Are There Hidden Codes in the Bible?

Bible Codes, Ancient and Modern

For hundreds of years both Jews and Christians have been intrigued with the idea that the Bible might have some mysterious hidden code divinely implanted in the text, just waiting for the readers with the right insight to uncover it. Through the centuries numerous individuals and groups have claimed to have found hidden “codes” in the Bible. At the close of the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, new code systems were supposedly “discovered” through the use of computer analysis. What are these codes about and do they have any validity?

Although numerous “code” systems have been proposed throughout the years, in general they can be synthesized down into three basic code systems: an Old Testament-era system (atbash), a New Testament-era system (gematria), and a modern, computer-era system (equidistant letter sequencing).

Atbash—an Alphabet Cryptogram

How the Atbash Code Works

Some people may have used the atbash code back in grade school without even knowing it. Atbash is a simple alphabetic cryptogram in which one uses the first letter of the alphabet to represent the last letter, the second letter to represent the next to the last letter, and so forth. In English, one would use A to represent Z, B to represent Y, C to represent X, and so on.

A lion from the “Procession Street” in ancient Babylon. Twice Jeremiah uses the Atbash Sheshach to refer to Babylon (25:26; 51:41).

Biblical Examples of Atbash?

There is little doubt that Jeremiah uses atbash at least three times (25:26; 51:1; and 51:41). In Jeremiah 25:26 and 51:41, the prophet uses the term Sheshach in a context that clearly refers to Babel. Applying atbash to the Hebrew alphabet, the letter shin (sh), next to last in the alphabet, represents the letter bet (b), which is second in the alphabet, and so forth. Thus Sheshach as an atbash represents Babel. Another example is in Jeremiah 51:1, where the prophet proclaims judgment on Leb Kamai, an unknown place if interpreted literally, but if seen as an atbash it refers to Chaldea, another name for Babylonia.

Is the Atbash Code Valid?

Evidence of atbash being used in the ancient world goes back as early as 1200 BC. Most of the time when it occurs in the nonbiblical literature it is associated with children’s or other students’ educational exercises. Within the context of Jeremiah there is little doubt that the words Sheshach and Leb Kamai are references to Babylon and Chaldea, so we can be fairly certain that Jeremiah is using the atbash code. What is not clear is why. First of all, this code is so simple that it wouldn’t have actually fooled anyone. So Jeremiah’s motive cannot be to keep his prophecies secret from the Babylonians in order to keep safe. Furthermore, the book of Jeremiah is filled with prophecies against Babylon. In a book where he mentions Babylon frequently and openly, what is the point of coding or hiding three references? So why does Jeremiah use the atbash cryptogram? In all probability Jeremiah is being a little bit sarcastic. As the Israelites go into exile, they do probably enter a time where they had to be very cautious about saying anything against the conquering Babylonians. Perhaps they used “code” words when they spoke negatively against Babylon. Jeremiah, who openly proclaims the end of Babylon, probably uses these rather silly code words for Babylon with a touch of sarcasm. His message is probably something along the lines of “This great power Babylon—which frightened you so much that you used secret code words to speak against her—will be destroyed by God completely.”

The use of atbash in the Bible is rare, and there is little convincing evidence that atbash is used in the Bible anywhere else than in the three texts mentioned above.

Gematria—a Numbers Cryptogram

How Gematria Works

The Hebrew language can use the letters of the alphabet to represent sounds in the spelling of words (i.e., the normal use of alphabet letters), but it can also use the letters to represent numbers. For example, aleph, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, can be used as a letter in a word, or it can represent the number 1. Likewise, beth, the second letter of the alphabet, can also stand for 2, and so forth up to the number 9. The next consecutive letters in the alphabet are used to stand for 10, 20, 30, and so on, up to 90, followed by letters representing 100 to 900, and so forth.

What gematria does is to suggest that the interconnection between the letters and the number value they represent is much deeper than that suggested above. That is, using the numerical value of the letters in regular words and by applying basic math (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), the proponents of gematria find all kinds of new and hidden meanings in the words. For example, the Hebrew word for father is composed of the two letters aleph and beth. Aleph stands for 1 and beth stands for 2, so the sum of the word is 3. Mother is comprised by the letters aleph (1) and mem (40), the sum of the word equaling 41. The word for child has three letters—yod (10), lamed (30), and dalet (4), which equals 44. So father (3) plus mother (41) equals child (44). This is an example of a very simple use of gematria. In advanced discussions, it can be very complex and mystical (which is often the intention).

Biblical Examples of Gematria?

Gematria is used as an important interpretive approach to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) within certain Jewish mystical movements, primarily the movement known as Kabbalah. However, although using individual Hebrew letters to represent numbers was probably widespread by the first century AD, there is no firm evidence that the individual letters of the Hebrew alphabet were used to represent numbers during the time when the Old Testament was written. The conceptual system under­lying gematria (that the writers would use individual letters to represent numbers) is not attested until well after the close of the Old Testament canon. Thus the many complex examples of gematria in the Old Testament proposed in the Kabbalah and rabbinic literature are highly unlikely.

Caesar Nero depicted on a Roman coin.

Ironically, it is in the New Testament that we find the most likely candidate for gematria. It is well established that by the New Testament era, number cryptogram systems similar to gematria were in use throughout the Mediterranean world. Thus it was a literary tool that was readily available to the writers of the New Testament and it was a feature that readers in the first century would probably have recognized. Some New Testament scholars think that gematria provides our best interpretive approach to understanding Revelation 13:18, which reads: “This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.” These scholars note that the letters in the Hebrew equivalent of the name Nero Caesar add up to 666. But there is no consensus among scholars on this.

Is the Gematria Code Valid?

There is no doubt that gematria was being used by writers in the ancient world by the time of the New Testament (first century AD). So it is certainly plausible that John could use it as he wrote the book of Revelation. However, numbers in general play a significant symbolic role in the apocalyptic literary style of Revelation, so it is difficult to establish with certainty whether John is using gematria for the number 666 in Revelation 13:18 or just using standard apocalyptic symbolism. For the Old Testament, as mentioned above, it cannot be established that writers were even using individual letters to represent numbers in the Old Testament era, so it is doubtful that gematria was used by any of the authors in the Old Testament.

Equidistant Letter Sequencing: A Modern Bible Code

How the Equidistant Letter Sequencing (ELS) Code Works

This so-called Bible code works on the premise that there are names and predictions hidden in the biblical text. What “hides” them is that each letter of the name is separated from the next letter by a large number of other “spacer” letters (sometimes thousands of letters). Each letter of the name is equidistantly spaced by the same number of letters. Often one of the letters also intersects some regular word that helps to make the prediction.

Cats were important in Egypt, both as pets and as symbols of deities. But there is not a hidden code reference to cats in Num. 4:3.

This code was “discovered” at the end of the twentieth century through the use of computers. Usually the procedure is as follows. The operators take a certain portion of the Old Testament Hebrew text, usually the Pentateuch. Then they remove all spaces between words, creating a continuous stream of consecutive letters. Then they instruct the computer to search for a name or other word. First the computer looks at every other letter. Then it looks at every third letter, every fourth letter, every fifth letter, and so forth until it is looking at letters spaced thousands of letters apart. The computer then analyzes the new word possibilities that the equidistant letters can create and tries to find a “hit” or match against one of the words the operators are looking for.

A simple example might help to clarify how this works. Let’s take a short three-letter word like cat and search through a small portion of text (Num. 4:3), looking for an equidistant letter spacing for cat. Does Numbers 4:3 contain the hidden word cat? Here is the text:

Count all the men from thirty to fifty years of age who come to serve in the work in the Tent of Meeting. (Num. 4:3)

The first step is to remove all of the spaces between the words. Thus we have:

Countallthemenfromthirtytofiftyyearsofagewhocometoserveintheworkinthetentofmeeting

Next we want to look at every other letter, then every third letter, fourth letter, and so on, until we find cat. If we persist long enough, we can indeed find the word cat, with each letter in cat separated from the next by a 32-letter spacing! We have shown the results below with the cat letters in bold. Starting with the c in count, skip over 32 letters and arrive at a in years, followed by a 32-letter skip to t in the.

CountallthemenfromthirtytofiftyyeArsofagewhocometoserveintheworkinThetentofmeeting.

Obviously three-letter words are easy to find and we could find “cat” in hundreds, if not thousands of locations in the Old Testament. Longer words are much more difficult to find. However, if one has enough text and a computer program to carry out the search, often even very long names can be found.

Biblical Examples of the ELS Bible Code?

One of the more famous examples that was used to popularize this Bible code at the end of the twentieth century centered on the name of a former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who had been assassinated. The ELS advocates tried to prove that the Bible had predicted (in hidden code) the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin thousands of years in advance. Here is what they did. They had their computer search throughout the Pentateuch until it located the twelve-letter name of Yitzhak Rabin and with an equidistant spacing for each of the twelve letters. The sequence started in Deuteronomy 2:33, with the first letter of Yitzhak Rabin. The computer then skipped the next 4,722 letters to find the next letter in his name in Deuteronomy 4:42, followed by another skip of 4,722 letters to Deuteronomy 7:20, and so forth, skipping 4,722 letters each time until reaching the last letter in Deuteronomy 24:16. Those who were arguing for the validity of this approach pointed out that the second letter of Yitzhak Rabin’s name is part of Deuteronomy 4:42. This verse, it was claimed, contains the phrase “the assassin will assassinate” (although this translation is rather puzzling; most English translations do not translate the verse in this manner). According to the proponents of this code, the intersection of the name Yitzhak Rabin with the verse about “assassination” was a prediction of the assassination of the prime minister thousands of years before it happened. Many ELS proponents claimed that the ELS code also contained predictions of dozens of other significant modern people and events, including President Clinton, Watergate, the 1929 stock market crash, the Apollo moon landings, Adolph Hitler, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, and numerous others.

Is the ELS Bible Code Valid?

Bible scholars and statisticians alike have overwhelmingly rejected the validity of the ELS Bible code. Bible scholars point out that the actual number of letters in the Hebrew Bible was constantly changing as grammar and spelling changed over the years. If one is searching for hidden words with letters separated by thousands of other letters, the insertion of one different letter in a spelling variation will throw off the sequence. The spelling of Jerusalem, for example, varies in the Old Testament and apparently underwent some spelling variations over time. So which spelling contains the hidden ELS codes? Also, newer editions of the Hebrew Bible that reflect the findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls differ in numerous small ways from editions of the Hebrew Bible that were printed at the beginning of the twentieth century. The differences are largely insignificant as far as meaning goes, but they are highly significant if one is counting letter spacings across spans of thousands of letters. Most of the “spectacular” ELS results that were paraded out as proof of the method were taken from computer analysis of a Hebrew Bible that was being printed in the early twentieth century and not the Hebrew Bible that scholars read and study today. The Yitzhak Rabin example cited above works only on that one particular edition of the Hebrew Bible; it doesn’t work on older manuscripts, nor does it work on modern editions.

Even though the proponents of the ELS Bible code argue to the contrary, numerous books and review articles have pointed out that the ELS code fails statistically as well. The sheer number (hundreds of thousands) of letters in the Hebrew Bible (and even in the Pentateuch), along with the numerous variations in which ELS searches and counts, makes it a high statistical probability that even twelve-letter names like Yitzhak Rabin will be found and will also intersect a context that can be loosely connected in one way or the other into some sort of “prediction.” One set of scholars ran ELS tests in English on the novel Moby Dick. They also found numerous hidden “names” and “predictions” of assassinations and the like. This is very strong evidence that the ELS Bible code is not at all a code placed in the Bible by God, but rather a statistical oddity, fueled by a modern infatuation with computers and hidden knowledge.