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Mysterious Bible Codes, p. 169-179)). Be- the question: do we today have a version of
cause numerous authors wrote the OT over a the Hebrew text that is letter-for-letter the
period of about one thousand years, it is for all same as the text as originally written?
practical purposes impossible for thousands of
coded messages based on ELS to have been A Basic Premise
"encoded" in the OT text by human design.
Therefore, the argument goes, the only reason- By its very nature the ELS Code demands
able conclusion is that the Code (and thus the the acceptance of an essential presupposition,
OT) is divine or supra-human in origin. namely that the Hebrew text we have today is
letter-for-letter precisely the same as the text
Scholars of various disciplines have of- originally penned by the various authors of the
fered a variety of criticisms of the Code. OT. That is, in order for the Code to work, not
Mathematicians argue that statistically such only must our present Hebrew text preserve
"codes" or patterns will occur by chance in the same number of characters as contained in
any text of similar length to the OT, particu- the original, but the letters also must be in the
larly one that includes no vowels as in the He- same order as first written. This necessity is
brew text (John Weldon, Decoding the Bible easily demonstrated with a simple example. In
Code, p. 94). Hebrew grammarians point out the character string "sdwdClko wOqwo dDpo
the liberties that Code proponents take with kjEmnx" the word "code" is found by using
the consonantal Hebrew text. In biblical He- every fifth letter. However, by simply insert-
brew vowels were not written, only conso- ing the single character "e" after the "C"
nants. Vowels were supplied when someone ("sdwdCelko Woqwo Ddpo kJemnx")my
read the text. In many cases which vowels are "code" now produces the nonsensical word
supplied affects not only pronunciation but "cwdj.) Hence my Code is invalidated by a
also the meaning of a word. For example, the change of one or more characters. The thesis
common Hebrew noun for "word" (dabar) is that today we have a pristine copy of the origi-
written with the consonants d-b-r, the two nal Hebrew text is the issue upon which the
vowels (-a-a-) being supplied by the reader. validity of the Code stands or falls.
Yet the same three consonants supplied instead
with the vowels -e-e- (deber) form a word Code proponents instinctively understand
meaning "pestilence." This and other charac- the necessity of accepting this premise in order
teristics of the Hebrew language make it fairly for the Code to work. Thus they either state or
easy to find or force specific meanings into a infer that the Hebrew text we have today has
given string of consonants (Phil Stanton, The been preserved without change or error since
Bible Code: Fact or Fake? pp. 35038). Oth- its inception. Note the following comments:
ers point to the failure of Code proponents to
consider the thousands of textual variants that "The three Torahs in use worldwide among
exist among the various manuscripts of the OT. the Jews -- the Ashkenazi, the Sephardi, and
Variant readings that add to or delete letters the Yemenite -- have only nine letter-level
from the Hebrew text, whether or not they variations total in the entire 304,805 letters of
change the substantive meaning of a passage, the text!" (Chuck Missler, The Cosmic Codes,
will certainly affect any "Code" based on p. 123).
counting character intervals between letters.
"Details of today's world are encoded in a text
But there is one problem with the Code that that has been set in stone for hundreds of
completely invalidates it. First we must ask years, and has existed for thousands of years.

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