Does The Bible Have a Hidden Code?

Proof of Inspiration?

Professor Brendan McKay,  of the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University, took up Drosnin's challenge and made extensive  computer searches through the English text of Moby Dick.  Using the same method described by Drosnin, McKay claims  to have found "predictions" of the Assassinations of Indira Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and others.  According to McKay, he discovered that Moby Dick also "prophesied' the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.

Returning to the Hebrew text of Genesis, Professor McKay and associates have also challenged the experimental results of Rips and his associates.  The charge was that the results have less to do  with an inspired coded message than with the researcher's  method and approach-the fitting of data largely done at the discretion of the researchers.  Scholarly debate on this point continues.

Another issue arises when claims are made that such encrypted messages were deliberately hidden in the "standard" or original Hebrew text.  Rips and his fellow researchers say that they made their search with the "standard, generally accepted text of Genesis."  Drosnin writes:  "All Bibles in the original Hebrew language that now exist are the same letter for letter."  But is this the case?  Rather than a "standard" text, various editions of the Hebrew Bible are used today, based on different ancient manuscripts. While the Bible message does not differ, the individual manuscripts are not identical letter for letter.

Many translations today are based on the Leningrad C0dex-the oldest complete Hebrew Masoretic manuscript-copied about the year 1000 C.E. But Rips and Drosnin used a different text, namely the Koren. Shlomo Sternberg, an Orthodox rabbi and mathematician at Harvard University, explains that the Leningrad Codex "differs from the Koren edition used by Drosnin by 41 letters in Deuteronomy alone."  The Dead Sea Scrolls include portions of the Bible text copied  over 2,000 years ago. The spelling in these scrolls often differs considerably from later Masoretic texts.  In some scrolls, certain letters were freely added to indicate vowel sounds, since vowel points had not yet  been invented.  In other scrolls, fewer letters were used.  A comparison between all extant Bible manuscripts shows that the meaning of the Bible text remains intact.  Yet, it also clearly indicates that the spelling and number of letters vary from text to text.

The search for a supposed hidden message depends upon an absolutely unchanging text. One letter altered would completely distort the sequence-and the message if there was one.  God has preserved his message through the Bible.  But he has not preserved each letter intact, as if he were obsessed with  such trivial matters as spelling changes over the course of centuries.  Does this not indicate that he has not buried a hidden message in the Bible? -Isaiah 40:8; 1 Peter 1:24, 25.

Next time: Do We Need A Hidden Bible Code?

Watchtower, 2000