Many of us have heard of the mysterious “Bible Codes”. What exactly is all the fuss about?
With the invention of high-speed computers a phenomenon has reportedly been discovered in the Bible involving what is called Equidistant Letter Sequences, or ELS, also popularly know as the “Bible Codes.” Basically a “code” is a word or words found in the text spelled out over regular intervals, such as every 7th letter, or every 20th letter.
How do we prove these words found encoded in the text are not just there by chance, which is the charge of skeptics of the Bible Codes? One of many statistical tests used by mathmaticians and other scientists is the “a priori test”, that is, rather than looking for related words in a text by trial and error, instead to specify in advance the words you are looking for in the text.
Here is an example of a code that has been found: a computer search was done for pairs of encoded words that revealed the names and dates of birth or death of the thirty-four most famous rabbis during the years 90-1900 A.D. These names were specified in advance by choosing them out of an encyclopedia.
When this experiment was run, the researchers found the names of every one of the thirty-four rabbis encoded and paired in close association with their birth or death dates. These were all encoded in the 78,064 letters of Genesis! And this code, if valid, is also prophetic! In Chapter Ten of The Bible Can Be Proven, I decribe this amazing experiment further as well as provide links to articles such as http://www.torah-code.org/papers/wdp2.pdf which describes some of the statistical methods used by code reseachers and answers some criticisms.
Apparently God has put some interesting features in the text of the Bible to get the attention of today’s computer-minded generation! And they seem to hold up to rigorous statistical testing.