The biblical code or code of the Bible are supposed messages hidden 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 religious Jews the code did not generate any reaction, since 1994 and for almost a decade, the biblical code was a big issue for some Christians in the United States. It was a kind of superscript from that decade: the magical, undeniable proof that Christianity was true. However, the only thing the code really demonstrated is that some people will always believe in something.
Summary
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- 1 History
- 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 coincides with the character of the god of the Old Testament
- 4 Bias determines significance
- 5 There is hidden “code” in any book with many letters
- 6 Apophenia: Imagine Patterns in Chaotic Data
- 3 Sources
History
In the late 1970s, EliYahu Rips (a 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 succeeded in getting the scientific journal Statistical Science to publish his paper ‘Equidistant letters in the’ Book of Genesis ” (‘equidistant letters in the Book of Genesis’), which was signed by the Israeli mathematicians E. Rips, D. Witzum, and Rosenberg.
The article – due to its pseudoscientific appearance – failed to become the subject of controversy.
Refutation of the Bible code
Believers in the Bible code claim that there are hidden messages – usually prophetic – encoded by the equidistant letter sequence system. Instead of reading the Bible in a linear way, they assume 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 letter numbers, according to what words they want. find. Depending on the sequencing they choose, significant words would emerge from the decoded text, such as the name or surname of a contemporary leader or some other type of information than the original authors of the Bible.they could not have known (like 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 could have been 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 proven by the fact that the trick works with other non-religious books.
Adulterated probability calculations
Proponents of the biblical code use denatured probability calculations. Some believers who present themselves as serious students 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 is on the order of one in every quadrillion ( septillion , according to the English “long count”). That probability – from which they do not provide the method by which they arrived at it – not only seems to be a crude invention: they assume 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 related codes that are close to each other in the text, but in an equidistant sequence of letters, if you search exhaustively enough it is Complex code clusters are virtually inevitable.
Finding a single coherent message made up of hundreds of adjoining words (and not – as Eliyahu Rips did – collecting single words every thousand nonsense “words”) might be really difficult (and would really demonstrate the presence of a supernatural revelation), but finding anything that seems significant in that random noise frame is unavoidable. [one]
For example, one letter was taken for 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 at the beginning of the 21st century, they would know that Diego Maradona is the number one soccer player in Argentina, who plays ball (in Argentina they say “ball” both to the ball and to the ball itself soccer sport), and he 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 this “code” after the XXII or XXIII century, or if the believer is not Spanish-speaking or is not from the American continent, the supposed code would have no meaning.
The Bible code only makes retroactive predictions
The messages encoded in the text of the Bible are supposed to be prophetic information that there is no way the authors of the Bible knew about, such as references to Jesus in books written several centuries before Christ, or mentions of modern wars, assassinations or results. elections in the United States.
Anyway, the problem is that the moment it begins to be 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 code of the Bible would be a pretentious way of the Judeo-Christian god Yajvé to say: “I already knew this was going to happen.” Some believers of the biblical code consider that this statement would perfectly coincide with the foolish attitude displayed by the fickle God of the Old Testament . [one]
Bias determines significance
Since the terms that refer to these things supposedly predicted by the Bible code are all searched after the fact, the entire process becomes skewed by whoever does the search. 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 code-believing Jews to accept Christ as their messiah. It would seem that Jews value the codes that validate the divinity of the Torah more than anything. And there are others who see the code of the Bible 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 hidden “code” in any book with many letters
In 1997, Brendan McKay, a professor at the Australian National University School of Computer Science, conducted a study of equidistant letter sequences – using an English word recognition computer program – in the text of the novel Moby Dick , and found hidden messages about the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Indira Gandhi, among many others.
This program is freely available on the internet. [2] In the book The Age of Reason , by Thomas Paine , a youtuber named Steve Shives found his own coded name 91 times in 2013. [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 code of the Bible is the product of a kind of ” apophenia, ” which is the phenomenon of imagining significant patterns in a chaotic data system. Apparently most of the believers in the biblical code do not know that concept.
