Bible Code - Fact, fiction or fluke?
Back in the 1990s, a book called The Bible Code was published that caused quite a stir. The book was written by a journalist named Michael Drosnin, who claims that the Hebrew translation contains a very complex bible code or sets of codes that reveals events that took place thousands of years after the Word of God was written. In Drosnin’s book, he claims that these events happened exactly they way they were predicted. Since the publication of the book, this theory has been highly publicized and criticized. It has been featured on television shows and on the History Channel.
This bible code theory is based on the technique that was developed by Eliyahu Rips of the Hebrew University in Israel. He published an article in the journal “Statistical Science” in 1994. Both Rips and Drosnin arrange the letters into a large array. Spaces and punctuation marks are removed and the words are run together one right after the other. A computer is used to find matches to selected names or words by stepping to a certain number of letters in the array. Both Rips and Drosnin worked with the original Hebrew characters because that is what was given to Moses by God, with no spaces or punctuation. However, this bible code concept can be used using English letters as well.
When Drosnin finds a name or word match for a given step value, he rearranges the letters into a matrix. The matrix is a certain number of letters wide, and inside this matrix, the letters for the “hidden message” line up together vertically. The analyst or the computer can then look for more related words around the hidden word. Next, matches can be picked off vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. For example, Drosnin found the word “Dallas” (connected with keywords “President Kennedy”) in one of his matrixes by starting at a D, and then picking the next letters by moving one space over to the right and three spaces down several times.
This is all very complex and is nearly impossible to do without the help of a computer, even for mathmeticians; but is this truly a bible code or just coincidence? If it is a bible code, did God put it there, and if so why would He put it there? I am a Christian, and I believe the Word of God is a guide for our daily lives and there are mysteries within in it just in the written text that is visible and readable. I personally don’t understand why God would put a bible code in His Word.
There are many skeptics of the bible code. In fact, some have went so far as to find codes in other books. Moby Dick was analyzed and found to have hidden predictions of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Indira Ghandi, among others.
So while this all very interesting, I can’t say I’m a believer in the bible code. It seems that it is a man-made phenomenon, not a God-inspired one.