THE TRUTH BEHIND THE BIBLE CODE

The book, The Bible Code, by Michael Drosnin is both fascinating and frightening. I was horrified to hear that the Bible, in its Hebrew original, contained a code that could only be cracked by computer which could predict future events.

The Truth Behind the Bible Code by Dr Jeffrey Satinover is perhaps more dangerous than Drosnin’s for it seems more reasonable.

The book is not about the Bible code but about the Torah code. It says there is no other code discovered yet.

It tells us that the Bible code exists but cannot be used to foretell the future. You only know that something had been predicted after it happens.

Page 170. “Upon first learning of the codes, almost everyone wonders whether they could be used to predict the future. In fact, the peculiar encoding method seems to preclude it: The Code emerges only when you find ELSs for two or more related facts that you have decided to look for for an event and a date.” Several dates are given if you do find a future event therefore “To be known to the person looking, the date must already be in his past” (page 170).

The phrase was found encoded that says that AIDS will be the end of every disease (page 164). HaKeTz L’MaChaLOT. We do not know if this is a good forecast or a bad one. AIDS could lead to a discovery that will end all disease or AIDS could mutate and end disease by killing all living beings so that there will be nobody to have diseases. However, it is impossible to see how killing one virus could end all diseases so the prophecy is a prophecy of doom. But it is a forecast and it contradicts the book’s doctrine that the codes cannot be used to foretell the future (page 170). How could the Law of Moses be from God if it prohibits such divination if it is for that purpose itself?

Sadly, the code cannot be utilized to refute the notion that Jesus is the Messiah for we are told that some “did misuse the codes to “prove” that Jesus isn’t the Messiah. Such negative proofs were as badly done as the Christian “positive proofs” (page 16). At least the code does not reveal that Jesus was the Messiah. But this silence makes it probable that Jesus was not the Messiah for God would not forecast this and that and say nothing about the most important alleged servant of God ever. Satinover knows that the Christians see that but desperately look for Jesus in code for they want it to be wrong. So he has no right to assert that the question of who Jesus was was left unanswered in the code. The question is answered by silence, Jesus was insignificant. Therefore he was not God or the Son of God.

What if the Torah code is miraculous and it reveals directly or indirectly that Jesus was not the Messiah? Then you can’t say that there must be some mistake for Jesus rose. A miracle you see in the text comes before a miracle you can’t see.

Miracles we can see for ourselves come before miracle reported by other people. If I see a miracle that denies that Jesus Christ rose from the dead that comes before even twenty people that say he has. Why would God put a miracle code in the Torah?  Only if it were to be obeyed and revered above other scriptures and prophets and miracles forever. If Jesus abolished the Law like Christendom maintains then how could he have been God’s Son when the evidence for the Law being of God is stronger than the evidence that it was abolished by God? How could Jesus or any miracle he did be evidence that he was right to abolish the Law if he tried to do so? The resurrection miracle would be nothing in comparison to the miracle code of the Bible. The God of the Bible claims to be the supreme intelligence.

It is a bit comforting that the book says that there are no codes in any other books of the Bible. “There is no evidence for codes within any of the other books of the Bible” (page 250). The lettering in the Bible cannot be altered for it ruins the codes and since this alteration happened with the New Testament at least nobody will find codes in it. If God put the codes in the Torah and no other book then what does that say about the other books? That he is not interested in providing miraculous proof for their divinity because they are man-made or devil-made.

Page 165-168 inform us how the assassination of Anwar Sadat on October 6th, 1981, was encoded in the Torah or the Book of the Law thousands of years ago. Chaled, the name of the killer, the date (8th of Tishri) and the fact that Sadat was shot during a parade are all given. The word murderer in Hebrew is spelled out every 21 letters and “at Sadat” every 3,800 letters. It would look more supernatural and miraculous if all the words had the same distance between each letter in the code. This method risks one taking the wrong meaning. This completely contradicts the claim of the Law to be prefect (Deuteronomy 27:26). If the code is inspired then the teaching of the Law is not from God.

The words spelled out have different interpretations. Sadat could be a place where a murderer was present on 8th Tishri.

On page 167, one wonders how the prophecy that a prince will be shot could apply to Sadat who was a president which is a very different thing from being royalty. The Hebrew word translated shot means something like being thrown or directed at you. If Sadat had been run over by a car they would still be saying this was predicted accurately.

It is admitted on page 179 that when Saddam Hussein attacked Israel it was known that three different dates for this attack were given in the code so that nobody would know beforehand exactly when it would happen. Do you really believe that this was the reason God put in three dates? If somebody tells you that there are three times you could be killed next year and gives you three dates does it matter if you don’t know which one it will be for you could be ready each day for the worst and taking precautions? The code did not come from a perfect intelligence. The being that created the Torah is not as sure of the future as he said he was (Deuteronomy 18). Nobody looked for the prophecy until after the event. And God should have known beforehand that nobody would be looking for this prophecy until afterwards so what did he need to give a number of dates to hide the real date for?

On page 242, it is declared that a causeless and random action is one that is freely willed. Free will is uncaused. But this is absurd for if your choice is caused then it is not your choice so there is no free will in it at all. Such credulity is a warning to us about this book. It is held that since the code gives several possibilities when it predicts something that this is an eerie parallel to the revelations of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics there is a causeless range of possibilities. But instead of mirroring modern physics the code is simply the same as a person predicting that in exactly five minutes time that A will be dead, or in the city or in bed! The code is said to be striking – the implication is that this is miraculous. Rubbish! The hint that the code knows of modern physics is wrong.

Lots of tests were done on the Book of Genesis to see if the code could be the product of chance (page 205). The letters in each verse would have been scrambled up and all the letters would have been put into an entirely new order. But then the codes that allegedly appeared were those that were entirely due to chance unlike the Bible code. A piece of War and Peace in Hebrew the same length as Genesis did the same.

But it takes a huge amount of knowledge and effort to find the message and even then the message will have several meanings or interpretations so they can be missed. It is probable that the messages were all missed. Also, we know that the “real” code is mumbo jumbo so we would expect equally bad codes to appear in the jumbled version.