6. Some Intriguing Observations (2)

Illustration #1: The “Bible Codes”

In 1997 the world was shocked by claims of American journalist Michael Drosnin[2] that he had found coded messages in the Hebrew text of the Torah. These alleged codes correctly described events that have happened in the past, and also predicted events yet in the future. His most famous claim was to link Yitzak Rabin to the Bible codes. He claimed that in 1994 he had discovered a code predicting the assassination of Israel’s prime minister, Yitzak Rabin, that took place in 1995. 

The principle of this Bible code, called by some the Torah code is to take the original Hebrew texts and form words with letters that are a certain fixed distance apart. Taken together, these “Equidistant Letter Sequences” (ELS) spell out events from the past or the future. Using computer programs, Drosnin (as others before him) searched Hebrew texts with various “skips” (distances between letters) for meaningful words and/or sentences. The skips could be well over multiple hundreds (or even thousands) of letters and in a forward or backward direction.  If something meaningful was discovered, the same text would be searched for words that would relate to the topic. For instance, a famous discovery are the so called the Holocaust codes.[3] These are a cluster of words in ELS, spelling names and events from WWII and the Jewish Holocaust, mostly in the book of Deuteronomy. Of course, these are “western” words, but spelled phonetically in Hebrew.

Some Words in the Holocaust Code Cluster
Encoded name	ELS interval	Beginning of ELS
Hitler	skip 22, reading right to left	Deuteronomy 10:17
Auschwitz	skip 13, reading left to right	Deuteronomy 10:21
Holocaust	skip 50, reading right to left	Deuteronomy 31:16
Crematorium for my sons	skip 134, reading right to left	Deuteronomy 31:28
The Fuhrer	skip 5, reading right to left	Deuteronomy 32:50
King of the Nazis	skip 246, reading left to right	Deuteronomy 33:16
Eichmann	skip 9670, reading right to left	Deuteronomy 32:52
Mein Kampf	skip 9832, reading right to left	Numbers 19:13
Genocide	skip 22, reading left to right	Deuteronomy 33:21

Table 27- 1 : The "Bible Codes" in the Holocaust Cluster

Ever since the initial publication of Drosnin’s book, a wave of followers has embraced the concept and a flood of critics has disputed the conclusion. This discussion is still on-going.

Analysis of the phenomena:

• Bible codes are possibly significant. They show and claim clear messages that seem beyond simple coincidence, as confirmed by various mathematicians.[4] However, it should also be noted that after initial support for the codes by renowned mathematicians, enthusiasm seems to have subsided, some now claim the codes are merely coincidence and that they can also be found in other books such as Moby Dick and War and Peace. If this were so, it would not make the code unique to the Bible. This claim continues to be disputed by numerous supporters of the ELS codes.
• The Bible codes are clearly not added intentionally.
• Apart from chance versus design, a serious objection concerns the preservation of the original text. Yes, the texts have been accurately preserved over the last 3,500 years or so since the Torah was written. Although these are the first written books of the Bible, they are also likely the closest to any original text of any book in the Bible. Yet they are not exactly identical to the original text. We know – from the Dead Sea Scrolls – that some textual variations have slipped in over the centuries. We can have very high confidence that the content of the message is still as it was first intended, but there are variations in the spellings of words. Likely other words were added to or deleted from the original text written by Moses and others. This creates a serious problem for the claim that the ELS codes in our current text were put there by God Himself.
• A final consideration is that the original texts of the Torah were written in ancient Hebrew. This did not incorporate vowels as only consonants were used in a twenty two letter alphabet. Vowels were added later, around 900 AD by the Masorete scribes. Original pronunciations of most names and even many regular Hebrew words in the Torah have likely been lost and were reintroduced by the Masoretes at the inclusion of their vowel system during their copying of the Scriptures.

Genesis	Exodus	Leviticus	Numbers	Deuteronomy
TORH à	TORH à	YHWH	ßHROT	ß HROT