Code name: Confusion

‘Come near to Me, hear this. I have not spoken in secret from the beginning’, Isa. 48. 16.

The Bible Code was introduced in 1988 by three Israelis and then popularized in 1997 by Michael Drosnin’s book, The Bible Code. The claim is that God not only communicated through the obvious text of Scripture, but encoded key words in the first five books of the it in such a way that they could only be discovered with the use of computer technology. Computer programs search the original Hebrew Masoretic text of the Torah, using Equidistant Letter Sequencing (ESL). For example, it will go through and pick out every fifth Hebrew letter in the text and then examine for a hidden word. The process is done repeatedly with different letter spacing from single digits through to the thousands.

Undoubtedly, some of the findings are fascinating. Yeshua Shemi (Yeshua is My Name) is found encoded in Isaiah 53 and Dam Yeshua (the blood of Yeshua) is hidden in Leviticus. Upon this proof, many evangelicals embraced the theory as a great discovery and are using it to validate the Bible as God’s Word.

But consider some additional discoveries. The expressions, ‘the blood of Mohammed’ and ‘the blood of [David] Koresh’ are also found many times in Leviticus. In fact, in the first five books of the Bible, Koresh is found 2,729 times, Mohammed is found 2,328 times, and Krishna 104 times by using skip sequences up to 1,000 letters. Mathematicians, statisticians and scientists are beginning to denounce the validity of the code. Virtually anything can be found using this method – it is even being used by some rabbis to prove that Jesus was a false Messiah.

The obvious test of the validity of the Bible Code is if it is unique to God’s Word. If the hidden messages in the Torah are from God to substantiate its supernatural origin, then they couldn’t be found in secular literature as well, could they? The ESL method was used on books such as War and Peace and Moby Dick and-sure enough-many interesting messages turned up. It is becoming increasingly obvious that if a document is long enough, almost any message can be decoded.

God’s truth isn’t reserved for an elite group of mathematicians or computer scientists. If we hold to the fact that the Word of God is sufficient in itself and that the Holy Spirit uses it to teach all believers, then our time would be well-spent searching out not some hidden code, but the doctrines that are clearly taught and then living them out daily to the glory of God.

Synopsis taken from The Berean Call (Feb. 98) P.0. Box 7019
By Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon.