Before the Da Vinci Code, there was the Bible Code...

This is a short study about supposed secret messages encoded in the Bible. The notion was popularized in 1997 by Michael Drosnin in his book “The Bible Code” (it sold well even in secular Sweden). Drosnin claims that the Hebrew text of the Torah contains hidden prophecies, including one about the assassination of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin. By now, various different Bible codes have been proposed, some proving that Jesus was the Messiah, while others prove the opposite. Unsurprisingly, fundamentalist Christians go with the former, while Orthodox Jews claim the latter!

The author of this booklet, Michael Heiser, is something of an enigma. He seems to believe in a rather “fundamentalist” version of Protestant Christianity, including literal demons and fallen angels (some of whom pilot UFOs). At the same time, he is skeptical of other alternative claims, such as Zecharia Sitchin's bizarre speculations about ancient Sumer. He doesn't believe the Bible codes either.

The codes are the result of a surprisingly “promiscuous” way of rearranging the Biblical text by computer (the so-called skip sequences), and you can get essentially any result by chance. Similar “prophetic” codes have been found even in “Moby Dick”! A curious fact is that Christian code enthusiasts use the Masoretic Text family (MT), which isn't even Christian, but rather consciously anti-Christian. This textual family evolved among Rabbinical Jews in polemics with the Christians in the early Roman Empire, who preferred the Septuagint. That Jews use the MT is less surprising, of course.

Heiser does have a theological problem, though. On the one hand, his argument hinges on the Biblical text being corrupt – no two manuscripts look the same, which means that there isn't a “true” text the code can be based on. On the other hand, Heiser presumably believes the Biblical text to be inspired by God. He is often at pains to signal his theological orthodoxy in the pages of the booklet. That being said, I regard Heiser's case against the Bible Code to be pretty conclusive. It's essentially a computer-generated code which “means” something only by chance, and it's not even based on the best available Bible manuscripts!

Here is a quote from the book which I think eminently summarizes the author's conclusions: “The claim that God inserted a special code in the Torah text when he moved Moses or anyone else to write the Torah cannot stand in the face of the inscriptional material we possess today. There is no way we can know or determine or reconstruct such a text and, more importantly for this discussion, the every-letter sequence of that text because the script, spelling, word order, and grammar of the language that originally conveyed the Torah has demonstrably changed over time. Comparing how a scribe of 800 B.C. would have written out the text of the Torah letter by letter with today's modern Hebrew editions would instantly produce enough letter variations to meet Satinover's aforementioned standard for undoing the Bible code” (Kindle Locations 448-453).