Do you believe in the bible codes?

Question

Some of the findings are amazing while others seem like they are reaching.

Not anything to do with the da vinci code. Im talking about the torah where scientists used ELS to find messages.

They tried it with the new testament and found nothing though

Answer 1

Yes, I have looked at some of them to. All I can say is they are very interesting. I am going to wait and see if 2006 pans out.

Answer 2

As Hyzakyt stated, there are Bible Codes that are being promoted right now. The most popular is called Equidistant Letter Sequences, or ESL. This is where a person will use the original Hebrew of the Old Testament and they'll start with a letter in a passage. They will then go to say, every seventh (or any other number they choose) letter in the passage, to see if a word is spelled out of every seventh letter. Many claim that these ESL's demonstrate that the Bible has hidden in it the history of mankind.

Another type of Bible Code is based on the Greek, and uses number sequences instead. For example, the last 12 verse in Mark 16 are considered disputed texts. But we can look at the mathematical formulae in the passage, and see that there is the evidence of a master Designer. Let's take a look:

There are 175 (7 x 25) words in the Greek text of Mark 16:9-20. Curious. These words use a total vocabulary of 98 different words (7 x 14), an exact multiple of seven. That's rather striking.

Try constructing a passage in which both the number of words and the number of letters are precisely divisible by seven (with no remainder)! The random chance of a number being precisely divisible by 7 is one chance in seven. In seven tries, there will be an average of six failures.

The chance of two numbers both being divisible by 7 exactly is one in 7 to the 2nd power, or one in 49. (This is a convenient simplification; some mathematical statisticians would argue the chance is one in 91.5 ) This still might be viewed as an accidental occurrence, or the casual contrivance of a clever scribe. But let's look further. The number of letters in this passage is 553, also a precise multiple of seven (7 x 79). This is getting a bit more tricky. The chance of three numbers accidentally being precisely divisible by seven is one in 7 to the third power, or one in 343. This increasingly appears to be suspiciously deliberate.

As we examine the vocabulary of those 98 (7 x 14) words: 84 (7 x 12) are found before in Mark; 14 (7 x 2) are found only here. 42 (7 x 6) are found in the Lord's address (vv.15-18); 56 (7 x 8) are not part of His vocabulary here.

This just gives you an idea of the incredible design that was put into the Word of God. This was all done in the first century, without benefit of supercomputers. Amazing!

For me, though, reading through the Bible, I see how God uses the Scriptures to make them come alive to me at certain places in my life. As He says in Hebrews 4:13, it is living and active!

Answer 3

I've read both of the first two Bible code books and am still on the fence, but they are interesting either way.

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MOST INTERESTING POINT

Whether you believe them or not, I do have to say that the most interesting find is that 2006 is the only year in the next 100 encoded with "atomic holocaust" and "world war 3".... I thought I remembered that and flipped the book open the other day when the middle east went nuts the other day, and there it was... Interesting considering all the Nuclear stuff going on with Iran and N. Korea, and the fact that we certainly are in WWIII right now, whether most people want to call it that or not.

Answer 4

What about the ‘Bible Codes’?
by Jonathan Sarfati

‘Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg searched the Book of Genesis looking for pairs of words spelled by picking out every dth letter, where d is some integer. The pairs of words were names of personalities and dates of their birth or death taken from the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel. When the authors used a randomization test to see how rarely the patterns they found might arise by chance alone they obtained a very highly significant result, with p = 0.000016. Our referees were baffled: their prior beliefs made them think the Book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern-day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks the effect persisted. The paper is thus offered to Statistical Science readers as a challenging puzzle.’

So it seems like the codes are statistically valid, and hard to explain on naturalistic grounds. But some of the sensationalist material in Michael Drosnin’s book The Bible Code is going too far. This often happens—a sober, proper scientific paper is often quite different from what popularist authors make of it. These codes cannot be used to predict the future, according to the authors of the original articles. They knew in advance what associations to look for; but the fact of association in itself proves nothing, because interpretation is needed which is often not clear until after the event. Many associations can be found, for example: Yeshua is the Messiah; Mohammed is the Messiah, Lenin and Messiah, Yeshua is not the Messiah, etc. In a large text, such associations are highly probable, and they prove nothing. The published research involved use of pre-determined associations (not concocted by the authors) and probabilities could be calculated which showed that the presence of all these associations was unlikely to have happened by chance.

The codes are good evidence of the extreme care with which the manuscripts of the Old Testament were copied. The codes would not work if there were any copying errors involving addition or deletion of letters, because they would throw out the equidistant letter sequences. No wonder Jesus could claim that neither the smallest letter ('jot’ or yod) nor part of a letter ('tittle’) of the Law would pass away.

However, caution is advisable—one can become so besotted with hidden codes that one misses the message of the plain words of Scripture. The whole tenor of Scripture is that God is proclaiming His message to all mankind in all ages in the plainest possible fashion, aiming for all to hear and understand it, and respond to Him in humility, repentance, and faith. The plain words include plenty of information about the future, in particular Christ’s Second Coming, so there is no need to try to dig for it with numerological techniques.

Answer 5

Don't confuse Da Vinci. with Bible code my friend.

Da vinci can't even do Morse code.

There are over 10382 Bible coeds as of now. and guess what. Scientists didn't find them.

Answer 6

Why would God make codes, if he wants to give us the truth!

I think that maybe the translations of the Bible, have undergone so many bastardizations (influenced by political, religious, and self-righteous means) that maybe the truth in the word is hidden.

That's why we need to study the word of God in it's original language and context!

Answer 7

lol NO!!!
there is no strong statistical correlation between the "codes". It is not scientifically supported stuff.
Things might seem amazing... but the same amazing things were found in Moby Dick. So... NO!

Answer 8

I dont.

But dont have a problem if you do.

I agree that some of the others do seem a bit of a stretch. That was one factor that made me grow skeptical after a while...

Cordially,
John

Answer 9

No, it only proves that if you look for something hard enough you are bound to find it, real or not.

Answer 10

No. You can run any type of algorithim and find what you want in any data set.