'For 3,000 years a secret code in the Bible has remained hidden. Now it has been unlocked by computer - and it may reveal the future.'
This was the start of a series of articles in The Daily Mail, running from May 28-30, giving extracts from a book by journalist Michael Drosnin called The Bible Code (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson).
The code works by writing out all the words in the Old Testament in a line then picking every fifth (or ninth or 264th etc.) letter. The picked letters are then set out in rows - different lengths of rows are tried - then a computer is asked to find certain combinations of letters, such as 'Clinton', in among the rows, columns or diagonals. The claim is that if you look near these various names, you can find other words or dates which have special links with them. There is also a claim that this does not work with any book other than the Bible.
What should we make of this? There seem to be two approaches we ought to take. First, it would be good to know whether the code really works. Second, we need to ask whether the God whose character is revealed in the Bible is likely to act in the way implied by the claims.
There are two questions about whether the code works, one mathematical and one textual. Mathematically, it would take a long time to check the validity of the code and it would require very carefully thought-through statistical analysis. The only mathematicians one hears about in the article are, of course, those who have been converted to belief in the code. Without doing a statistical analysis, however, there are few things that can be said.
The textual question
The first point is that the text is in Hebrew and essentially consists of consonants only. This means that the words are much shorter. 'Assassin that will assassinate' has 27 letters in English but only about six in Hebrew. This makes the random (and hence meaningless) occurrence of 'significant' phrases much more likely. The absence of vowels also means that almost any combination of consonants makes a word or phrase (try it in English). The second point to make is that the code is a 'two-way bet' - it cannot lose. The rows and columns are full of random information. To take the most publicised example, where the word Rabin (the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister) occurs, there are thousands of other words around it, many of which will give pieces of information which were not true of Rabin. Those using the code will regard these as random letters and not in any way disproving the code. The third point to make is that the numbers of possible combinations of letters involved are very large indeed. It is a great surprise if you find a perfectly spherical pebble on a beach. However, if you had a machine that could collect every single pebble on the beach and check them, you would find some astonishingly spherical ones. The powerful computers involved in searching for significant words in the Bible Code are very like such a pebble-collecting machine.
Ultimately, it would need lengthy analysis to check the mathematics of the Bible Code. However, there is a rather more immediate question. What is this 'Bible' that they have access to, to produce their code? The code depends on knowing the exact text of the Old Testament. If one letter is incorrect, it wrecks the calculation. But we do not have access to a letter-perfect text of the Old Testament. There are many points of minor uncertainty, such as whether a word is spelled with a single 'n' or a double 'nn'. Put a double 'n' in a word early in Genesis and your set of 'every tenth letter' picked after that becomes entirely different.
At one point in his articles, Michael Drosnin refers to the Isaiah-scroll which was found at Qumran and which dates from the time of Jesus. Is that the text of Isaiah that the code uses? Or does it use the traditional Rabbinic text which is rather different? One of the most exciting aspects of the Qumran discoveries has been that it has shown us that the Biblical texts that Jesus had were essentially the same as those that we have. However, that similarity does not extend to minute details such as spelling. What does Michael Drosnin mean when he talks about a '3,000 year-old text'?
The theological question
This brings us naturally on to the theological question. Does God act in this way? Picking up from the previous point, we can say that God has acted wonderfully down through history to preserve the Bible for his people. However, he has chosen not to preserve it in letter-perfect form. All the Bible's messages seem to have been transmitted safely - but not all the spellings. We really do not know how some words were originally spelled. This is theologically important. God wants to SPEAK to us through the Bible. He does not want to give us a physical object for worship or a text which is suitable for a kind of magical investigation. Both routes have been followed in the past. Neither is appropriate to the kind of revelation that God has given us.
If God did use codes, would he use a code like the Bible Code? A major theological problem seems to be posed by the way that the Bible Code yields a wild mixture of random letters, incorrect information and correct information. If God had indeed made, say, every 50th letter in the Bible spell out a message, surely the message once found would be clear, complete, unmixed truth. This is the character of God. Does God use codes at all? Some biblical writers, writing certain types of literature, did use codes. Since they were writing under God's inspiration, we can say that God used codes in these cases.
The most well-known case is in 'apocalyptic' literature such as Revelation or parts of Daniel. In Daniel, various beasts are used as codes for certain people - and both the code and the meaning are often given. An example is Daniel 8.20: 'The two-horned ram that you saw represents the kings of Media and Persia.' In Revelation 13.18, the reader is challenged to interpret a code: 'If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.' In this case, numbers are used for letters - an idea which the rabbis called 'gematria'. The numbers may well stand for 'Nero Caesar', in which case you can understand one reason why the writer might use code (even though Nero himself was probably dead). As well as political danger, writers of apocalyptic used code or, more generally, symbolism because of the nature of apocalyptic itself. It is about visions being seen and then interpreted.
Another kind of biblical writing which involves a kind of code is the composition of genealogies. Both Matthew and Luke's genealogies of Jesus are notable for their patterns of sevens - three groups of 14 in Matthew, 77 names in Luke. Jewish genealogies were often used as a way of highlighting the importance of certain people who appeared in the seventh position or at other key positions. Matthew and Luke probably each felt that the genealogical material that they had available about Jesus highlighted his central position in God's plans.
Content and context
But we are a long way from the Bible Code. With apocalyptic literature, we have writing which is inherently symbolic. With genealogies, we have lists which are very structured and in which interpreters will naturally look for evidence of patterns in God's action in history. In the Bible Code we have, for example, a passage which is about loving the Lord your God but which contains a coded message about the date of a nuclear holocaust. The Bible's normal use of symbolism or 'code' fits naturally in the context of what each book says. Even when a New Testament writer might draw out of an Old Testament passage more than its author might have seen in it, what is drawn out is a reasonable extension which expresses the movement of the Old Testament as a whole. A message from the Bible Code is occasionally related to the content of the book from which the message comes, but usually the message and the content are completely alien.
The Bible Code makes God's relationship to the human biblical authors very different from the one indicated by the Bible as a whole. In the Bible we see prophets, poets, historians, and church-planters bringing messages from their hearts and minds but which also express God's heart and mind. In the most radical case, that of prophetic oracles, God speaks to the mind of the prophet, the prophet understands, and then obediently speaks. The Bible Code sees God not working through and with the biblical writers, but completely without their knowledge or consent. God is sovereign. He can act as he wants. But he has not so far shown himself to be a God who acts in this kind of way.
