Is there a hidden code in the Bible? Part 1 of 2

Photo. Secrets codes found in the Bible. The author Michael Drosnin has predicted important world events as the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as shown on the photo.

According to the Bible Code Digest (www.biblecodedigest.com), is Bible code research said to date back to at least the 12th century, when rabbinical scholars first wrote about discovering meaningful words hidden in the Hebrew text of the Torah.

Was it was common in the ancient world to write "coded messages" in that way?

The most serious claim of scientific evidence for the Codes was made by three Israelis: Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg (WRR). They claim that biographical information about medieval rabbis is "encoded" in the Hebrew text of Genesis. Specifically, the rabbis' names and other appellations are claimed to be encoded closer to their dates of birth and death than should be expected by chance (Source: the website Torah Codes http://cs.anu.edu.au). WRR's "experiment" became published in the well-known journal Statistical Science already in 1994, but it's still a hot subject.

One of the world's greatest scientists ever, Sir Isaac Newton was convinced that God had predicted the human's future expressed by a code. He searched insensitively, but didn't find it. At this time Newton didn't had a computer to support his work.

The Bible mystery

According to the website, the Torah Code (www.thei.aust.com/torah), Michael Drosnin, a former journalist for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, began an incredible journey five years ago when he first flew to Israel to meet the Israeli chief of intelligence about the future of warfare in that country. A young officer stopped him as he left and recommended him to see Eliyahu Rips, a mathematician in Jerusalem who could tell him the exact date the Gulf War would begin. It was found in the Bible.

Photo. Burial place for Jesus (Jerusalem)? Jerusalem is the historical site for biblical events and figures in the old Testament.

Suddenly Drosnin, a man who professes no religious beliefs or knowledge of the religious text, found himself considering a moment in history that allegedly occurred 3,200 years ago; when God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai . It seemed beyond belief. But Rips was considered a genius in mathematics, one of the world's leading authorities on group theory (a field of mathematics underlying quantum physics), so Drosnin visited him.

Drosnin soon discovered that the Bible code was a computer program containing Hebrew letters in five different colours in a grid much like a crossword puzzle. Rips had removed the spaces between the Hebrew words creating a string of 304,805 letters in 64 rows of 4772 letters. The continuous string of 304,805 letters is searched by the computer for words, names and phrases hidden in the Bible text. According to legend, it was the way Moses received the Bible from God - "contiguous, without break of words".

Drosnin viewed a printout that read "Hussein", "Scuds", and "Russian missile", words encoded together in the Book of Genesis. The full code sequence stated "Hussein picked the day." In Chapter 14 of Genesis where the story of Abraham's wars is written, the date 'fire on 3rd Shevat' had been found. That date from the Hebrew calendar is January 18, 1991; the day Iraq launched the first Scud missile against Israel. Rips discovered the date three weeks before the war started.

Based on his finds, Michael Drosnin`s wrote the book "The Bible Code". The book was released the 30 May 1997. It's allegedly the first full account of a code in the Bible that reveals events that took place thousands of years after the Bible was written. As Michael Drosnin says about his own work: "The only thing I can state with certainty is that there is a code in the Bible, and in a few dramatic cases it has foretold events that then happened exactly as predicted".

The release of this book has, understandably, caused worldwide controversy. But this is not the only book that purports the existence of a code in the original Hebrew form of the Torah. Michael Drosnin is, however, the author who claims that information contained in the code has predicted important world events; the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin being the most well-known. Indeed, hundreds of details concerning major world events, including the Holocaust and both Word Wars, have been found using the code.

Read more about the Bible codes in our article Part 2. 

WHAT MORE CAN THE OLD TESTAMENT REVEAL ABOUT OUR FUTURE, OR IS THIS JUST A GAME WITH COMBINATIONS OF LETTERS?

Stein Morten Lund, 12 April 2004

Additional information

Sources:

Torah Codes website: people behind this web site examine the Bible Codes (also called Torah Codes) from the point of view of the mathematicians and other experts who have examined them critically. Click on the links below for more detailed information:

www.thei.aust.com

http://cs.anu.edu.au

The Bible Code Digest: www.biblecodedigest.com

About the book Bible Code II:

The author Micheal writes about our last years on earth: the Countdown starts with 9/11 and counts down to Armageddon. For 3000 years a code in the Bible remained hidden. Now it has been unlocked by computer, and it reveals events that happened thousands of years after the Bible was written. Often big dramatic events are predicted in advance, and then happen exactly as foretold. Do we really have only years to survive? Or can the Bible code help save our world? Can we use it to change our future? The book is highly debated and reviewed in major publications worldwide. It raises a vital question: does the code describe an inevitable future, or a series of possible futures whose ultimate outcome we can still decide?

Jerusalem:

One of the most holy places in the world: Jews, Muslims and Christians hold Jerusalem as sacred. Could the next World War starts here? This city and area is already very unstable.

About the Bible:
The word Bible means "books of books ". Within the Bible there are 66 different books, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. The Bible was written between 1500 B.C. and 100 A.D. by approximately 40 different authors on 3 different continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe).

The Bible, or Word of God, has been historically proven so that there is no doubt of its authenticity. The Bible covers history, prophecy (fulfilled and unfulfilled), poetry, exhortation and theology. It also covers several different topics, such as creation, the triune God or Trinity, the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the second coming of Christ.