Today in History: Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville, was published on this day in 1851. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous. Its reputation as a "Great American Novel" was established only in the 20th century, after the centennial of its author's birth.
Twenty-five years ago, Michael Drosnin published the book The Bible Code, wherein he posits that Bible foretold the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin via messages encoded in Scripture. Critics of the “Bible Code” theories point out that if one has a substantially lengthy text, and he does enough computer searches, if he can go anywhere in any direction in the text, he can “find anything.”
In 1997, in response, Drosnin issued this challenge: “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in ‘Moby Dick’ I’ll believe them”
"Professor Brendan McKay, of the Department of Computer Science at Australian National University, accepted Drosnin’s challenge.Running computer searches similar to those employed by Drosnin, he scanned the text of Moby Dick. By the Drosnin/Jeffrey method, he was able to construct 'prophetic' messages foretelling the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, Indira Gandhi, Rene Moawad, Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King, Sirhan Sirhan, John F. Kennedy, and Princess Diana!" Source
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