As impressive and exciting as The Bible Code is — and it certainly is that and more — there’s one major fundamental flaw with the whole paradigm. Using computer programs now — as compared to doing it by hand as the innovative first researchers did in the 1940s — they simply type in their search term, e.g. a word or phrase they are looking for, say 9/11 or Twin Towers, and the program then searches through all the different Hebrew letters in each paragraph on every page of every book in the bible looking for those specific words or phrases — not the words themselves with the letters in order and in a row… But secretly embedded within the text in a numerical code known as ELS, meaning in a specific pattern like every five letters they will find one letter of that word, then the next letter of the word five letters away and then the next letter of the word another five letters away.
For example 9/11 might appear in a paragraph of the book of Genesis every ten letters. Or Twin Towers might appear in the book of Leviticus every seven letters. If they can find 9/11 and Twin Towers AND Bin Laden AND Airplane all within the same paragraph or two in this ELS form (each letter of the word the same or “Equidistant” number of letters away from the previous one), then they consider it even more impressive because it’s that much more improbable.
It’s essentially a form of old fashioned encryption or coding that say spies would use in ancient times to disguise their communications in case they would fall into enemy hands. So on the surface while the two Creation stories are being described in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, most readers will just read those stories and that’s it. Of perhaps they might look for symbolic meaning to the stories — looking at them more as allegories that tell a bigger story… But people who believe in the Bible Code aren’t looking for the stories on the surface. In fact they’re completely uninterested in them. Neither are they looking for symbolic meaning or allegories. Instead they are literally playing with letter and numbers. “Let’s see what happens if we start here at the letter L and count every four letters for the next few pages and see if any words are spelled out every four letters. Nothing? Okay cool. No problem. Let’s do the same exact thing but instead count every give letters. Ah hah! We’ve found the word L O V E! Counting from the letter l every five letters! So then they look for other words that might be related to the word LOVE, something like Romeo or Shakespeare. If they find all three of those words all within the same paragraph or two or three or even within one page — what they call matrixes — they then conclude that it’s not a coincidence, but instead that the “true author” of the bible put those words there on purpose as a way to predict that a man named Shakespeare was going to write a famous love story about someone named Romeo.
Now that we have computer programs that do all the work for us, any own can become a Bible Code researcher. Type in a word related to any subject that you care to explore and the computer will tell you if it can find a numerical sequence in ELS — letters in an equidistant length from each other — that spell out that word. And so on.
At best it’s cool. Neat. Nifty. Fun. Sudoku for religious nerds. The problem is that if one took any book the size and scope of the Bible (this has only been tried with the first five books of the Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament and what Jews call the Torah) and attempted this same research there is a high likelihood that the same “code” would be found in that book as well. Think of books that are large in scope and lengthy like the bible… such as Rowling’s Harry Potter series… Surely just the sheer law of probability states that the same mind of encoded words and phrases would appear if one sat there long enough and tried a variety of different search terms until they found some. Especially considering that they have NO rules in terms of how close or far apart the letters of any word has to be — the letters of the word just need to be the same number of letters away from each other (equidistant) in order to form that particular word; they can be three letters away from each other, four, five, even ten or eleven or twelve. What’s more, the next word in the matrix — say Waterloo after finding the word Napoleon — does not have to have its letters be the same number of characters away from each other as the previous word. So the letters that form the word Waterloo can be fifteen letters away from each other. They just have to be equidistant within each word itself. So it’s pretty loose in terms of mathematical or statistical rules are concerned.
Given that, it seems highly likely that though some exciting moments from history have been found “secretly encoded” within the bible — Watergate, 9/11, Russian revolution, the Clinton scandal, the Rabin assassination, etc., the same results could easily be achieved using just about any large book.
Until someone sets about to testing whether or not this is true then there is simply not enough exclusivity to this relatively easy task to accomplish to give it merit that it is something solely unique or special belonging only to the Bible. Hence it really shouldn’t even be called the “Bible Code” in the first place.
– Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone 8s Custom
