True about the vowels.
allowing them to have that false "code" say anything they want.
And, this statement shows your ignorance of the process. Some of the best Hebrew scholars available are involved in asserting what the Hebrew says. If there is ambiguity, both options are given. There's rarely much ambiguity and it usually is over simply two common ways of saying something. When it's any change in meaning, both options are given and the reasoning for both are given.
You make it sound like a linguistic free-for-all. That's a deception and a lie. If your assertion were true, children learning Hebrew would take much longer--like Chinese Children learning their characters--at least 10 years.
I especially love the moronic hidden "code" about Rabin's assassination that the "code experts" found said, "Bang-bang Rabin."
I guess you've never had sufficient illustration of God's humor in the original languages of Scripture. Or perhaps, haughtiness is considered by you an aid to understanding.
As I've said many times, I think the Codes are part of God's fun period. And they are particularly part of God's fun with unbelievers but also with some believers. The foolishness of God is truly greater than the wisdom of man. And I've seen it more in the Code phenomena than ever before.
According to--it turns out--John's CRITERIA:
1st John 4:1 Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,
You can choose to ignore The Bible on this point, if you wish. But it's still an excellent SCRIPTURAL guideline, criteria.
And on this point, the Bible Codes are quite SCRIPTURALLY clear as they are QUITE SCRIPTURAL on all the points of basic doctrine.
This should be no surprise. How could anything such an inherently integral part of the cells and fibers of Scripture be any LESS??????!!!!!
I don't think God intended the Codes to be anything other than embellishment on His Majesty. They are certainly not necessary for Salvation though they have led some agnostic and Jewish scholars into a Saving knowledge of Jesus--another clue to their Authorship. I still think they are primarily God's fun and an added clue that men everywhere ought to believe--a slight added REASON, EVIDENCE for faith without 'forcing' faith.
You are certainly able to follow Paul in his 'kicking against the pricks' era, if you wish. I still wouldn't recommend it.
In due course, you will be proven even MORE ABUNDANTLY, exceedingly wrong. And there's no need of it. The evidence is already quite Biblicly thick in many respects.
But personally, I prefer to join God's evident fun with them. They are graphically beautiful in many cases. They are intellectually fun. And they are CERTAINLY SCRIPTURAL in an awesome, majestic way. Wonderously, they affirm Christ's words and the prophecies about Him. They affirm His deity.
And, they are just a kick to learn about.
Where can I get a quick introduction to the basics of Bible codes?
HERE: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/24
for answers to such essential questions as, “What are Bible codes?”, “What is an example of such a code in an English text?”, “Why have Bible codes been controversial?” and “For what people or events have proponents claimed there were clusters of Bible codes?”
Who Publishes Bible Code Digest?
The Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society was formed to conduct research of the Hebrew Bible for a variety of statistically-relevant anomalies, including encoded phrases and letter frequency variances. The Society publishes Bible Code Digest, an on-line newsletter, and a web site with news of the findings of its researchers and others in the field, and conducts seminars on the subject.
Who Heads Up Bible Code Digest?
HERE: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/27
For details about the people and behind the web site and newsletter.
If You Have a Basic Understanding of Bible Codes, and Want Bottom-Line Answers to the Key Questions, Read On
What has been the main response of skeptics to the claims of code proponents?
“Similar kinds of codes can be found in any book.”
Are the skeptics right?
Definitely not. All the skeptics showed was that very simple clusters of short codes can be found in any book. The examples they provided from Moby Dick and War and Peace were fairly comparable to many of the simpler published examples, but they are seriously out of date. Some proponents’ recently discovered clusters of Bible codes are so complex and extensive that they really couldn’t be a coincidence. The most extensive cluster of Bible codes found to date (the Isaiah 53 cluster) is vastly more complex and improbable than the most extensive cluster found in any book other than the Bible. There really is no comparison.
[QX NOTE: the original link resulted in mostly a blank page. This link results in a list of major code scholars and a detractor or 2].
HERE: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/26
What has been the main response of skeptics to the claims of code proponents?
“Similar kinds of codes can be found in any book.”
Are the skeptics right?
Definitely not. All the skeptics showed was that very simple clusters of short codes can be found in any book. The examples they provided from Moby Dick and War and Peace were fairly comparable to many of the simpler published examples, but they are seriously out of date. Some proponents’ recently discovered clusters of Bible codes are so complex and extensive that they really couldn’t be a coincidence. The most extensive cluster of Bible codes found to date (the Isaiah 53 cluster) is vastly more complex and improbable than the most extensive cluster found in any book other than the Bible. There really is no comparison.
[QX NOTE: The original link resulted in mostly a blank page. The following link is to a document about the later research study showing there’s really no comparison. I hope to post it as the 2nd doc after this one.]
Isn’t it true that there is no limit to the number of ELSs that can be found in the Bible?
Though very large, the total number of ELSs in the Hebrew Bible is actually quite limited. In fact, it is a bit less than 20.2 trillion. That’s in the same ballpark with the Gross National Product of the United States.
Couldn’t you find relevant ELSs about any topic if you looked long enough in any text?
It heavily depends on how long the ELSs are. If the ELS is eight or less letters long, it is almost certain we will find it somewhere within the Hebrew Bible at some skip. If it is 10 or more letters long, it is unlikely we will find it anywhere. And the longer it is, the more unlikely it is that we will find it anywhere. For example, if it is 15 letters long, the odds are 1 in 1.3 billion against finding it anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. If it is 20 letters long, the odds are 1 in 9,621 trillion against finding it anywhere. This is why the longest codes discovered are so exceedingly significant.
So what makes the difference between a coincidental and a highly improbable cluster?
The coincidental one will only have ELSs that are eight or fewer letters long. The highly improbable cluster will have a number of ELSs that are 10 or more letters long. The longer the ELSs the better, and the more long ELSs in the cluster the better. How close together or spread out the ELSs are is also a factor.
Is this distinction illustrated by comparing the Isaiah 53 and the Hanukah clusters?
Yes. Dramatically so, as detailed in our
[Qx note: the original link resulted in a blank page. The following link lists links to a number of different pages regarding the HANNUKAH CLUSTER]:
HERE: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/search.php
the Hanukah cluster only consists of seven ELSs and the longest one is seven letters long. The Isaiah 53 cluster includes over 1,200 ELSs and 19 of them are 10 or more letters long. The ten longest ELSs are 22, 21, 19, 19, 18, 17, 16, 16, 15, and 14 letters long, respectively. There is no comparison.
Couldn’t codes about Jesus have been embedded in the text after he lived?
No. The Hebrew Bible was completed between 100 and 400 years before Christ lived. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide copies of nearly all of the Hebrew Bible that date back to many decades before Jesus was born.
What clusters other than Isaiah 53 are significant?
Extensive clusters of ELSs about Christ have also been discovered in Psalms 21-23 and Proverbs 14-18 as well as sections of Genesis and Exodus. Highly improbable, though not as extensive, clusters have been discovered about the Holocaust in Genesis 8 and in three sections of Deuteronomy.
Are all codes real?
Certainly not. Many codes are just coincidental. A real code must be intentional. Some Bible code examples and phenomena are so improbable that chance should be ruled out as a reasonable explanation, and we should conclude that they were intentional.
How can you know for certain whether or not a particular code is intentional?
You can’t. There’s always some chance, however small, that the code could be coincidental. Like other codebreakers, Bible code analysts use statistics to help them evaluate codes. We can know “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that a given code was intentional if statistical analysis shows that the odds of its chance occurrence are extremely small (e.g., less than 1 in a trillion).
Can you know for certain that a code cluster is predominantly real?
Yes. If the odds of the combined cluster appearing by chance are extremely small (say, less than 1 in a trillion times a trillion), then chance should be ruled out.
Why would God give us codes we can’t understand?
That is an excellent question. Some of the codes we turn up are easily understood, but some of them -- especially the longer ones -- are difficult to interpret. In fact, we believe that some of them are imparting several unconnected thoughts.
After giving this a great deal of consideration, we have decided that since we are on the cutting edge of this research, we will simply not be able to comprehend a lot of what we find. Eventually, we (or other researchers) will be able to put it all together. The longer codes may be combined with numerics, three-dimensional ELSs, parallel codes, or other disciplines that have not yet been applied to them. In truth, the sky is the limit.
A fair comparison is the surface text of the Bible itself. To someone unfamiliar with it, the text is strange and incomprehensible. Parts of the book of Revelation, for instance, are difficult to understand even for those who read the Bible daily. And yet down through the centuries, researchers have unlocked the great truths of the Bible and how they all fit together.
And if the message of a code is mysterious, perhaps God wants us to focus on the existence of messages as opposed to their specific content.
Our philosophy is based on the Old Testament verse that reads, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter . . .” (Proverbs 25:2)
What major contribution have skeptics made to code research?
They have helped people to understand that if someone presents only a few short codes, all they have done is come up with something you could pull out of almost any book. That’s clearly worth knowing, for otherwise people might to jump from some simple code example to highly unwarranted conclusions. Such abuses should be avoided if at all possible.
What is your view of the statement by 55 mathematicians that there is no substance to the codes?
The petition signed by 55 professors was a statement of opinion based on their review of the state of Bible code research as of about 1997. Many findings have been made since then that are far more improbable than anything published at that time. Consequently, the petition is seriously out of date.
HERE: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/57
for more on this topic.
Do the codes have anything to do with Biblical numerology or kabbalah?
No. One kabbalistic device, the “cipher disk,” was adopted by cryptologists looking for a way to break codes in the middle ages of Europe. This forerunner to the German Enigma machine of World War II is the only connection between codes and the mystical offshoot of Judaism known as kabbalah. There is no direct connection between kabbalah and Bible codes.
Are abuses of the codes a good reason to dismiss the whole thing?
The Bible has often been misused. Is that a reason to reject it? Of course not. Various dubious code practices are analogous to the bad practice of quoting Bible verses out of context. The cure isn’t to throw the whole thing out, but to approach it correctly. Much education is needed. Over time, the difference between proper, in-depth research and naïve or self-serving misuse will become evident.
Can Bible codes be used to predict the future or to discover new truths?
No. Here are six reasons: 1) Codes are typically open to multiple interpretations since the text used has no vowels or syntax markings and Hebrew is a very terse language. 2) We often can’t be sure where spaces between words should be. 3) There is no assurance that the code(s) comprise the whole message. 4) It might just be a coincidence. 5) Clusters about different events could simply overlap, so how could we be certain that just because two codes were close to one another, they must be related. 6) Finally, copying errors by ancient scribes, or changes in spelling conventions, may have changed the spacing a bit, creating some unintended ELSs. If codes provided a message that contradicted the literal text, it would be foolish to accept its content as preferable—given all of the uncertainties just cited.
[QX NOTE: I think the above reasons are mostly chaff. I believe most codes are AS CRYPTIC AS SOME BIBLICAL SURFACE PROPHECIES ARE—and which have similarly been obscure and hard to decipher until after the event. I personally suspect there will be some Codes which will eventually predict things amazingly clearly and accurately. We shall see. But I don’t think that prediction is their purpose, per se. I still think they are primarily God having fun showing his TIMELESS POWER AND MAJESTY.]
What valid purpose(s) could Bible codes serve?
They could possibly serve as a source of authentication of the Bible—that it was written by an intelligence far greater than that of any human being—who knew the future when it was written. Codes could also serve as evidence in clarifying the meaning of various literal passages. For example, if something had been prophesied in a given passage, and there is uncertainty as to whether or not some subsequent event was a fulfillment of that prophecy, the existence of an extremely improbable cluster of codes about that event (or person) might serve as supporting evidence.
About Bible Codes: Medieval Beginnings
Bible code research is said to date back to at least the 12th century, when rabbinical scholars first wrote about discovering meaningful words hidden in the Hebrew text of the Torah.
Tradition among the most devout Jewish scholars holds that everything and everyone that ever was or ever will be was recorded in the text of the first five books of the Bible. Thus, as it was passed down letter by letter from God to Moses, then generation by generation to modern times, great care has been taken to preserve it intact. Rabbis encouraged caution in Torah copyists by reminding them that just one letter lost in their work could bring about the end of the world.
Only very slight changes have occurred in the original text over the 3,200 years since Moses first received it – a wonder that ranks among the great miracles of the ages. As the Torah was preserved by a miracle, so were the Jewish people, despite tremendous persecution and being without a homeland for 19 centuries.
The Father of Bible Code Research
It was during the last attempt to exterminate them as a race, the final solution of the Holocaust, that many credit with their restoration to the Promised Land. In the midst of this horrible time, Michael Ber Weissmandl (above), a Slovakian rabbi, continued his study of ancient writings by scholars who had found secret terms encoded in the Torah. But the Nazis were descending on his village, and the majority of his time was taken up with negotiating for the lives of people.
Rabbi Weissmandl, in fact, invented an outrageously bold scheme to ransom European Jews by bribing Nazi officials. The plan was workable, but no one could or would provide the $4 million the Germans demanded to save the lives of two million people, a mere $2 per person.
He himself was ultimately rounded up with his family and put on a death train to the camps. With him he took only a loaf of bread and three books, two copies of the Torah and a dusty commentary by a 13th century scholar mentioning the hidden codes. Alone, Weissmandl escaped the death train and eventually made his way to the U. S., where he was able to continue his research. And yet, he was tortured by grief. His devastating regret was that he had not been able to rescue even one of his children. He died of a broken heart in 1957.
Codes Move Into the Spotlight
Just a quarter of a century later, there was a fortuitous convergence of occurrences that were to move the codes from obscurity into the international spotlight. The war that brought death and devastation to so many lives also gave the world the most fiendishly clever code ever developed – Germany’s the Enigma Code. Breaking this code raised the study of statistics and probabilities to new heights, and brought about the invention of the computer.
Some time later, the advent of the personal computer made it possible to carry out searches for codes in seconds that had taken previously hours and even days to do. Researchers inspired by Weissmandl’s work, and using it as a starting point, began to develop the software necessary to perform these searches.
Thirdly, there was an awakening of faith among the brightest minds in Judaism. Previously atheistic or religiously disinterested scientists and intellectuals began to find themselves attracted to the most orthodox beliefs. As word of the codes spread around the world, many of these men began to devote themselves to study of the Torah and the unraveling of these codes.
Two of these scientists, a former physics graduate student, Doron Witztum, and a world-renowned mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, along with Yoav Rosenberg, an Israeli computer whiz, stunned the scientific world in 1994 with the publication of their paper on the codes in the journal Statistical Science.
The Great Sages Experiment
WRR’s Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis was based on the original work of Rabbi Weissmandl. It described the discovery of the encoded names of 34 notable figures, the Great Sages, in Jewish history, along with the dates of their birth or death, in the first book of the Bible, and the statistical significance of each code. Prior to its publication, the paper was reviewed by a panel of referees, a process that took years to complete. The referees found the math used to compile the probabilities to be ironclad.
Statistical Science courageously published the paper, if somewhat reluctantly because of the storm of controversy they were sure would result. In a statement in the same issue of the journal, editor Robert Kass wrote: “Our referees were baffled: their prior beliefs made them think the Book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks the effects persisted. The paper is thus offered to Statistical Science readers as a challenging puzzle.”
Books Bring Codes World Attention
Controversy indeed erupted, not only in the scientific community, but in the religious community, as well – among both Jews and Christians. Books were written about the phenomenon -- notably The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin and Cracking the Bible Code by Jeffrey Satinover -- that brought it to the attention of the world.
Christian researchers also began to locate codes in the Bible about Jesus Christ, and books were published about their findings, among them Yaacov Rambsel’s His Name is Jesus: The Mysterious Yeshua Codes and Grant Jeffrey’s The Signature of God.
Professor Barry Simon, chairman of the mathematics department at CalTech and an orthodox Jew himself, organized a statement disputing the codes that has been signed by Ph.Ds all over the world. An attack on the paper was launched by a group of scientists headed by Brendan McKay, Ph. D., a reader in the department of computer science at the Australia National University. Their rebuttal was published by Statistical Science in 1999, and WRR are reportedly working on a response.
Aish HaTorah, a Jerusalem-based organization that is dedicated to bringing secular Jews to a renewed faith in God through its Discovery Seminars, now uses the codes to help convince skeptical attendees, and has become one of the leading proponents of the science. In late 1996, the Wall Street Journal covered this approach by Aish
Scientists both Jewish and Christian all over the world are using computer software developed by WRR to search the scriptures for new codes and to compute their statistical significance, which in layman’s terms means whether or not they can be considered real. The International Torah Code Society (ITCS) has been formed, and held its first meeting in Jerusalem in 1999. Leading code researchers such as Robert Haralick, Ph.D., Boeing Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, presented new findings and works in progress to the group.
The Bible Code Digest was founded in 1999 to report on developments in the field of Bible code research, including the results of its own research. BCD maintains this web site and publishes a monthly e-newsletter for subscribers. Founder R. Edwin Sherman has written a fascinating book on the subject, Breakthrough: Encountering the Reality of the Bible Codes, which is available at no charge to subscribers to the Digest.
What Are Bible Codes?
The Bible Codes are perhaps the most compelling enigma in history. Within the past four years several best-selling books have claimed that Bible codes about 20th Century people and events were intentionally embedded in the Hebrew Bible when it was written many centuries ago.
The best known of these books are The Bible Code (Michael Drosnin), Cracking the Bible Code (Jeffrey Satinover, M.D.) and The Signature of God, The Handwriting of God and The Mysterious Bible Codes (all by Grant Jeffrey).
Bible Code Digest Subscribers Receive Objective Analysis of Published Codes
These books have caused a wave of controversy and, not surprisingly, resulted in sharply divided views on the validity of their claims.
Bible Code Digest takes clear exception to many of the opinions and findings of each of these recent authors. Subscribers to our Report receive notice of where these claims abandon objectivity, and our unbiased analysis of codes noted by these and other authors.
And as a bonus, subscribers receive news of codes discovered by our own research, presented with scientific objectivity.
How to Find Love in the Bible Codes
But just exactly what (you may be asking if you are new to this subject) are Bible Codes? They are equidistant letter sequences, or ELSs, that appear in the ancient Hebrew text of the book we know as the Bible.
It was the advent of the personal computer, like the one you are sitting at now, along with the development of software to find these hidden ELSs, that caused the explosion of interest in Bible Codes.
What does a typical ELS look like? Well, suppose we start with the sentence, "All of our avenues are wide." To locate an ELS in a sentence like this, we eliminate the spaces and look for words that could be formed from letters that are equally spaced within the string of letters that form the sentence.
If we start with the second letter (L) and then eliminate, or skip, three letters to pick up the next letter of the code (O), and so forth, we will find the word, LOVE within the string. Like this:
a L l o f O u r a V e n u E s a r e w i d e.
LOVE is an equidistant letter sequence (ELS). Such codes can have a skip of any length and can either be forward or backward.
So How Does This Apply to the Bible?
The first ELSs discovered were found in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, which were ostensibly written by Moses, the prophet who led his people out of Egypt.
More than 50 years ago, a Jewish rabbi (H.M.D. Weissmandel) noted that if you start with a T (tav) in the first verse of the book of Genesis, skip 50 letters, pick up a V (vav), skip another 50 letters, pick up an R (resh), skip another 50 letters, and pick up an H (heh), you have TVRH, or Torah as it is spelled in Hebrew.
Now this occurs, mind you, not only in the first book of the Torah, but also in the first verses of the books of Exodus and Numbers. It also appears in the first chapter of the book of Deuteronomy. In each case there is also a skip of exactly 50 letters.
Where the Codes Began to Attract Worldwide Attention
The discovery of these first Torah codes was not necessarily eyebrow-lifting, however. Any author, human or otherwise, could have intentionally embedded such codes within a text. What heightens eyebrows are codes, embedded, mind you, thousands of years ago, about contemporary people and events.
For example, Drosnin begins his book, The Bible Code, with a show-stopping claim: the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 was foretold by hidden Hebrew codes in the ancient text of the Bible.
What’s more, Drosnin also found the name of the assassin, Amir, as a code near the original ones, as well as a code which meant, "name of assassin." Furthermore, a code for Tel Aviv, the city where the shooting occurred was also discovered, as well as a code for the year when it occurred.
Keep Going . . . It Gets Better
Drosnin doesn't stop with the Rabin codes, however. He goes on to present numerous clusters of codes that would be astounding if only they were not coincidental.
Here is a sampler of codes that are displayed in crossword clusters:
Economic collapse, the depression, 1929 and stocks.
Atomic holocaust and 1945.
Watergate and "Who is he? President, but he was kicked out."
World War and atomic holocaust.
While all of these are bad events, Drosnin also presents a few positive clusters:
Wright brothers and airplane.
Shakespeare, presented on stage, Macbeth and Hamlet.
Newton and gravity.
Edison, electricity and light bulb.
Fall of, communism, Russian, in China next.
Bible Code Digest Research Helps You Distinguish Between the Valid Codes and the Questionable
Many intellectuals and scientists have attacked these claims as bogus, stating that you can find anything you want as a code and that other books must also contain similar codes.
On the other hand, both conservative Christians and Jews have expressed concerns that their beliefs (which are based on the literal text) may be challenged by findings that some might draw from the codes.
Currently published books present examples that run the gamut from those that are very likely to occur by chance to ones that are highly improbable. Unfortunately, none of these current authors make these critical distinctions.
Making such distinctions is one of the primary purposes of
BibleCodeDigest.com