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Bible Codes: Less than Meets the Eye
David Brown
Hidden "messages" have been found in the Hebrew text of the Bible at least as early as the 1950’s, so the idea is not altogether new. Nevertheless the publication of such books as Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code, published in 1997, has brought it into public attention.
The "Bible Code" or "Torah Code" phenomenon is based on the observation that if one counts off certain numbers of letters in the Hebrew Bible, words can be found "embedded" in the text. To see how this works, consider the following embedded message in English:
It is Best not to gEt carried aWay with appArent but unReal messagEs.
If you starting with the first "B" and count off every 11 letters (ignoring spaces and punctuation) you find the word B-E-W-A-R-E.
Another way to think of this is to arrange the letters of a text in a grid, after the fashion of a "Word Search" puzzle, and look for words and phrases reading up, down, backwards forwards or across any diagonal. We could arrange our example as follows:
ItisBestno
ttogEtcarr
iedaWaywit
HappArentb
utunRealme
ssagEs****
Note that letters in a word need not be adjacent as long as they are equally spaced, since it is really only the "skip sequence" (the number of letters counted off) that matters. The words "ewe" and "lye" can be found in the block above:
ItisBestno
ttogEtcarr
iedaWaywit
happArentb
utunRealme
ssagEs****
Which could, after all, be arranged as:
ItisBestnottogEtcarrie
DaWaywithappArentbutun
RealmessagEs**********
Drosnin’s book is based on the work of Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips, who created special computer software specifically for this purpose of finding these "codes."
The software works by counting its way through the Hebrew text scanning for keywords. (The keyword is any word or phrase the researcher wants to find – Yitzhak Rabin, for example, or Bill Clinton) If it finds a match, (and it almost always does) the surrounding block of letters is displayed. Words and phrases in the vicinity of the keyword are supposed to reveal things "locked up" in the text by Providence to await their discovery in the 20th century, when computers made it possible to look for them.
Drosnin opens his book with a text in which the name "Yitzhak Rabin" (the Israeli Prime Minister who was assassinated in 1995) is embedded. Drosnin makes it out to be highly significant that this name happens to intersect a Bible verse referring to murder. In the following pages he reveals how the name of the assassin, the date and the city are all "encoded" within the Hebrew text.
It is easy to be misled by the illusion of design in these random patterns. It seems counterintuitive that so many meaningful phrases should occur together merely by chance. In actuality, however, given a large enough text, any number of possible "words" and "phrases" are likely to occur by chance. Even a very small sample can produce intriguing results for a persistent searcher. Here’s an example from a recent newspaper article:
G17LEWINSKYAFORMERWHITEHOUSEINTERNWHOTUR
NED25ONJULY23HASMOVEDASTEPCLOSERTOACHERI
SHEDGOALFORMYBIRTHDAYLEWINSKYHADTOLDHERF
AMILYIWANTMYLIFEBACK********************
Now surely (heavy sarcasm) the appearance of the word "sorry" so close to the name "Lewinsky" is a hidden prophecy of the president’s historic confession (the article was written at least two weeks before)!
But remember that Biblical Hebrew is written with consonants alone. This greatly increases the number of times that random combinations of letters will happen to spell words. I decided to simulate this effect by removing the vowels from the same sample text. Dozens of real words (minus vowels) began to leap out of the page:
GLWNSKYFR
MRWHTHSNT
RNWHTRND2
5NJLY23HS
MVDSTPCLS
RTCHRSHDG
LFRMYBRTH
DYLWNSKYH
DTLDHRFML
YWNTMYLFB
CK*******
In this block we can find:
- MR WHITEHOUSE
- TOUCHER
- COME IN
- HELD
- DO STOP
- SHAME
- SIN
- SAD
- WHY
- MR P (MR PRESIDENT?)
- FEMALE
- TOLD
- LAW
- BARS
- SHOWN
- TV
(Has God has been moonlighting for the Associated Press . . .)
Of course, not all of the words seemed as appropriate to the theme. It’s so easy to find words this way, that I found quite a few throwaways:
- TURN WHITE
- SENATOR
- TEACHER
- LEARN
- CLASS
- DULUTH
- FOCUS
- NEW HAT
- NEW HOUSE
- GOLF
- GREW LOTS
- DINER
- DETAILED
- RENEW
- FIND
- HOLD
- WELTS
- NEW LEG
- CLOSER TO CHRIS
- SORT
- MARKET
- THESE ROADS
- LOAFER
- FOR MY BRAT
- FOR MY BREATH
- FOR MY BIRTH
- WILEY
- SNOW
- THAW
- TREND
- NO VOTE
- JERK (Maybe these last two fit the "theme" after all, but my grid is already too crowded!)
- WORM
But this is part of the problem with this whole idea. There are so many words you can use; the chances of finding something that fits are always good. There are also plenty of leftovers, so how can you possibly know which message the text is really trying to communicate? It’s as though someone were to send you a letter and cut into pieces, then throw in pieces of three or four other letters besides. How could you ever to piece together the original message with any confidence?
Using the same block of Hebrew text featured in Drosnin’s Rabin sample, I found the following Hebrew phrases:
- From the sons of Levi
- You longed for a turtle
- In the water
- A river
- A sea in the sea
- To the sons
- The smelling of kinds
- The hornet
- I will send
- I will do
- The boycott or "ban"
- You will build
- The blemish of Balam
- The soldier (crosses the word "fear")
- Generous
- Joined
- The cow
- In Nellie’s hand
- The one who repels
- To build a shadow of fear
- This time
- Denali
- Why?
- We shall compel
- An innocent voice in the stones
- Christian
- A letter jar
- He will give every day
- The hand of his people
- In July
- Write like a dead woman to their turtle
- Arad
- Barfy
- Bobby
- I have a Bible and a pacifier
- Saltzman
- If only . . .
I could go on, but this should suffice to show that you could concoct any prophecy you want this way. If all of this can be derived from this small sample, imagine what can be done with a text as long as the entire Hebrew Bible!
The word-search effect actually seems to work even better in Hebrew, perhaps owing to such facts as the following: 1) Hebrew is written with only 22 letters 2) Hebrew words tend to be short 3) The same sequence of letters can often be read three or four different ways. 4) The same word can often be written in two or more different ways.
Dangers
Could God have inserted messages in the text this way? Yes, of course he could have. He could spell out His plan for your day every morning in your Alpha-Bits, if it served His purpose, but that doesn't mean that he has or that he will. We must be very careful about putting words in the mouth of God. (See Deuteronomy 19:20) It seems to me that the "Bible Code" is a form of divination no better than opening a Bible at random and taking whatever you find as the answer to your question. In effect it turns the Bible into a kind of Ouija board, and that is not God's way. (See Deuteronomy 18:14)
Drosnin found the name "Amir" of (Rabin’s assassin) spelled backwards near the place where Rabin’s name intersected a reference to murder. But what if someone had tried to identify the assassin based on the Bible Codes alone? Anyone named Hartzman, Butler, Zellner, Rind, Crum or Crumb would also have been suspect, since all these names, among others, are also "encoded" in that vicinity. First names are conveniently provided as well – I see Tim and Tom and Larry and Bambi, to name a few. I even found my own name – David – directly astraddle the word "assassin"! (GULP!) The surname "Barak" crosses the phrase "who will assassinate." What if your name happened to be "David Barak" and you lived in a state that took these "prophecies" seriously? Would you be convicted without a trial? After all, it was all coded in the Bible thousands of years ago . . .
Illusions
- You tend to find what you’re looking for. For example, Drosnin’s block of text relating to Hitler (p. 40) highlights several phrases that relate to that theme, but ignores everything else embedded there. Why does it say "pleasant aroma" across Hitler’s name?
- The English words are usually longer than their Hebrew equivalents. This is significant, because the shorter the word, the higher the probability that it can appear by chance. "Saddam" is only three letters in Hebrew, and "Hussein" is only four, so finding these names is not as impressive as it seems at first. "President" is a fairly long word in English, but the Hebrew word is only four letters long. "Prime Minister" looks like a long phrase in English, but in Hebrew a three-letter abbreviation will serve.
- The Hebrew equivalent of the English words "in", "to", "from", "and", "as", "the" and "that" are represented with single letters, making it very easy to find "phrases" in the random text. Other single letters can extend a short word by changing person tense or gender. Of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, at least 11 of them can be used in at least one of these ways, so once you’ve found a simple word, the likelihood that it can be extended into a phrase are better than 50%.
- No matter how you rearrange the grid, there is always one path through it that represents the sequence of original text of the Bible, so there is always at least one path from which extended phrases can be lifted. All the longer texts in The Bible Code are taken from the plain text of the Bible.
- Dates are represented in Hebrew with letters of the alphabet. "The 4th of Tevet" is the equivalent of a four-letter word in Hebrew. Any year of the Jewish calendar from creation to the present can be represented with four or fewer ordinary Hebrew letters. It is actually very easy to find "date" sequences scattered throughout the random blocks of text. For example, where Drosnin identifies a "great earthquake" to take place in the year 2000, one can also find the date 1941! On page 155 we are told that the earth is to be annihilated in the year 2012, but the dates 1942, 1951 and 2030 are also "encoded"!
- Without an explicit context, it is left to imagination what to make of any words found. Page 133 shows "Ariel" and "World War." The author has identified Ariel with Jerusalem, but how do you know it isn’t referring to an individual of that name? Page 139 shows what he identifies as "Great Earthquake" along with the year 5760 (=2000), but the 3-letter word he reads as "Earthquake" is also the common word for "noise." How do you know it doesn’t just mean a "big noise" in the year 2000? (By the way, the year 2000 here is also only 3 letters in Hebrew)
Conclusion
I’m willing to give the codemongers the benefit of the doubt as far as their sincerity goes, but it is evident that the "codes" are not as significant as they appear at first glance. The likelihood of a genuine message being contained this way is so remote, and the potential for abuse so great, that I cannot recommend taking "Bible Codes" or code-based prophecies as being of divine origin.
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