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bible code: "Teaching them [wrong] things", The
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2000 by Taylor, Richard A
f Those things "written but not read." In a number of places there are words present in the text that the Masoretes inherited, but which in their judgment were not part of the original text. They indicated their disavowal of these words by leaving them unpointed in their Hebrew text. 51 In that way they instructed the reader to ignore the words. For example, in Ezek 48:16 the number five is repeated due to dittography. The second occurrence of this word is unpointed by the Masoretes, with the marginal instruction not to read the word even though it is written. The ancient versions also attest to just one occurrence of the numeral here. But since these words are present in the Masoretic consonantal text, presumably Bible code advocates include them in the Hebrew text that they are working with to discover encoded messages. However, since the words have no real claim to originality, their presence confuses the pattern of ELSs that include them in the counting. The resulting message is thus not really based on an accurate counting of only those letters that were in the original text. 52 How then can the alleged message possibly be genuine?
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g. Those things "read but not written." This phenomenon is more or less the opposite of the one mentioned above. There are a number of places in the MT where vowels appear without the appropriate consonants written above them. 53 In these places the Masoretes record in the margin the consonants that they want to read with the vowels that are found in the text. For example, in 2 Sam 8:3 the masorah parva instructs the reader to add the word "Euphrates" (Heb. MD) at the end of the verse. The vowels of this word appear in the text but without the consonants, which are to be supplied from the margin. In places such as these Bible code advocates are working with a consonantal text that is shorter than the original text. Any perceived ELS pattern is as a result falsified by the absence of letters that presumably belong in the text but are found there neither in Masoretic manuscripts nor in printed editions that are based upon such manuscripts. The consequences for any attempt to recover an encoded message based on ELSs should be obvious.
2. The printed text. If Bible code advocates choose to dismiss the manuscript problems referred to above and to base their theory on a particular printed Hebrew text, another similar problem still exists. This problem presents itself in the form of certain choices that must be made. First, which printed text is to be preferred? And second, what is the manuscript base of that particular edition? The choice between printed editions is actually quite limited. From a scholarly perspective, there are at present only two viable candidates: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, which is a diplomatic (not eclectic) edition based on the early eleventh-century manuscript B19A, and the Hebrew University Bible Project, which is based on the early tenth-century Aleppo Codex but is far from being complete. In either case, apart from the variant evidence found in the critical apparatus, we are really dealing with a single medieval Hebrew manuscript. To think that either of those manuscripts, excellent representatives of the medieval Masoretic tradition though they be, is sufficiently accurate as to sustain a theory of divinely encoded messages based upon ELSs, is simply untenable. These manuscripts exhibit all of the problems discussed above. The Koren edition 54 published in Israel has the same limitation, differing from BHS in only a limited number of places. 55
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