The Biblical code or code of the Bible are supposed hidden messages in the Hebrew text of the Bible , recovered in 1994 by means of the equidistant sequencing of letters by the Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips.
Despite the fact that in Israel and among Jewish religious the code did not generate any reaction, since 1994 and for almost a decade, the biblical code was a great topic for some Christians in the United States. It was a kind of super-story from that decade: the magical and undeniable proof that Christianity was true. However, the only thing the code really showed is that some people will always believe in something.
Summary
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- 1 Story
- 2 Refutation of the Bible code
- 1 adulterated probability calculations
- 2 The Bible code only makes retroactive predictions
- 3 The absurd creation of the code matches the character of the Old Testamentgod
- 4 Bias determines significance
- 5 There is “code” hidden in any books with many letters
- 6 Apophenia: imagining patterns in chaotic data
- 3 Sources
History
In the late 1970s, EliYahu Rips (professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ) claimed that he had found a coded message hidden in a sequence of equidistant letters in the Book of Genesis .
Eighteen years later, in 1994, Rips got the scientific journal Statistical Science to publish his paper “Equidistant letters in the” Book of Genesis “”, which was signed by Israeli mathematicians E. Rips, D. Witzum and Rosenberg.
The article – due to its pseudoscientific appearance – failed to become controversial.
Refutation of the Bible code
Believers in the Bible code claim that there are hidden — usually prophetic — messages encoded through the equidistant letter sequence system. Instead of reading the Bible in a linear way, they suppose that the Judeo-Christian god Yajvé hid messages in the Bible , and they read a biblical passage every ten letters, or every seven letters, or every different number of letters, according to what words they want find. Depending on the sequence they choose, meaningful words would emerge from the decoded text, such as the name or surname of a contemporary leader or some other type of information that the original authors of the Biblethey could not have known (such as the results of the 1993 presidential election in the United States, in which “Bill [Clinton]” won). [one]
Followers of this belief hold that this would be proof that the Bible is a supernatural book, since it is not possible that this code was written without the assistance of divine revelation.
But for a book to manifest a phenomenon like the Biblical code, it does not have to be supernatural: it only requires that it have many letters. And this is demonstrated by the fact that the trick works with other non-religious books.
Doctored Probability Calculations
Proponents of the biblical code use denatured probability calculations. Some believers who present themselves as serious scholars of the Bible code insist that only the most complex and improbable codes should be considered legitimate, because it would be less likely that they would have appeared in the text of the Bible by chance.
They claim that the chances of a certain complex set of code appearing in the text purely by chance are in the order of one every quadrillion ( septillion , according to the English “long count”). That probability – of which they do not provide the method by which they arrived at it – not only seems to be a gross invention: they suppose that a certain given code, in the English language, is the only significant result.
But given a book with as many letters as the Bible has and the fact that believers accept as codes related that are close to each other in the text, but in an equidistant sequence of letters, if it is searched exhaustively enough it is Virtually inevitable clusters of complex code emerge.
Finding a single coherent message made up of hundreds of neighboring words (and not – as Eliyahu Rips did – collecting single words every thousand meaningless “words”) could be really difficult (and would really demonstrate the presence of a supernatural revelation), but finding anything that seems meaningful in that frame of random noise is inevitable. [one]
For example, one letter was taken every ten letters in this same text, which produced:
tilqasesoe
edusednulc
amleedatat
daiderneot
uieoin one or
hrdoeoori
lbdlniuloe
agnrmtlais
adioompabs
peaanidroe
rl matt anne
rlaidoioos
snplncahle
oenetncsna
snbasoenex
nuorrilsru
something enzcii
agipeinnfl
broonaobef
jrslccraia
ctsdeenale
alrcc red to
ss diego BDD
raasmodtat
b ball oqnse
epssqaeaap
goscsatepe
cmescxssyc
qaoaevcvil
In the text, a computer application that could recognize Spanish words within a chaotic flow of letters, would recognize:
- Diego
- one
- ball
- something
- Red
- mate
If the believer in codes were Argentine and Spanish-speaking, and lived in the early 21st century, he would know that Diego Maradona is the number one soccer player in Argentina, who plays ball (in Argentina he is called a “ball” both to the ball and to himself sport of soccer), and is a friend of Cuba (something red = communist) and his favorite drink is mate , he would find this text highly prophetic.
If the believer read that “code” after the XXII or XXIII century, or if the believer is not Spanish-speaking or not from the American continent, the supposed code would have no meaning.
Bible code only makes retroactive predictions
Messages encoded in the text of the Bible are supposed to be prophetic information that there is no way that the authors of the Bible knew, such as references to Jesus in books written several centuries before Christ, or mentions of modern wars, assassinations, or results. of elections in the United States.
Anyway, the problem is that the moment it becomes possible to know what to look for, the prophesied events have already taken place, so if you find any prediction it is because you already know it. [one]
The absurd creation of the code matches the character of the Old Testament god
The Bible code would be a pretentious way for the Judeo-Christian god Yajvé to say, “I already knew this was going to happen.” Some believers in the biblical code consider this statement to be perfectly consistent with the foolish attitude displayed by the fickle Old Testament God . [one]
Bias determines significance
Since the terms referring to these things supposedly predicted by the Bible code are all searched after the fact, the entire process becomes biased by whoever searches. Christians who adopt the code seem to place the greatest emphasis on codes present in the Old Testament that they interpret to refer to Christ.
However, the presence of this information in the text has not persuaded believing Jews in the code to accept Christ as their messiah. It would seem that the Jews value the codes that validate the divinity of the Torah more than anything. And there are others who see the Bible code as a curiosity, that all that in the long run has no real meaning, and that it would be the alphabetical equivalent of pareidolia: looking at the clouds and imagining that a turtle is drawn there. [one]
There is “code” hidden in any books with many letters
In 1997, Brendan McKay, a professor at the School of Computational Sciences at the National University of Australia, conducted a study of equidistant letter sequences – using an English word recognition computer program – on the text of the novel Moby Dick , and found hidden messages about the murders of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Indira Gandhi, among many others.
This program is freely available online. [2] In the book The Age of Reason , by Thomas Paine a YouTuber named Steve Shives found in 2013 its own code name 91 times. [one]
A similar study was carried out with the Hebrew text of the translation of the novel War and Peace , by Lev Tolstoy. Similar results were obtained.
When you know what to look for, finally this is what you find. [one]
Apophenia: imagine patterns in chaotic data
The supposed Bible code is the product of a kind of ” apophenia, ” which is the phenomenon of imagining significant patterns in a chaotic data system. Apparently most believers in the biblical code do not know that concept.
