bible code: "Teaching them [wrong] things", The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2000 by Taylor, Richard A

When Drosnin looked for the name Yitzhak Rabin, he claimed to have found an encoded message (with an ELS of 4,772) indicating "assassin will assassinate,"11 and on this basis he concluded that Rabin was in grave danger. And the Israeli scholars Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg claim to have found embedded in the Hebrew text of Genesis the names of thirty-two prominent Jewish personalities described in the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel,12 along with the dates of their birth or death. On the basis of statistical probability their conclusion was that ". . . the proximity of ELSs with related meanings in the Book of Genesis is not due to chance."13

In approaching Bible study this way, Scripture becomes an amorphous collection of letters with an almost infinite number of combinations based on ELSs that run sometimes forward, sometimes backward, sometimes vertically, and sometimes diagonally. Bible study is thus reduced to discovering what one sets out to find rather than listening patiently to what the divine author has to say in and through the text. Is there a code to be found in the Bible? Is it through mathematical computations or mystical combinations of letters separated sometimes by vast distances that God has chosen to reveal himself and his plan for the universe? I think not. The combinations of letters and so-called messages discovered by Bible code researchers appear to be contrived and/or coincidental. 14 I do not believe that there is a code to be fond in the Bible.

III. DELIMITATIONS In this paper I would like to examine the claims of those who advocate the existence of the Bible code from the standpoint of what we know about the history of transmission of the Biblical text. Space constraints permit me to discuss the Bible code mainly from this single perspective alone. I will not seek to address other more peripheral issues such as the defective knowledge of the Hebrew language reflected in the writings of many Christian advocates of the theory, or examples of glaring inconsistencies in method, or the ever-present tendency toward eisegesis.

More specifically, I will not seek to answer the argument for the Bible code that is based on statistical probability as set forth by the Israeli team of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg. There are several reasons for this decision. First, I am not qualified to do so. I am a Biblical scholar and not a mathematician. I confess to being quickly overcome by the ethereal air of the sophisticated mathematical computations that are a necessary part of any discussion of statistical probability. My expertise does not lie in that area. Second, there are qualified mathematicians who have responded to that part of the Bible code discussion, and I am content simply to refer the interested reader to those discussions. 16 In the opinion of a number of mathematicians who have investigated the matter, there are serious flaws in the formulaic expressions of probability as presented by Rips and other code researchers. 17 Third and most important, I do not believe that the real issues in this discussion actually lie in the discipline of mathematical probability. Bible code advocates have based much of their theory upon arguments from statistical probability. However, the Bible code phenomenon is ultimately an issue of OT textual criticism, and no amount of statistical probability or mathematical speculation can alter that fact. Any Bible code theory that plays loose with known facts concerning the transmission of the Biblical text is working with an inherent flaw that is actually fatal to its claims and conclusions. In such a case sophisticated mathematical computations may be nothing more than distracting and misleading subterfuge.