Are there hidden messages in scripture buried in the Hebrew manuscripts? Over the past few months, much publicity has attended the supposed discovery of prophecies relating to modern events and political figures. Being keenly interested in the Bible, we must all begin wondering if there is anything to these advertised findings. Have we been getting only part of the message of scripture?
The discoveries are based on a form of statistical technique which Bro. Jack Robinson is qualified to evaluate as a professor of Statistics and with his long years of experience in using varied statistical tools to analyze masses of data. What follows is a carefully reasoned approach which again reassures us the Bible message is designed to be fully understood by the faithful heart desirous of pleasing God.
Although the plain text of conclusively affirms it is God’s inspired message designed to edify His servants (II Tim 3:16), The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin suggests scripture contains additional “messages” concealed until recently by complicated codes. Are these authentic messages or are they just another example of man’s misrepresentation of God’s word?
Varied reactions to the book
Drosnin’s book has attracted both serious attention and ridicule. Some “Christians” have embraced his and similar code discoveries as helpful apologetics, another “proof’ that the scriptures are inspired. While most “Christians” have ignored or dismissed Drosnin’s claims from lack of interest, others, fearing them to be misguided, have distanced themselves from what they believe is a misuse of sacred text for something akin to fortune telling.
The following comments seen on the Internet show the disdain some feel toward Drosnin’s book. “If this book was sold only in supermarket checkout lines, it would be seen for what it is — a journalistic hoax.”
“This book freaked me out. Now I know why I hate math and religion.”
An ancient idea
The allegation that secret messages lie hidden in the Hebrew text of scripture is not a new one. From medieval times men have been captivated with the feeling the Bible contains secret codes. Even Sir Isaac Newton, states Drosnin, had an interest in this topic.
Ancient commentaries on the book of Esther observe that although the divine name is absent from the plain text, it appears several times in coded form. The title, YHVH, is present four times as an acrostic, revealed in the first letter of consecutive words (Est. 1:20; 5:4; 5:13; 7:7). A second title, EHYH, i.e. “I AM,” forms a fifth acrostic (Est. 7:5). The novelty of this feature of the book of Esther does not appear to have been assessed objectively. Is it additional proof that Esther is divinely inspired or are similar acrostics scattered widely in the Hebrew text?
Design or coincidence?
It is no easy matter to distinguish between design and coincidence, and humans frequently confuse the two phenomena. Skeptics see coincidence in the organization of nature while the gullible see design in the serendipity of fortune telling. Men find it impossible to be entirely objective. A design to some men appears to others as random scratching. Yet the discovery of an unusual pattern may suggest design. Where do we draw the line between coincidence and providence? The recent code publications present the reader with this challenge.
Popular books on the Bible codes (see also The Signature of God by G. R. Jeffrey) indicate that cryptograms are everywhere when equidistant letter sequences (ELS) are used on the Hebrew text — the search technique currently in vogue for finding hidden “messages.” This unusual method can be traced back at least as far as a fourteenth century rabbi.
Using ELS
In this century, before computers were invented, Rabbi H. M. D. Weissmandel labored using ELS to discover coded words in the Hebrew scriptures. He found the Hebrew letters spelling “Torah” once each in Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In these four books the letters were spaced either 49 or 50 letters apart; interestingly, the word “torah” was not found in Leviticus. While Weissmandel expended much effort to make his discovery, it has become far easier to find coded words using ELS with today’s technology.
Briefly, the method is as follows: The Hebrew text is stripped of all its spaces and entered into a computer as a string of letters (Genesis becomes a string of 78,064 letters). To find a coded word, start with its first letter then skip a fixed number of letters repeatedly until the word is spelled out. If the word is not found, then repeat the search using longer skips or begin a new search at successive occurrences of the first starting letter.
Since most readers, the author included, have a limited knowledge of Hebrew, the ELS procedure will be illustrated with English text. The text of the second sentence of the previous paragraph, stripped of spaces becomes:
tofindacodedwordstartwithitsfirstletterthenskipafixednumberoflettersrepeatedlyuntilthewordisspelledout. To find the word “now,” locate the first letter “n,” skip three letters stopping at “o,” then three more stopping at “w.” The word “now” has been found using an ELS with a skip of three.
An alternate way to uncover “now” is to group the letters four at a time, in rows to construct a word search puzzle:
tofi
ndac
oded
word
The above figure is a useful display since the coded word “now” appears vertically in the first column and is easy to spot. Note also the word “odd” appears in the second column by coincidence (it resulted from skipping three letters twice, starting at the first “o”). Since two coded words have been found using ELS, an interpretation can be put forward using the “methodology” of “The Bible Code.” Consider “now that’s odd” as a possible meaning for the pair of codes “discovered” using ELS with a skip of three.
As you can now see, it was easy to discover two short words using ELS in the text This kind of result is to be expected since the text of scripture, or any book for that matter, contains the alphabet many times over Thus, by repeated trial and error, short “messages” will be found in any sufficiently long rearranged text Yet as the word you search for becomes longer, the chances of find-mg that word decrease
Dangers of this approach
When ELS is used, what you discover is simply what you were looking for (now) as well as possible bonus words (odd) that may also appear at the same ELS Thousands of arrays were likely scrutinized, but only those that seemed interesting and plausible to Drosnin were presented in his book.
When studying the plain text of scripture, a selective search for support of a preconceived idea can give misleading results This method of Bible study can easily wrest a false idea from God’s word (II Peter 3 16) Surely when a few coded words are used instead of the plain text, this selective approach presents an even greater opportunity for misunderstanding “God’s message” in the resulting interpretation.
Consider that most code discoveries involve a series of words, often only a pair If the words look interesting, the association and context can be subjected to interpretation (compare II Peter 1 20) In spite of billions, perhaps trillions, of searches no researcher has yet presented an extended message equivalent to a paragraph or chapter of the plain text If God has actually coded grammatical messages below the surface of the text, then it seems obvious that man’s present decoding skills are still very primitive, only capable of uncovering a word here or there Predictions using only the meager portion of “His message” that has been “decoded” are tentative at best
Moby Dick meets the challenge
With this in mind consider again Drosnin’s book Drosnin’s discovery of a coded “prophecy” of Rabin’s assassination (the eight Hebrew letters for Yitzhak Rabin were found using an ELS with a skip of 4771 letters), is the “highlight” of his book So much so that he is reported to have said “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I’ll believe them”
Since encrypted codes of assassinations have now been found in Moby Dick (including Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Indira Gandhi and Yitzhak Rabin), Drosnin’s prediction of Rabin’s assassinations can now be seen for what it was, merely a fluke When he first discovered Bible codes, he could possibly have been excused for thinking they were unique Now it seems that his codes are nothing more than results from a giant word search of scrambled scripture text — child’s play being passed off as design, not coincidence.
Tabloid material
Yet even in his book, Drosnin makes it obvious his findings are tabloid material When the prediction for an atomic holocaust of Israel in 1996 failed he conveniently found the word “delayed” (three letter code) near his original prediction.
One of Drosnin’s chief mentors, Eliyahu Rips (who has approached the ELS question more scientifically — but that’s another story) has categorically stated the codes cannot be used to tell the future. Rips’ colleague, D. Witztum, even made the discovery of a Torah code that Churchill would be assassinated. Still another researcher reported finding the phrase “Jesus is the False Messiah” several times. In other words, you are likely to find codes for whatever you set your mind to discover. It is just fun and games (word-search) with a scrambled sacred text.
Conclusion
It seems obvious the contemporary Bible codes that have been discovered are distortions of God’s word. They are useless for prophecy and if they were profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and for instruction in righteousness, surely Paul would have made it obvious to the godly reader (II Tim. 3:16).
(Those with access to the Internet should try: http ://cs.anu. edu. au/ —bdm/dilugim/moby.html)
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One