What about the "Bible codes?" Books like "The Bible Code" claim that they are real and allow the discovered to know the future. But are they really there or are they too subjectively forced? The answer is that there are some real ones but not as many as is claimed and they do not accomplish what is thought.
Back and Forth, Real or Hoax?
I went back and forth on the question of the validity of the Bible codes over the years. My introduction to the topic came by reading "The Bible Code" by Michael Drosnin in 1998. It was an impressive and provocative book that convinced me the Bible codes were real. I was however young and just at the start of my investigation of Bible prophecy at the time. I was leaving no stone unturned and the Bible codes were intriguing.
As I learned more about Hebrew's block letters, I started to question the conclusions of Drosnin's books. The codes are based on Hebrew Square (Babylonian) characters for the manuscripts. This text was evidently quite late since it contains a number of inconsistencies which only derive from the late square characters. For example, Daleth and Rosh, or Gimel and Nun are sometimes mistaken for one another due to the similarity in shape of the
characters. This kind of issue could not arise with the old Phoenician characters in use prior to the captivity. I believe that the so called Bible codes only "work" on the manuscripts, not in the old paleo characters.
Then, too, Michael Drosnin's many later predictions based on Bible Codes failed. For example, Drosnin clearly states in "The Bible Code II" that there would be a world war involving an "atomic holocaust" which would allegedly be the end of the world.
I realized from all the above how subjectively and arbitrarily the predictive Bible Codes worked. Obviously when a few words crisscross, it's open to wide interpretation what that means. You can easily make those words confirm many interpretations that you already had preconceived. In othere words, the Bible codes let ones confirmation bias (a natural human tendency to filter out evidence that contradicts your theories) run rampant.
My Perspective on Bible Codes Today
Owing to a better familiarity with cognitive biases and logical fallacies than when I first read "The Bible Code," I now pay no more attention to the Bible Codes than I do to the many typical speculative prophecy theories that Christians think up every year. What these share in common is that none of them are literally there in plain text of the Bible. They all takes words (or letters as the case may be) out of their context to support their predictions.
For a long time now my approach to Bible prophecy has been on doing the opposite. I stay with the literal plain text of Bible prophecy and make plain sense of it. It has produced tremendous insights which I have not found elsewhere. My Wormwood breakthrough was a product of this approach and many others that followed and are detailed in my book Know the Future.
Today my position is that Bible Code is real, but that it is not able to predict the future. The predictive ELS codes are subjective and arbitrary. The codes that I still beleive in are the simple single word repeat that are said to exist in the Law (Genesis through Deuteronomy) that spell out the letters of "Torah" (the Law) every 50th character. Supposedly Genesis and Exodus spell this out forwards and Numbers and Deuteronomy spell the same thing out backwards (point towards Leviticus, the center of the Torah). If that is correct then it seems to provide a remarkable watermark evidencing a divine origin to these books of Moses.
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Tim McHyde
Tim is the author of this site (since 1999) and the book Know the Future that explains Revelation literally at last--including the key event of Wormwood (Rev 6-8). To read more from Tim and not miss a single new article, sign up for his free newsletter above.