The Bible Code

For at least a millennium, Tanakh (Old Testament) scholars have been aware that within the Masoretic text of the Tanakh are embedded words. For example, you might count every Xth letter forwards or backwards and come up with words and phrases that seem to be messages.  One instance of this is in Isaiah 53, which is a discussion of the unnamed Messiah who would save the world, and embedded into that text is Yeshua Shmi. You start in verse 10 with the second yod (a Hebrew character) and count forwards every 20^th letter and you get Yeshua Shmi which in English is “Yeshua is my name”. There are thousands of other examples.

For instance, in that same chapter, which is about the death of the Messiah, the names of each of the people that are named by the gospels as being in attendance at the crucifixion of Yeshua (Jesus) are embedded. The name Miriam appears three times, and there were three named Mary known to be at the crucifixion. 

Or one could turn to Genesis and read where God placed a garden in Eden, and find embedded in the text the names of every kind of tree mentioned anywhere in the Old Testament.

People rightly point out that you can also find in the Old Testament the name of Mohammed over a couple of thousand times and many phrases that are not in harmony with the teaching there. Or they point out that you can find words embedded in newspaper text.  It’s all random chance.  In trillions of words of text, we are likely to find something. And they are right.

BUT, how random is it when the embedded words fit the context into which they are embedded?  THAT is the phenomenon that is called the Bible Code. It’s like God’s signature woven into the text like a hologram embedded in our cash.

A week ago I wrote about levels of inspiration in the Bible. When a text has words acrostically woven through it, that text pretty much has to be written word for word in a precise way. And that is the teaching of the New Testament.  The New is basically a commentary on the Old, with some new history added, and the New Testament teaching about Scripture (meaning the only one they had then --- the Old) is that it is the TEXT that is inspired, not the writers (II Timothy 3:16). Jesus said that not one tittle or jot (notations in the Hebrew alphabet) would pass away from the Scriptures until they were all fulfilled.  Yes, it is the writings, not the writers, which are inspired. It doesn’t matter if a writer was sick, sleepy or soused. He still wrote was required. In II Peter 1:21, we read that these writes were “moved” by God to pass along God’s words. That word translated from the Greek scriptures (the New Testament was originally compiled in Greek, the language of education in the Roman Empire at that time), is a word that means to be forcefully moved outside of where a person might otherwise go.

So, to pick up from that previous post (https://god-study.blogspot.ca/2016/12/theories-of-biblical-inspiration.html), the Old Testament would have to have been made the way the verbal and dictation theories hold. My thought is the dynamic theory of inspiration applies to the New.