[The Loan Arranger]

Bad news for the Moral Relativism Crowd.

[Zeroisanumber]

Bravo Sierra. If God were to put "proof" of his existance in the Bible, then why not give something unequivical such as "The Sun is a Star", or "E=MC[squared]"? Why would the greatest being in existence bother to play obscure number games which only appear in Hebrew?

In any event, why would you want concrete proof for the existance of God? Wouldn't that totally invalidate the concept of faith?

[D Edmund Joaquin]

. Isaiah 53 proved to be a rich cluster of hidden messages, containing 42 encoded statements relating to Jesus' death, resurrection and ascension, far more than his baseline predicted.

Note the number 42. 42 months in Jesus' ministry, 42 sojourns in the desert, (Numbers 33), 42 children eaten by the bears when they told Elisha to "go up!" Great stuff!

[Aeronaut]

Ivan Panin

[sasportas]

More Bible code baloney. Nothing new, the occult has been dabbling with numerology and gematria (Kabbalah) for hundreds of years. The only difference is now they have computers.

Kabbalist mystics claim the words we read in our bibles are only for the stupid, these elites, however, claim to know what these words REALLY mean. Each letter is equivalent to a number, hence when Moses gave the Torah, it was for the elite among them, the Kabbalists, to decipher the code. An esoteric science.

The Torah doesn't mean what it appears to mean on the surface, with numerology the words of the Torah can be made to mean anything - anything the numeric "experts" want it to mean. Its all in the eye of the beholder.

Not me, I choose to believe Moses was not writing some sort of esoteric code. The word of God means what it appears to mean.

One doesn't need mystic numerology to prove God, millions of ordinary people through the centuries have come to faith by taking the words of the bible at face value. The Apostle Paul often quoted from the Torah in the New Testament, nowhere does he try to prove the existence of God, or prove any point by telling us, "Now if you will use numerics on this quotation you will find out the true meaning."

[D Edmund Joaquin]

The earthly things are just the blueprints

Heb 8:5

Who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses was admonished of God when he was about to make the tabernacle: for, See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.

Heb 10:1

For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year * * continually * * make the comers thereunto perfect.

[Grut]

Hm. Didn't Carl Sagan write a novel where the infinitely tiny numbers far to the right of the decimal point in pi 'prove' the existence of God? Fiddley kind of God, if so.

[AmericaUnited]

All of this ELS code business has been disproved.

This is a great read on the subject - Code Breaker

ARTICLE EXCERPT FOLLOWS:

---

Deciphering the Yeshua Codes

At Isa 53:12, 67th letter, with a skip of -20, the following 16-letter sequence occurs:
       
Translation = I desire/lust after treachery/fraud, Jesus is my violent name
The Significant Index for the above is 1/439,482,767,272,900 (one chance in 439 Trillion)

The word * * "I desire/lust" It is the 1st person common singular Polel imperfect of the Biblical Hebrew word * * [BDB, p. 1003].

* * = *ma'al*--(noun) "treachery, embezzlement, deception, fraud" [Alcalay, 1420; BDB, 591].

* * = *Yeshua'*--Jesus

* * = *shemi*--"my name"

* * = *'az*--(adjective)--"strong, powerful, mighty, fierce, violent, courageous" [BDB, 738; Alcalay, 1875].

---

In Gen 40:5 beginning with the 44th letter, Skip distance = -5556, Dr. Price found:
     
Translation: "God (is) an abomination and a diviner."
Significant Index = 1/31,518.30 (one chance in 31,518)

* *--"God" (the one true God of Israel) [BDB 42]

* *--noun masc. sing. "detestation, detestable thing" [BDB 1054]

* *--"and"

* *--"diviner" [BDB 890; cf. Deut 18:10]

---

These above finds took Dr. Price a very short time to locate and I have no doubt that he could find many more positive and/or slanderous ELS phrases if he thought it was required.

He has now shown the ELS Phrase phenomenon to be a random occurrence that happens in all literature. There is nothing special about the mathematical significant occurrences in the bible good or bad.

The Famous Rabbi's Experiment

We have one last item to look at: The famous Rabbi's experiment that started off modern interest into this topic

In 1994, a team of Israeli mathematicians found in ELS 64 names of the most famous Jewish Rabbis and Sages from between the years 1 AD and 1000 AD. They also found the date of birth or the date of death for each one in ELS in a compact area of the original Hebrew text of Genesis. This data was published in the Journal of Statistic Science 1994, Volume 9, No. 3, 429-

The mathematicians calculated the chances that this would happen were less than one chance in two and a half billion.

Dr. Price ran a search on an 800 Hebrew letter string in the original text in the book of Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12. He programmed his computer to search for 9,060 Hebrew words with at least 3 letters or more per Hebrew word within the 800-letter string. When the computer finished the search it found 5,903 of the 9,060 words he was looking for with many words appearing more than once. When all of the 5,903 words plus all the duplicate ELS finds were added the computer found a total of 160,650 Hebrew words in ELS within the 800 letter Hebrew string.

---

Dr. Price's Isaiah experiment:

In the 15-verse segment of Isaiah (52:13 to 53:12) I ran an exhaustive search of all the words in the Hebrew Bible at least 3 letters long. The following is the result:
Number of verses--15
Number of words--202
Number of letters--800
Total number of words searched--9060
Number of different words for which at least one ELS was found--5903
Total number of ELS's found 160,650

All the ELS's were totally confined within the 800-letter matrix, so the maximum possible skip distance was 265. Thus this segment contains ELS's for 65% of all the words in the Bible.

All 58,738 completely fit within the matrix of 459 letters. So the maximum possible skip would have been 153.

---

[BigCinBigD]

I believe the Bible is the written word of God. If God wants to encode.."Be sure to drink your Ovalteen" in Numbers. That's his business.

But until Jesus comes back it will be a matter of faith. Thats part of the process.

[devane617]

Bible Code is pure BS and nothing more. Just a way for someone to make a ton of money.

[Recovering Hermit]

The Scriptures are encoded by removing all spaces between words and creating long strings of letters.

If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters...

[greasepaint]

I feel kinda sorry for non-English speakers,
what do they do for an error-free Bible?
English speakers have the KJV.

[TMSuchman]

To those who do believe there is no need for more proof, to those who do not believe there is never going to be enough proof.
I for one do not need for more proof. I see the face of GOD everywhere, I look. [ie sunrise,face of my kids,sunset,ect...]

[goldstategop]

Jews have always believed G-d is the Author Of The Torah and Moses is the greatest and chief of the Prophets and the Torah, both in the Written And The Oral Law and there will never be another. Today science confirms what people have believed down through the ages. Man's findings confirm the wisdom of Hashem is ahead of His Time!

[Maceman]

I reminded of the experience of Dr. Jocolpus Bumer, as described in "The Devil's Dictionary" by Ambrose Bierce under the entry for the letter "J":

"J

is a consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel -- than which nothing could be more absurd. Its original form, which has been but slightly modified, was that of the tail of a subdued dog, and it was not a letter but a character, standing for a Latin verb, jacere verb, jacere, "to throw," because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog's tail assumes that shape. This is the origin of the letter, as expounded by the renowned Dr. Jocolpus Bumer, of the University of Belgrade, who established his conclusions on the subject in a work of three quarto volumes and committed suicide on being reminded that the j in the Roman alphabet had originally no curl."

[docbnj]

This numerology is completely nutty.

The numbers in the Bible are most assuredly not the message. In fact, except for mere numbers of enumeration, like the Ten Commandments, the numbers in the Bible mean nothing much at all. Many of them are simple hyperbole. For example, Jesus comments that we are to forgive seventy times seven times (490, if you suspect that there is any mystery in that). That was because the customary saying was that one should forgive seven times (which usually will do the job!), but by giving a ridiculously large number, he was saying that there is no real limit. He was saying it in an easily remembered way, as a clever quip, and using hyperbole (exaggeration for effect). Hyperbole is all throughout Jesus's teachings.

If people would lighten up a bit, and read the Bible straight, it is not that difficult.

Does anyone really take seriously the dimesins of the ark? Or the ages of those superannuated ancestors in the Old Testament? If there is any message there, it is God saying to us, "This is not a matter of numbers."

While people are looking for wisdom in obscure places, the truth is plainly stated, and right in front of them. It does not take a Ph.D., or higher math, or knowledge of dead languages to figure it out.

[greasepaint]

Have the 'bible-code' script kiddies
ever looked at the Talmud?
.
Lots of goodies.

[dangus]

Please tell me that NewsMax hasn't gotten so thoroughly debased as to be publishing "The Bible Code" as a news story! THere's only been three movies, four sequels and spinoffs, countless refutations, and ten years of failed prediction since "The Bible Code."

This is like the snake-handlers' answer to Nostradamus.

[dangus]

Oh, and here's something else funny: The Hebrew bible, as it stands today, was compiled only after Christ was denied by the Jews. Archaeological discoveries and historical research have shown that, in spite of St. Jerome's naive assertions, it's the Septuagint and not the Masoretic Text which most closely approximates the Hebrew bible at the time of Christ's birth. Only problem is there was no starnadardized text at all at that time.

[Rockitz]

Where's the bunny with a pancake on his head when you need him?

[nmh]

The Judeo Christian God doesn't operate by sleight of hand. Yes He uses numbers for symbolic reasons BUT He doesn't hide things so only a few can know.