The Bible Codes
A Hoax or a Message from God?

An idea that has sparked public interest, especially among christians, is that the Bible may contain hidden messages in its text that can be used for prophetical nature and prove the divine nature of the Bible. These "bible codes" are of much controversy and speculation, though.

What are the Bible Codes?
The illeged bible codes are strings of words found in the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The way in which these words and phrases are hidden in the Hebrew is called ELS, or equidistant letter sequences. That is, if you ignore punctuation marks and spaces, one can take every letter, skip N number of letters, take a second letter, skip N number of letters again, and so on until you have a coherent word or message. For example, beginning with Leviticus 21:10, if you take every third letter, it reads "behold, the blood of Jesus" (hain dam Yeshua in Hebrew). This kind of discovery sounds very exciting. The discovery of these hidden messages have brought much hype about the accuracy and divine nature of the Bible. But are these messages really meaningful? That is, these bible codes would be invalidated if we were to find similar messages in any other text, such as a newspaper, encyclodedia, novel, etc.

Have the Bible Codes been invalidated?
What has happened in the past year is that there have been "hidden messages" found in other random texts. It has also been found that derogatory statements about God and Jesus can also be found hidden in the Old Testament. Are we to also accept these messages along with the prophetic messages about Jesus? I don't think so. The bible codes are now holding less and less ground and is now being seen more as just a statistical phenomenon. An excellent article about debunking the bible codes is Cracking the Codes by Hugh Ross. It gives a thorough analysis of the bible codes and explains why they should not be trusted as prophetical messages from God.

I would also recommend reading 10 Criticisms of the Bible Code by Ken Samples. This article portrays how the bible codes have distracted many christians from the real message of the Bible, the message on the surface, not the illeged ones hidden beneath.

My conclusion: There are serious mathematical, biblical, and theological problems associated with the Bible Code theory.

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