What is 'The Bible Code'? Basically it is the name given to the idea of equidistant letter codes that are contained within the first five chapters of the Bible, the Torah. The idea was first published by a statistical science journal, in an article entitled Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis. Upon reading this the senior cryptographer for the NSA, Harold Gans, set out to disprove the theory. After writing a computer program to test the validity of the results, he obtained a result that suggested the probability of this occurring by accident was nearly non-existent. Despite this, the idea has been rejected, dismissed or ignored by most Churches around the world as well as many scientists. According to Michael Drosnin, the author of the book The Bible Code, "Every major event in world history, every major figure in world history appears to be encoded in the Bible." If this is indeed true then it would be the most important discovery of the twentieth century and something that should not be ignored.

Scientists throughout history have had the idea of an equidistant letter code within the Bible. Sir Isaac Newton spent half his life searching for a code that he believed was contained within the Bible. In fact most of the million or so words he left at Cambridge after retiring had nothing to do with Mathematics or astronomy, but in fact were about esoteric theology. There are also many other prominent Rabbis throughout the last few hundred years who have expressed similar beliefs.

One of the first pieces of evidence of the code was the decoding of the date of the start of the Gulf War, the name "Saddam Hussein" and the word "Scuds" by Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips. This was apparently decoded three weeks before the start of the Gulf War.

So what are equidistant letter codes? Simply put, they are where a message is encoded in another message in such a way that for example every 10 characters there is one character of the message. For example the words "Letter codes" might mean "Led" if we consider only letters with a gap of three between them (ignoring spaces), i.e. "Letter codes". This is obviously a very simple example, and the encoding of a longer message within a text would be a difficult task. A simple example found within the Bible: the word "Torah" (in actual fact the Hebrew version of it) is encoded at 49 letter intervals in Genesis and Exodus. In Deuteronomy and Numbers she same result is found but only if you spell it backwards. They seem to be pointing at the centre text, i.e. Leviticus. In Leviticus the Hebrew word for God is found, this time at seven letter intervals, perhaps indicating that the Torah is pointing to God.

After discovering that, the one time the name "Yitzhak Rabin" (the name of the former Israeli Prime Minister_ was decoded in the Torah, the words "assassin will assassinate" crossed his name; Michael Drosnin flew to Israel, met with one of the Prime Minister's closest friends and warned him of the decoded information. The Prime Minister apparently completely ignored the warning and around a year later he was tragically assassinated. There are many other examples of apparent prophecies hidden within the Bible. The World Wars, the Great Depression, the Kennedy assassination, the date that a comet crashed into Jupiter (including the name of the comet), and even the death of Princess Diana have all been decoded from the Torah.

At the start of writing this article I was basing it mainly of the DVD edition of The Bible Code. It obviously presented a very positive view of the theories involved. It included some examples of experts who rejected the theory and some of the problems with the theory. These included the fact that there are several different versions of the Torah, and due to this, any conclusions reached are not necessarily valid, as you are not basing them on the original text. An expert on the Torah, however, argued there was very little difference between versions. Another argument was that the apparent codes were just down to random chance and that if you took any significantly large text you were bound to find some sort of code contained within it.

After carrying out some research on the topic I found out that the statistical science journal that published the original results has now published another study that refutes the first study. Also Harold Gans has spoken out against the idea that every piece of information 'decoded' is an actual prophecy, although he does not appear to have taken back his earlier claims that the probability of the codes being due to accident was extremely small.

If the theories were scientifically validated then it would provide irrefutable scientific evidence for the existence of God and that the Bible is the direct creation of God. It would raise the question of what we can do with the codes. Are the events described impossible to avoid or can we, with the knowledge gained from the Bible codes, avoid future tragedies?

I am not completely sure if the codes are genuine or not, but I do think that the reaction of Christianity in general to the idea of equidistant letter codes in the Bible is unfair. The idea seems to have been dismissed out of hand without proper study or consideration. When one expert speaks out in favour of the idea and one takes the opposing view, the view opposing the idea of a Bible code seems to be the one immediately accepted. Part of the problem is that to understand the overall situation you would need to know Hebrew at a reasonably good level as well as computer science and mathematics, and I doubt many Biblical scholars have these skills. Also, the approach that many scientists take to the problem is to try to disprove the theories. While some have subsequently become convinced of the validity of the idea, others refuse to consider that possibility. I think the idea is worthy of further study, not just directed towards equidistant letter code, but other areas of cryptography as well. I also believe it is an issue which all Christians, and indeed Jews, should carefully consider.

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