Bible codes
Bible codes are various kinds of patterns identified in the subtext of the Bible which some Christians and Jews think were put there deliberately, for a purpose, by God or by the writers of the original texts.
All human languages have patterns, and, when put into written form, many of these patterns are easily noticed. But, among those who believe that at least some of the subtextual patterns in the Bible are unique to literature, there is the contention that one or more profound dynamics are uniquely involved in these patterns in the Bible. On the conservative side, there is a wide acceptance of the idea that some of these patterns were created by the original Hebrew scribes in order to help preserve the exactness to which the texts were copied, and to detect inferior copies that might be made by ignorant or nefarious persons. But, on the side of some ‘Bible Code’ zealots, there has been every manner of attempt to create a stir in favor of the idea that at least some of these patterns constitute a kind of high-tech mechanism for predicting any number of trivial and non-trivial future events.
Kinds of Bible codes
As with any text, there are very many different subtextual patterns in the Biblical text. In the interest of brevity, only a select set of these Biblical subtext patterns will be listed here.
. One kind of 'Bible code' is that found in Equidistant Letter Sequences, or ELS. The 'ELS codes' were made popular in the last century by Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips, his associate Doron Witztum, and several others.
. Another kind of 'Bible code' (and, for many people, the most interesting kind of subtextual pattern), is that found by listing, in chronological sequence, the meanings of the names of the antedeluvian patriarchs given in Genesis chapter 5.
. A third kind of 'Bible code' is that of a complex set of interconnecting subtextual patterns based on the number 144. 144 is the number of hours in the six days of the Creation Week, and, when 'visually' coded as 930 (Adam's age at death), leads to the Equidistant Verse Sequence (EVS) code of 111. By observing the sum of the three digits (1, 4, and 4), and then observing the differences, or 'distances', between the contiguous digits (1-4, 4-4), the number 144 is seen to 'state' "930" in a way similar to how a perfect circle is visually observed to 'state' "pi". 930 is the unique number of the man who represents all of humanity, and is found at the 111th verse (Genesis 5:5). The unit of 111 verses is found to be the key to pinpointing both explicit and implicit prophetically pivotal passages in the plain text of the Pentateuch. (A criticism of the 'EVS code' is in the fact that the original texts had no explicit verse divisions. But, while it is true that no explicit verse divisions existed in the original texts, and that any such divisions made were made only recently in world history, the text itself, like any text, is not comprised either of random or indifferent linguistic sets. Furthermore, while the standing verse divisions of the Bible may not be perfect, the kind of verse division of which they make use is, in general, superior for the purpose of general reference than are all other possible kinds of verse division.)
