I recently read a review copy of a new US Christian ‘blockbuster’.
Called The Chamberlain Key, it describes one man’s discovery of a secret code hidden within the Hebrew text of the Bible.
The preoccupation with biblical codes is nothing new. It is part of an ancient Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, which took great interest in the shapes, positions and significance of the Hebrew letters themselves rather than only the surface meaning of the written text.
Equidistant sequences
Michael Drosnin published The Bible Code in 1997, which used a theory about statistics and applied it to the Old Testament. The way the codes were found followed a very simple but scientific-sounding method called ‘Equidistant Letter Sequences’. The method simply counts off Hebrew letters at equal distances from each other and finds hidden words. To add to the possibilities the text can be laid out in columns and then read up, down, left, right or even on the diagonal. The Bible is read like a bumper Word Search puzzle book but full of end-time prophecies.
By appealing to statistics, proponents make it sound as if the hidden messages they have found are so unlikely to have been the result of chance that they demonstrate that someone deliberately placed them there. Even though 97% of statistics are made up on the spot, appeals to such evidence gives the impression that there is solid scientific basis to these claims.
In the hands of apologists and journalists this material can be dangerously misleading. The Chamberlain Key tells the story of an antique dealer who, using a method like this, claims to have discovered his own name (and some other personal details) embedded in a chapter of Genesis. He believes this has given him the role of ‘chamberlain’ to unlock other hidden meanings throughout the Old Testament.
Fictional discoveries
Starting with the discovery that his own identity had been encoded in the Bible, the author sets out to find more. By reading every 16th letter, in various directions, he finds predictions of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (a bit late), the rise of ISIS and reference to an obscure statue of the Virgin Mary. Several pages are spent describing his reckless adventure tracking the statue down to a church and dodging the guard to get a glimpse of it – it is like Indiana Jones, but without the guns and the plot.
No doubt the well-meaning author believes his book has value for Christian apologetics. It also seems that he is genuinely convinced that he has found himself referred to in the Bible. However, it was not actually his name, Timothy, that he found but the letters of the Greek version of his name as spelt in Hebrew. Well, not exactly the Greek version of his first name but letters that would sound a bit like ‘Timotheus’ if you choose to pronounce the Hebrew letters that way. Nor exactly are the letters found together but require you to count every 16th letter. This may sound far-fetched to you, and you would be right.
There’s a market out there
Clearly there is an appetite for this kind of material – and the publishers even commend it as somehow proving the existence of God. But theories like this have numerous problems.
They are based on the assumption that there is only one Hebrew text of the Old Testament of which we can be certain of every Hebrew letter. After all, drop a single aleph and the sequences fall apart. The Masoretic text is generally chosen, from the tenth century AD. But we have plenty of earlier variants, particularly in the Dead Sea scrolls. As it happens, the variants are often of minor matters of spelling and so enable scholars to be even more confident about what was originally written. However, this certainly does not extend to the exact order of every Hebrew letter or exact spelling of every Hebrew word.
Another problem is the misuse of Hebrew itself, which is substantially consonants. Therefore, the discovery of the name ‘John F. Kennedy’ was actually the identification of the Hebrew letters KNDY in the sequence, which is a lot less remarkable.
Open secret
The real story here is that many people have a preference for hidden messages than for the obvious meaning. The evidence of Scripture is found not in cryptic secrets but in public pronouncements. The Gospels themselves provide eyewitness claims and recollected sayings. Paul warned Timothy to have ‘nothing to do with godless myths and old wives tales’ (1 Timothy 4.7). The evidence is not buried but revealed in the text and we too should renounce ‘secret and shameful ways’ (2 Corinthians 4.7) because that is not how God has spoken. The fascination with mysteries in the biblical text may open opportunities to share our faith, but let’s stick with the clear meaning of the message.
