Quote: Originally posted by Coin Toss on Jul 8, 2011
Re: Bible codes:
The Bible code (Hebrew: ????? ???"?), also known as the Torah code, is a method described as a "hidden code" of selecting letters from within the Hebrew Bible that form words and phrases supposedly demonstrating foreknowledge and prophecy. The study and results from this cipher have been popularized by Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code.
Examples have been documented in the past. One cited example is that by taking every 50th letter of the Book of Genesis, the Hebrew word for "bible" is spelled out. The same word is found similarly in each of the other five books of Moses. Modern computers were used to search for similar patterns and more complex variants, and reported in an academic paper in 1994 and later as a book. Drosnin and proponents hold that it is exceedingly unlikely such sequences could arise by chance, while skeptics and opponents hold that such sequences do often arise by chance, as demonstrated on other Hebrew and English texts.
Equidistant Letter Sequence method
The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is theEquidistant Letter Sequence(ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters inthissentenceforman ELS. With a skip of -4, and ignoring the spaces and punctuation, the wordsafestis spelled out.
Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each line.
Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy).
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Also as the Old Testsament was in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, both languages have gematria, that is letters have corresponding numbers.
For example, the name Nero comes out to 616. Some theologians believe that Recelation 13:18 :
Revelation 13:18
King James Version (KJV)
18Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
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Was originally 616, not 666, and using gematria Nero = 616.