Bible Codes

Back in the mid-1990’s the “Bible Code” craze erupted, and the entire world was told that “hidden messages” had been discovered in the Bible. Israeli researchers had used computers to analyze the original Hebrew of the Old Testament and had found that if you skip certain sequences of letters (say, every 5th letter), the result would spell out some kind of recognized word or phrase. This became a huge phenomenon and many people wrote books about it, each revealing all the “hidden things” they had found in the Bible.

I remember watching TV one day while someone showed how they had found the name “Jesus” embedded in a verse in Psalms. I was not impressed. After all, the word “Jesus” was very short, and the Psalms were really long. People looked for codes forwards and backwards, skipping anywhere from just a few letters to thousands of letters. It seemed to me that if you looked hard enough you could find anything you wanted.

Even worse were the people who were using these codes to predict the future. One book said that Bible Codes predicted that Los Angeles would be destroyed by a nuclear weapon in 2008. I was just in that city last year and can report that it has not been destroyed.

To me it looked like the codes were just a lot of nonsense: people were finding things that had no statistical significance and were just as likely to be discovered in War and Peace. On top of that, they were trying to use these “hidden messages” to predict the future, and failed miserably. So I lost interest and moved on.

Recently, however, I came across a fascinating book entitled Bible Code Bombshell by R. Edwin Sherman. The reason this book caught my attention is because it was written by a mathematician, who analyzed the Bible codes from a statistical point of view. Like myself, he was deeply skeptical of the whole phenomenon and wanted to see just how likely the codes actually were. Was there anything to this, or were the codes statistically meaningless?

The author of the book has a master’s degree in Mathematics and is a member of the American Academy of Actuaries. (An actuary is someone who uses statistical analysis to help manage things like insurance programs.) For seven years he was a Principal of PricewaterhouseCoopers, a very large accounting firm. Since he did not know ancient Hebrew (which is a pretty important skill to have if you’re looking for messages in ancient Hebrew manuscripts!) he worked with Dr. Nathan Jacobi. Dr. Jacobi is a Holocaust survivor with a Ph.D. in physics; he lived in Israel for a number of years and has taught classes in Hebrew. Together they made up a team: Dr. Jacobi worked to uncover the codes themselves, and the author analyzed them from a statistical point of view.

I was very pleased to see that that the author did not share just his conclusions; he also provided the mathematics he used to arrive at those conclusions. The book includes his equations and the approach he took in using them, so if you have an understanding of statistics you can see exactly what he did. I had the feeling that he wanted to be as open as possible with his work, and I appreciated that tremendously.

So what did he find? Well, first of all, as one might expect, the length of the Bible codes (or ELS, as the book calls them, which stands for “equidistant letter sequence”) determines its likelihood of appearing. Shorter words are far more likely to appear that longer ones. On page 33 the author gives a table that explains how likely it is that words of various lengths will appear in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible):

Number of Letters	Expected Number of Appearances in the Torah
2	192000000
3	4000000
4	132000
5	4500
6	165
7	6
8	0.25
9	0.01
10	0.0004
11	0.000016
12	0.00000066

 
As you can see, as the number of letters in the phrase you are looking for grows, your chance of finding it drops off dramatically. This is how the author explained it:

“If a code has six letters or less, it is nearly certain that you could find it somewhere in the Torah, and probably find it in many places. If it has eight or more letters, it is very likely that you won’t find it anywhere in the Torah by chance. The probability that you will not be able to find a word you selected as a code in the Torah is 78.5% if it has 8 letters, 99.0% if it has 9 letters, 99.96% if it has 10 letters and 99.998% if it has 11 letters.” (Bible Code Bombshell, p. 34)

In other words, if you are looking for a very short code (like “Jesus”), then you are guaranteed to find it a great many times in a book the size of the Torah – in fact, you would expect to find it thousands of times. (The author puts a number on this: he said that, because the Hebrew name for Jesus has only four letters, you would expect to find it 600,000 times in the Torah, just by random chance alone.) That is exactly what I suspected: the ability to find very short phrases in a very long document is not the least bit surprising. The author pointed out that this holds true even for random collections of Hebrew letters.

If you want to find something special you need to look for long phrases. As he pointed out, if you are looking for a phrase that is 11 letters long there is a 99.998% chance that you will not find it. Finding something that long would be significant. This creates a problem, however, because most books that talk about Bible Codes look for very short phrases – usually words 6 letters long or shorter. Then when they find something they get all excited about it, when in reality they would have had just as much luck searching for it in War and Peace. (Incidentally, this is something the authors actually did.)

The bottom line here is that Bible codes are only meaningful if they are longer than just a few letters. Finding something a dozen letters long would be very special; a phrase that long is unlikely to appear just by chance. Finding something even longer than that would be very special indeed.

As it turns out, the number of possible words/phrases you can find in the Torah is not infinite. In the back of the book the author calculates that there are only 1.2 trillion different possible combinations. (The author does explain how he arrived at that number, but in the interest of not putting everyone to sleep I’ll skip over that.) That may seem like a huge number, but it is very much less than infinite – in fact, it’s around our current budget deficit. The bottom line is that you cannot find anything that you want to find, if you just look hard enough: the math says there are some things you will definitely find, there are some things you might find, and there are some things that you are extremely unlikely to find.

What came as a great shock to me was that the author found codes a lot longer than 12 letters. The longest code he found had 73 letters. This was part of a “mega-cluster” of Bible codes that was focused on Isaiah 53, which is a chapter that deals with the crucifixion of the Messiah. By “mega-cluster”, what he meant was that in that one chapter alone he discovered more than a thousand Bible codes. For the record, here is Isaiah 53 in its entirety. As you read it, try to imagine what it would take to hide hundreds of secret messages in it:

Isaiah 53:1: “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?
2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
8 He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.
9 And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.
11 He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

This cluster of Bible codes is so dense that it uses almost every letter of the passage. On page 84 the author estimates that the odds of this cluster occurring purely by chance are 1 in 2,189,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. To say it is “unlikely” is a vast understatement. On page 94 the author puts these odds into perspective: he says it is like buying just one lottery ticket a month for 33 consecutive months, and winning a 1-in-a-million lottery each time. Anyone who actually did that would be arrested on grounds that they had rigged the system. That, in fact, is the point the author is trying to make: the system has been rigged. Bible codes are quite real and God put them there deliberately – but not for the reasons we would expect.

From pages 88 to 90 the author lists some of the codes that were discovered in this passage. What is amazing is that many of them are actually topically relevant – in other words, the codes are talking about the same thing that the chapter is (namely, the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus). Below I give a sample of some of these codes; the letters to the right represent the phrase’s length in Hebrew.

One thing you might notice is that some of the phrases seem a bit “odd”; I’ll discuss this a bit later. The key to remember is that the longest codes are far too long to have appeared by chance, so they must have been put there deliberately, even if they seem a bit bizarre and cryptic. There is a reason for this oddity, which I will discuss in a minute.

Isaiah 53 codes – English translation	Hebrew letters
If the friend of evil will thirst for the end of righteous purity, his home is an urn. Let Judas have his day. To me, the elevated one, they fasted. Where are you? Its content will be written from my mouth. Father, indeed you will raise the dead over there.	73
If indeed all the detail of this one is a string, does Peter despise the burden of the extra ships, and does my throne rest? So spoke God’s poor.	47
Gushing from above, Jesus is my mighty name, and the clouds rejoiced.	22
There God will raise everything to the lion, God’s witness being Matthew.	22
Obedience to God, even if for a day only, Peter.	19
The ascension of Jesus: for the sleeping one will shout. Listen!	19
And in his name, as he commanded, Jesus is the way.	16
My shepherds are among the disciples.	14
Jesus is salvation	8
Mary is the mother of God	8
Son of Elohim	8
Dreadful day for Mary	7
It is finished	7
Jesus reigns	7
She weeps much	7
Shiloh is a guilt offering	7
True messiah	7
Second Adam	6
Thirty	6

 
These are just a few of the codes that were found in Isaiah 53; there are many more. The point I want to emphasize is that the odds of the longest code appearing by chance (let alone the odds of all of the discovered codes appearing clustered in this one place) is simply unfathomable. The author calculates the odds of just the one 73-letter phrase appearing are 1 in 71.6 billion times 1 billion. It is simply impossible for this to be an accident: this mega-cluster of codes had to be put there deliberately. It is not a product of simple random chance.

It is the author’s belief that the codes demonstrate that God must have written the Bible. No one else had the expertise necessary to embed the codes into the passage. Even with modern technology it would be difficult to fit 1600 codes into a passage as short as Isaiah 53, even if you weren’t concerned about producing something that made sense! For a passage as short as that chapter to have that much hidden in it, and for the messages to tie in so neatly to what the chapter is talking about, is nothing short of a miracle – it has to be the handiwork of God. Bible codes are strong evidence that God wrote the Bible. Only a divine, all-powerful Being could have hidden that much material inside such a short passage. (In fact, there are other “mega-clusters” besides Isaiah 53, and the author talks about them, but I think one example is enough for the purposes of this paper.)

The codes are also evidence that the Bible has not been tampered with. If the original text had been extensively modified, the codes would have been “broken” and one would no longer be able to find these messages. The fact that they are still intact indicates that God has preserved His Word through the millennia, exactly as He promised.

And yet, there is something odd about these codes. The short phrases are easy enough to understand (“thirty”, for example, may be a reference to the 30 pieces of silver that were used to betray Jesus), but the longer ones are cryptic, at best. “Does Peter despise the burden of the extra ships”? What on earth does that mean? The phrase is so long that it cannot be an accident; it must have been put there deliberately. But why? (Some of the Bible codes that have been found in Isaiah 53 are even more bizarre than that.)

On page 165 the author lays out a number of principles that he believe helps put Bible codes into context, and explain why they are the way they are. For the purposes of this discussion I think it’s important to quote this in its entirety. He said:

1. Codes by definition are hidden, but this would not be inconsistent with the nature of God. “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter…” (Proverbs 25:2)
2. Divine codes would probably relate generally to the subject matter of the surface text. The Bible clearly sets forth the principle of confirmation – that is, a matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. This principle is clearly stated twice in the Hebrew Old Testament (Deuteronomy 17:6, 19:5), and three times in the New Testament (Matthew 18:16, 2 Corinthians 13:1, and 1 Timothy 5:19). So codes that served as another witness to the message of the literal text would seem quite natural.
3. Divine codes would often relate to future events. God claims that one of His unique abilities is His full knowledge of the future. “To whom will you compare me or count me equal? … I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please” (Isaiah 46:5, 9-10). About 25% of all Bible verses are prophecies of future events.
4. The reliability of Divine codes should be clearly inferior to that of the literal text. If Bible codes were truly reliable, the content of the literal text would be open to challenge on the basis of newly discovered codes. Such discoveries, or the proclamation of prophecies based on codes, would give glory to the researchers who discovered them, rather than giving glory to God. Yet we know that God will not share His glory with others (Isaiah 42:8, 11).
5. Divine codes should be inherently unreliable as the basis for accurately predicting the future. Otherwise, God would be openly tempting us to do evil. Yet God does not tempt anyone (James 1:13). Using Bible codes to attempt to predict the future is akin to practicing divination, sorcery, and/or the reading of omens. Such practices are strongly condemned in the Bible (e.g, Leviticus 19:26, Deuteronomy 18:10-13).
6. Divine codes may well be foolish, lowly, and despised, and yet they would still confound the wise. God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise…He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things – and the things that are not – to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29)

… Why would God intentionally encode unreliable messages within a sacred text? This would make sense if God wanted to provide implicit evidence within the text that He composed it, while at the same time discouraging attempts to derive new truths or predictions from such messages. It appears that the only real purpose of Bible codes is like that of the embedded strip in $20 bills. The strip adds nothing except proof that the bill is the real thing. (Bible Code Bombshell, page 165-6).

I think the last paragraph is key. Bible codes are very real, and offer compelling evidence that God did write the Bible and the Bible has not been corrupted over the centuries. However, the codes are not intended to provide a way to predict the future. They are something like a watermark: they demonstrate the authorship of the text but they were not designed to add anything to it. People who try to use them to predict the future will find themselves in a mess, because that is not what the codes were designed to do. They are not a magic 8 ball that predicts the future: they are the fingerprints of God, showing that the Scriptures were written by God, and not by men.

If you are interested in this subject I’d highly recommend reading the book, which you can find here. The author goes into a tremendous amount of detail and offers a lot of valuable insights. If you are interested in a scientific analysis of Bible codes then this is definitely the book for you.