deduced that 2006 is the human deadline.

Should he be dismissed as nonchalantly as we ignore the man with the billboards; or, bearing in mind that some of his “proofs” appear astonishingly powerful, should we listen more carefully?

This is particularly pressing for Jews, as this is the time of the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashannah), a moment of reflection about how we have behaved in the past and how we intend to spend the next 12 months. Moreover, it is our own Hebrew texts that are being quoted at us — although, as it is a universal doom that is predicted, others might also wish to take note too.

The warnings come from Michael Drosnin, who stumbled upon what has become known as The Bible Code when he met an Israeli mathematician, Eli Rips.

Using a computer to sift through different combinations of Hebrew letters in the Bible, they detected references to later events that were unearthed through a variety of skip codes, eg, reading every fifth letter or tracing letters diagonally. Examples include Shakespeare writing Macbeth, the Great Depression occuring in 1929, Hitler conducting mass slaughter, and Nixon being undermined by Watergate.

However, all these occurred long before Drosnin began his research, and it is relatively easy to hunt for names and events, and then seek to match them together. Proving the past is not too difficult; it is much harder to predict the future. There is one such instance: Drosnin claims that he found evidence that the Israeli Prime Minister would be assassinated, and that he warned him in advance. Fourteen months later, Rabin was indeed murdered, and when Drosnin went back to the Bible, he found the name of his assassin, Amir. It is as if the Bible is a giant cryptogram set by God, except that the message is not designed for us to while away our leisure but is crucial to human history.

So, with 2006 being the time of Armageddon, according to Drosnin’s decoding technique, is it time to start taking the Bible more seriously and begin repenting?

Those of a nervous disposition can relax. The idea of a skip code in the Bible is nothing new. The rabbis long ago noticed that by taking a letter at the beginning of Genesis, jumping the next 50, and the next 50 and so on, you could produce the word torah (teaching); but they regarded this as an intellectual pastime, not a divine nudge.

Take every second letter of the word “Kennedy”. Does this prove that two brothers will come to a grisly “e-n-d”, or does it show that you can read into things anything you want, especially if you already know what you are looking for?

The supposed Rabin encoding proves nothing. In the wake of Sadat’s assassination and the multiple attempts on King Hussein, Rabin was always a potential target. Moreover, no date was given, and the assassin’s identity was only “discovered” afterwards. In fact, the idea of predicting events centuries ahead is doubly at variance with biblical prophecy. First, prophecy was immediate. Isaiah, Jeremiah and others spoke to their listeners about their own time. None could verify an invasion by the Assyrians predicted for hundreds of years later — or even care about it — but one next spring would excite attention.

Secondly, biblical prophecy was always conditional. If you act in this way, disaster will befall you; alter your course and mercy will be dispensed. The prophets tried to change human behaviour, not foretell what lay ahead. This highlights another problem with The Bible Code. What is the point of telling us what will occur? If it is inevitable, all we can do is panic. Moreover, what sort of deity does the book suggest? A God who plays hide-and-seek, who gave hints to Moses about Hitler that were irrelevant to the desert leader, and only came to light long after the Führer’s victims had been turned to ashes.

There are also technical objections to the code: much depends on the text today being exactly the same as the original text, which is questionable, while the method of transliterating into Hebrew names such as Shakespeare is debatable.

But if The Bible Code begins to seem harmless nonsense, it introduces other dangers. By asserting that the secrets of God are evident from the scriptural text, it implies that the exact text is of divine origin. This panders to a highly conservative understanding of the Bible, which endorses attitudes that many would consider no longer appropriate, such as promoting the death penalty and describing homosexuality as an abomination.

It is perfectly possible to argue that the Bible is a marriage between the human and the divine: God’s revelation and Man’s perception — with us today having to distinguish between the two. But not if every single letter comes from heaven. Another objection is that those making fanciful claims for the Bible not only degrade it, but distract us from its real value. At its best, the Bible provides guidance on how to live in the immediate present. It throws out the challenge: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and urges us to “Love your neighbour as yourself”. It gives warning about living on the edge of destruction, but offers rainbows of hope.

Back in the 10th century, the Babylonian rabbi Saadiah Gaon cautioned that “one of the main causes of irreligion is the ridiculous arguments advanced in favour of religion”.

As Jews greet the new year, it is only natural to wonder what the future holds; but rather than pore over skip codes, we are better off following the demands of Jewish tradition: the simple yet daunting task of improving on last year’s personal performance.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain is minister of Maidenhead Synagogue