We’re continuing with an examination of Bible confusion. Let’s hope I don’t add to it.

For this blog post, I’d like to take a look at an odd topic–Bible codes.

A few years ago there was a book called The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin which was very popular. The author claimed that there were secret messages hidden inside the Bible. People could find these messages through something called equidistant letter sequences (els).

Here’s how it supposedly works. You take a passage from the Bible, ignore all the spaces between words, and count a certain number of letters. Whatever you land on with your count (for example, every five letters) is a letter that you highlight. Then you count another five letters and highlight that letter that you land on. You do this repeatedly to see if those letters you have landed on spell out anything.

Let’s try a simple example. Look at this sentence: “All of our avenues are wide.” We will start with second letter (the letter “L”). Skip the next three letters and mark down the fourth letter (this time it is the letter “O”). If we do this repeatedly for our original sentence, we will have spelled out “LOVE.” Ah ha, we are on to something here–or are we?

It is reported that a scientist and mathematician in 1994 found the names of 34 famous Jewish people in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). Some verses in Genesis (if you skip every 50 letters) spell Torah.   So, is there something to this?  Skeptics say you can do the same in Moby Dick and end up predicting all sorts of things. Apparently, the probability of creating words and phrases that make sense is high if you use any skip method. There are a couple of websites that you can examine for more details if you are interested – biblecodedigest.com and skepdic.com/bibcode.html.