Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Andre,

I'm sorry, I'm not convinced by these "Bible codes". This can quite 
easily happen by chance. Let's look at some statistics and compare 
with what would happen if instead of the Hebrew Bible we looked a 
random selection of the same length, over 1 million letters chosen 
from the 22 Hebrew consonants. (We are looking at the consonants only 
I think). What is the chance of finding the name "Hitler" "hidden" in 
this way? Presumably we are looking for just He-Taw-Lamed-Resh, or 
perhaps Tet instead of Taw, or either. For any given starting place 
and skip value (number of letters skipped in either direction), we 
have a 1 in 22 chance of finding the right letter, which gives 1 in 22 
to the power 4 or about 1 in 200,000 that all four letters are 
correct. Thus for each skip value we would expect to find the name 
Hitler 5 times in the random text. Jeffrey's examples allows skip 
values as high as 153, and in both directions, so we must multiply by 
at least 300 and so expect to find the name Hitler "hidden" 1500 times 
in a random text the length of the Bible! (The details will be 
slightly different if you weight the proportions of each letter 
according to how common they are: this will mean more "hidden" 
examples of words spelt with common letters).

Longer phrases will of course be rarer, but if when you find the word 
"Auschwitz" (also only four Hebrew consonants?) you look at the 
surrounding random selection of consonants, there is a pretty high 
chance that you can make them mean something appropriate. Obviously 
the chances are less if you restrict yourself to a short passage in 
Deuteronomy, but in fact the cases quoted are from several parts of 
Deuteronomy which is long enough in itself for several occurrences of 
"Hitler", "Auschwitz" etc.

So I conclude that these phrases could well have got into the Hebrew 
Bible by chance, and so (especially considering the textual problems 
others have mentioned) very probably they did. Now I believe that all 
"chance" is subject to the providence of God, but I don't think this 
is a case of anything deliberately hidden but of people finding in the 
text something which was never intended by anyone.

Peter Kirk