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Hidden "Codes" in the

Biblical Text?

David Maas

During the last decade the notion that hid- The classic example used to demonstrate
den codes are "embedded" in the Hebrew text ELS occurs in Genesis 1:1-5a. Starting with
of the Old Testament (OT) has become of the last letter of the first word of the Bible, the
great interest to evangelical and some Jewish tau roughly corresponding to our "t," and
circles. The idea has grown sufficiently in counting forward in intervals of forty-nine
popularity to spawn over two dozen books (in- characters, one discovers that the Hebrew
cluding at least one New York Times bestsel- word for "instruction" or "law" (torah) is
ler), several commercially available software spelled out every fiftieth letter. (Chuck
packages (for "decoding" the codes), a number Missler, The Cosmic Codes, pp. 126-129).
of television interviews and program episodes We will return to this example in a moment.
about the code, and at least one commercially
viable Hollywood movie. The relatively recent awareness of the
Code is due to technological advances. Prior
There are different nuances and complexi- to the advent of the modern computer it was
ties to this Code depending on which propo- extremely tedious to find such "codes" by
nent one listens to, but the underlying counting Hebrew characters manually (the ba-
methodology is quite simple. The Code is re- sic thought that "hidden codes" of various
ferred to as "Equidistant Letter Sequences," or types exist in the Hebrew text goes back at
ELS. The theory is that hidden words and sen- least to the Kabbalah of medieval Jewish
tences can be found "embedded" in the He- mysticism (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, pp.
brew text of the OT by counting Hebrew 337-343)). Yet today computers running ap-
letters at equally spaced intervals. That is, a propriate software can quickly scan the He-
person can locate certain meaningful words or brew text and detect a variety of "embedded
phrases, such as "hammer" and "anvil," if he messages" (several such programs can be
examines the letters at sequences that were downloaded from the Internet). By using com-
equally spaced in the Hebrew text. Thus, "if he puters Code proponents claim to have discov-
found the first letter of a significant word such ered thousands of words and sentences
as Torah, and then, by skipping forward seven "embedded" in most or all sections of the O.T.
letters he found the second letter of the word
Torah, he would continue to skip forward the The import assigned to the ELS codes is
same number of letters to see whether or not that their existence "proves" that the Bible, at
the complete word Torah was spelled out in least the OT, is "divine rather than human in
the text at equally spaced intervals" (Grant origin" (some Code proponents also claim to
Jeffrey, The Signature of God, pp. 255-256). have discovered messages "embedded" in the
Greek text of the NT (Grant Jeffrey, The

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