Bible Codes began in the
twelfth century when Jewish students
discovered interesting and relevant
hidden words in the Hebrew version of the
Torah, the first five books of the Bible.
Devout Jews believe that details of
everything that will ever happen on Earth are
recorded here; the great Rabbis have always
stressed that as these writings were dictated
by Moses straight from God, no alterations
should be made to the text.
The modern era of Bible Codes was begun
by Michael Ber Weissmandl – a Slovakian
rabbi who narrowly escaped the Nazi death
chambers. His interest in ancient books about
Bible Codes led him to develop his own
theories. Although the Second World War
had helped to ruin Weissmandl’s old life, it
did promote the idea of code-breakers, with
the famous stories of the German Enigma
programme. It also marked the beginning of
micro-computers, and many Torah scholars,
fascinated by Weissmandl’s ideas, were able
to harness complex technology to further the
research into Bible Codes.
In 1994 a group of intellectuals, Doron
Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg,
published a study in the Statistical Science
journal of an experiment they had conducted
using methods developed by Weissmandl.
They said they had found references to 34
Great Rabbi Sages, together with their
respective birth and death dates, hidden in
the book of Genesis. This study ignited the
scientific and popular interest in Bible
Codes, which is still active today, and has
led to many more books being produced,
although not all of these have had such
groundings in scientific procedures.
So how are the messages in the Bible
decoded? In its simplest form, the research
uses a system called Equidistant Letter
Sequencing. This works by placing all the
letters in the text next to each other, with no
spaces or punctuation. Then, by performing
uniform jumps along the letter chain, other
words are discernible. For example:
GENERALIZATION
In the above passage, by skipping to every
third letter from the starting point, we get the
word ‘NAZI’. The method can be used
forwards or backwards, with any number of
letter jumping or spacing. There are even
more complicated ways of decoding, called
arrays or matrices; they are a two
dimensional presentation of the text – rather
like a word search puzzle – which contain
hidden words in different directions.
Weissmandl’s initial discovery was that by
taking the first T in the first verse of the book
of Genesis, and then skipping 50 letters three
times you end up with the word TVRH, the
Hebrew spelling of Torah. This finding
applies with the same 50 letter skips in the
first verses in the book of Exodus and
Numbers. More recent research has shown
