The best way to explain what the "Bible Codes" is, is by using an example.
Let's take the first verse in the Bible, Genesis 1:1.
      In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

We then remove all punctuation, spaces, and we make all the letters the same case (lower case or upper case). We end up with one long string of letters.
      inthebeginninggodcreatedtheheavenandtheearth

We now start looking for hidden words (codes) in this string. One example is shown.
      inthebe G inningg O dcreate D theheavenandtheearth
If we start at the 8^th letter, and we take every 8^th letter, we find the word "god". We started at position 8, and used a constant spacing (ELS) of 8.

We now break the string into smaller pieces in such a way that the word is written top-down.
      inthebe G inninggod
      inningg O dcreatedt
      dcreate D theheaven

The word "god" that we found, crosses 3 other words, namely "beginning", "God" and "created".
      inthebeGinninggod
      inninggOdcreatedt
      dcreateDtheheaven

Other words can be also be found near this word e.g. the word "age".
      intheb E Ginninggod
      innin G gOdcreatedt
      dcre A teDtheheaven

Different "theories" can now be proven (or disproved) using this information.

Note: If you find the word "branham", and it crosses the word "prophet", it does not conclusively prove that William Marrion Branham was a true prophet of God. The questions you should ask are:

• Which Branham? William Branham, Billy-Paul Branham, Joseph Branham, David Branham or any of the hundreds of other Branhams in the world?
• Does the word "prophet" refer to a true prophet, or a false prophet?

Let us look at the above example again
     inthebeginninggodcreatedtheheavenandtheearth

The above string is 44 letters in length.
Let's assume we want to search for a hidden word of 5 letters.

If we started searching for the hidden word at the first letter in the string, we must be able to fit the remaining 4 letters of the word we are searching for into the rest of the string (43 characters) -- else we will never find the word in this string. The maximum spacing between the letters is thus 43 divided by 4, which is about 11. (See the left side of the following graph.)
Example:
      I nthebegin N inggodcre A tedthehea V enandthee A rth
The offset (starting position) is 1, and the spacing is 10.

If however we started at the 9^th-last letter, the maximum spacing would be 2 (the right side of the following graph).
Example:
     inthebeginninggodcreatedtheheavenan D t H e E a R t H
The offset (starting position) is 36, and the spacing is 2.

If we had to draw a graph, it would look like this:

The spacing on the left side would be 11 (44 divided by 4). On the right side it would be 2.

The search word will only be found inside this triangle.

The longer the word we are searching for, the smaller this triangle will become. (The right top side of the traingle depends on the length of the search word.)

The longer the search word, the less chance we have of finding the word. This means you would not find the phrase "williammarrionbranham" (William Marrion Branham) in the Bible Codes. The search phrase is very long, and thus the chances of finding it are very small. (We did search for it, and did not find it.)

Commercial programs

Searching for these "hidden codes" will take very long. We need computer programs to help us with these searches. There are commercial programs available that allow you to search the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). Some allow you to search the English Bible. Some programs are "freeware".

Most of these programs have some limitations however.

• They do not allow you to examine any book of your choice. They may be limited to the English Bible, or the Hebrew Old Testament. We wanted to search any book of our choice.
• They do not allow you to examine any language of your choice. We wanted to search in Hebrew, Greek, English, Afrikaans and Dutch.
• They do not allow you to search random letter strings (mixed-up letter combinations).
• They are slow.
• They do not provide the source code, so you have no way of knowing if they are reliable.
• They do not all allow searching for the word "backwards", effectively limiting your search by half.
• They do not provide the statistics you need to properly analyze this "phenomenon".
• They have a "cut-off" point. The typical spacing is not allowed to be more than 2000 letters.

  

  The commercial programs ignore the top 99% of the triangle area! They cut out the majority of the finds! In our research, we have found that they typically ignore 99.3% of the results, e.g. in the English Bible.

Letter	Occurrences	Percentage
A	275183	8.53
B	48589	1.51
C	54619	1.69
D	157791	4.89
E	410579	12.72
F	83335	2.58
G	54923	1.70
H	282400	8.75
I	193175	5.99
J	8787	0.27
K	22129	0.69
K	129512	4.01
M	79787	2.47
N	224246	6.95
O	242087	7.50
P	42895	1.33
Q	953	0.03
R	169278	5.24
S	189502	5.87
T	316406	9.80
U	83069	2.57
V	30339	0.94
W	65266	2.02
X	1449	0.04
Y	58274	1.81
Z	2971	0.09
Total	3227544	100.00

The results are obvious. The letter 'e' occurs more than any other letter. The chances of you finding a letter 'e' in the KJV is 431 better than finding the letter 'q'.

Depending on the letters in the "hidden" word you are searching for, you will find the density of the "dots" changing.

Now let us have a look again at our search words. The word 'branham' consists of letters that are found less often than the letters of the word 'statist'. When we calculate the difference, we find that we are more likely to find the word "statist" than the word "branham" by about 19 times. Does this correlate with the findings? Yes. We found it was more than 18 times more. This explains why the scatter-graph was denser with the word "statist" than with the word "branham". It is purely statistical. The even distribution of the "dots" also shows that this is a statistical phenomenon.

Formulas and reality

With our research, we also developed formulas that we can use to calculate (statistically) how many times a specific word should occur in the string. We then used these formulas to predict certain words' occurrences. We then ran our program to check if the predicted results were true. In all cases we were accurate in our predictions within 3%.

To predict the results for other languages and books, we simply check the number of times each letter occurs in the book. Then, using the updated table of statistics (like the table above), we apply the same formulas. Each time we were accurate within 3%.

Hebrew

The Hebrew language is far better suited to find "hidden codes" than most languages. This is probably why most programs only work with the Hebrew.

• It consists of fewer letters in the alphabet.
  
• Names are normally shorter, e.g. you can write "Shakespeare" as "shkspr" (eliminating the vowels), which is 6 characters instead of 11. This means that the probability of finding it increases dramatically.
  
• You can write dates in Hebrew using letters, e.g. A=1, B=2, etc. This makes the Hebrew ideal for attaching dates to certain events. Again these search patterns are very short, and you can find quite a few of them.
  
• Many words have multiple meanings, so one can find codes and associations much easier.

This study, with all the graphs and figures, is © copyrighted by WR de Louw, 1999-2009, wordwide

 

nathan.co.za      Bible | Sermons | Books | Studies | Missions | Stories