The Torah Codes Are Real

As you read this section, keep in mind that the New Testament is not merely a history book, it's meant to change us to become more and more like Jesus. When we read any passages in the New Testament, our goal should be to discern what God wants us to believe and do so that we can be obedient to Him.

Ancient Jewish tradition says that there are multiple ways of understanding the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible). One way is simply by reading what the text says. But according to ancient Jewish rabbis, information was hidden by God in the Torah using various types of codes (see Cracking the Bible Code

by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D.). In one of those types of codes, words are formed by starting on a particular letter and then skipping a specific number of letters until the hidden information is spelled out.

For example, I've used this method to hide the word "TORAH" in the following sentence:

Be sure to read the story of Roger A. Smith's illustrious career!

To find the hidden word, first eliminate all punctuation and spaces:

BESURETOREADTHESTORYOFROGERASMITHSILLUSTRIOUSCAREER

Now, starting with the T in "THE," count every 5 letters until the word "TORAH" is spelled out:

BESURETOREADTHESTORYOFROGERASMITHSILLUSTRIOUSCAREER
            ^    ^    ^    ^    ^

In the above example, the "skip distance" is 5 (if the word had been spelled backwards then the skip distance would be -5). The hidden word can easily be seen if we wrap around at the skip distance:

BESUR
ETORE
ADTHE
STORY
OFROG
ERASM
ITHSI
LLUST
RIOUS
CAREE
R

This is a very easy way to encrypt a secret message in a text. Anyone can find the encoded message if they know the correct letter to start with and the proper number of letters to skip.

Experts in cryptography (the science of breaking codes) refer to this type of code as an "Equidistant Letter Sequence" (ELS) because the hidden words are encoded using an equal distance between letters. In order to break a coded message, experts in cryptography first write the message as a string of letters, eliminating all punctuation and spaces, just as I did in my example above. According to ancient Jewish tradition, this is exactly how the Torah was given to Moses by God, as a string of letters with no punctuation or spaces (Satinover, p.1, 8, 35, 40, 48-49, 54), which would make sense if there really is hidden information encoded in the Torah using the "skipping letters" type of code (or any other types of codes). In modern books and articles, the encoded words (using equidistant letter sequences) are usually referred to as Torah Codes or Bible Codes.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the rabbi known as The Vilna Gaon

("the genius of Vilna") was "probably the most influential Jewish leader in modern history." He made the following statement:

"All that was, is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible...and not merely in a general sense, but including the details of every person individually, and the most minute details of everything that happened to him from the day of his birth until his death; likewise of every kind of animal and beast and living thing that exists, and of herbage, and of all that grows or is inert." (Satinover, p.2)

That statement echoes the teaching of rabbis down through the ages (e.g., Satinover, p.43, 45-47), which is why for millennia there have been very exact rules for handcopying the Torah, letter by letter, because the scribes are taught that "Should you perchance omit or add one single letter from the Torah, you would thereby destroy all the universe" (Satinover, p.4). In other words, from ancient times it was believed that the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible) contains specific details about everything in history, even down to modern times, and this information can only be preserved if the Torah is copied precisely, without any variations in spelling.

In 1994, a paper entitled Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis

by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg was published in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal called Statistical Science

. In this paper, the first scientific experiment with the Torah Codes was described. To summarize this experiment, the Codes researchers created a list of 32 famous rabbis (sometimes referred to as great sages) in Israel's history, all of whom lived between the 9th and 18th centuries AD (thousands of years after the Torah was written). They then determined the birth and death dates for those 32 men. By using the different Hebrew forms of each man's name, and the different Hebrew forms of each birth and death date, they had a list of just over 160 combinations of name/date pairs to search for. Every piece of information used in this experiment was objectively decided on (using strict rules) before the experiment was run in order to eliminate any subjectivity or wiggle room. They then did a "skipping letters" search in the Hebrew version of Genesis to see if these men's names are encoded near their birth or death dates in Genesis. Despite the researchers' initial skepticism, it turned out that many of these men's names were actually found encoded near their birth or death dates in Genesis, far beyond what could be expected just by random chance.

Concerning random chance, imagine that you're walking down the street and you see 5 pennies on the ground near each other. You can't prove that this happened just by accident, but your gut instinct tells you that those coins probably fell out of someone's pocket and were not deliberately placed on the ground in that arrangement. But if you come across 5 pennies that are neatly stacked on top of each other, your gut instinct tells you that it's impossible for that to have happened just by accident or by random chance; you can't prove it, but it must have been done deliberately for some unknown reason. The point here is that it's not always possible to prove something, so scientists use statistics to calculate the odds against something happening just by random chance.

For example, imagine that a scientific experiment is performed, obtaining a specific result, and the odds against that result happening just by random chance are 20 to 1 (or greater, such as 30 to 1). In such a case, most scientific journals would publish the outcome of the experiment because 20 to 1 odds (or greater) are enough to show that the result could not have happened just by random chance. For the Famous Rabbis (or Great Sages) experiment described above, the Statistical Science journal (mentioned above) refused to publish the result unless the odds against it happening just by random chance are 1,000 to 1 (50 times stricter than their usual 20 to 1 requirement). After the Famous Rabbis experiment was performed, it was calculated that the odds against the result happening just by random chance are 62,500 to 1 (more than 62 times better than the higher 1,000 to 1 odds required by the Statistical Science journal). Therefore, Statistical Science published the article (Satinover, p.202-203). Many other scientific experiments on the Torah Codes have been performed since then, confirming over and over that the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible) contains hidden information, including specific information concerning modern events, encoded using the "skipping letters" type of code. This hidden or encoded information could not have happened just by random chance (as shown by rigorous statistical analysis), and Moses could not have put it there on his own when he wrote the Torah (because some of the information involves people and events from thousands of years after Moses died), and by comparing ancient copies of the Torah with modern copies, it's clear that the hidden information was not introduced thousands of years after the Torah was written.

Critics have tried to show that the Torah Codes don't exist, but their charges and accusations have been answered in detail by the world-class experts in statistics, cryptography, pattern recognition, and mathematics who are performing these experiments and researching these codes. Some of the researchers were atheists and skeptics when they began working on these experiments, and became strong believers in God (i.e., the Orthodox Jewish faith) as a direct result of their research into the Torah Codes. Those former atheists and skeptics now firmly believe that God exists and that He deliberately placed hidden information in the Torah thousands of years ago.

I've provided just a very simplified description of the research being done, but you can learn more detailed information in these articles and books:

Torah Codes Explained - This article provides a short summary about the Torah Codes, the history of finding these codes, and some of the people involved in modern research into these codes.
A Primer on the Torah Codes Controversy for Laymen - This PDF provides a very detailed and very interesting explanation of how the codes work and various scientific experiments that have had highly significant results. It also answers many of the charges that critics have made. It's quite technical, but it's written for non-technical people.
Cracking the Bible Code by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D. - I read this book many years ago and found it to be very interesting and informative.
Torah Codes: A Glimpse into the Infinite by Robert M. Haralick, Eliyahu Rips, and Matityahu Glazerson - I haven't read this book yet, but it was co-authored by one of the original Torah Codes researchers.

The bottom line is that numerous strictly-controlled scientific experiments have been performed over the past 40+ years, and these experiments have found all kinds of information (including people and events in modern times) encoded into the text of the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible) in ways that are far, far beyond the possibility of it happening just by random chance. Therefore, either this is all a hoax, or there were significant flaws in every experiment that no one has been able to find after all these years, or else the encoded information was deliberately placed there by God when He gave the Torah to Moses. As you can see in the articles and books listed above, critics have tried very hard to dispute and discredit the existence of these Torah Codes or Bible Codes, but their charges and accusations have been answered in detail by the Torah Codes researchers.

What the Lord wants you to know (see my article called How to Discern God's Guidance) is that the Torah Codes are real. He deliberately placed that hidden information into the Torah, along with a mind-boggling amount of other hidden information that He encoded into the Torah. If you're one of the vast majority of Christians who has not yet learned how to discern what God is telling them (see my article called How to Discern God's Guidance), then the only way for you to determine the truth of what's written here is by allowing God to confirm these things for you by doing a miracle (see my article called God Will Do Miracles to Confirm What This Website Teaches for the details).

In fact, here's an example of encoded (hidden) information in Genesis that you can verify for yourself. The Codes researchers say that in a large number of cases, a particular passage of Scripture contains key words (relating to the topic of the passage) encoded many times within that passage using the "skipping letters" type of code. For example, Genesis 2:4-10 describes the Garden of Eden, and somewhere I read that it contains the three-letter Hebrew word for "Eden" encoded 16 times within those 7 verses. As a computer programmer by profession, about 25 years ago I decided to test this for myself. I found a Hebrew version of Genesis, and wrote a program to search for the 3 letters in the Hebrew word for "Eden" in Genesis 2:4-10. The 3 Hebrew letters are Ayin (which is silent), Daleth, and Nun, which I called A, D, and N, respectively. To my great surprise, my program found all 16 "Edens" (ADNs) encoded in that passage. Some of them are written forwards and the rest are written backwards, plus there are 2 more occurrences of the word "Eden" in the text of the passage. To verify them for yourself, find a Hebrew version of Genesis 2:4-10 and follow these directions (Hebrew is written from right to left, but as an English speaker I probably counted the letters from left to right):

Starting on the 1st A, skip 84 letters to the D, then skip another 84 letters to the N.
Starting on the 2nd A, skip 82 letters to the D, then skip another 82 letters to the N.
Starting on the 3rd A, skip 15 letters to the D, then skip another 15 letters to the N.
Starting on the 3rd A, skip 106 letters to the D, then skip another 106 letters to the N.
Starting on the 4th A, skip 57 letters to the D, then skip another 57 letters to the N.
Starting on the 5th A, skip 52 letters to the D, then skip another 52 letters to the N.
Starting on the 5th A, skip 104 letters to the D, then skip another 104 letters to the N.
Starting on the 8th A, skip 0 letters to the D, then skip another 0 letters to the N.
Starting on the 8th A, skip 52 letters to the D, then skip another 52 letters to the N.
Starting on the 14th A, skip 0 letters to the D, then skip another 0 letters to the N.
Starting on the 1st N, skip 59 letters to the D, then skip another 59 letters to the A.
Starting on the 2nd N, skip 116 letters to the D, then skip another 116 letters to the A.
Starting on the 3rd N, skip 89 letters to the D, then skip another 89 letters to the A.
Starting on the 4th N, skip 70 letters to the D, then skip another 70 letters to the A.
Starting on the 7th N, skip 44 letters to the D, then skip another 44 letters to the A.
Starting on the 8th N, skip 40 letters to the D, then skip another 40 letters to the A.
Starting on the 8th N, skip 50 letters to the D, then skip another 50 letters to the A.
Starting on the 9th N, skip 46 letters to the D, then skip another 46 letters to the A.

Someone might assume that Moses figured out how to place all of the above letters into Genesis 2:4-10 while making the entire passage sound perfectly clear and understandable, but since there are so many examples of hidden words throughout Genesis, it's virtually inconceivable that Moses could have worked out the hidden encodings of all of those words and then written intelligible passages of Scripture around all of the hidden words. The only other option is that God deliberately hid (encoded) a massive amount of information in the 5 books of the Torah.

If you recall, 20 to 1 odds (or greater, such as 30 to 1) are enough to show that the result could not have happened just by random chance. Dr. Satinover's book provides many examples of encoded information in the Torah that are far beyond random chance, such as these:

When the passage we looked at (Genesis 2:4-10) is expanded to include 7 more verses (Genesis 2:4-17, which mentions the river that flowed from the Garden of Eden), there are now 3 occurrences of the word "Eden" in the text and 19 hidden "Edens," plus there are 3 occurrences of the Hebrew word for "the river" in the text and 13 hidden occurrences of "the river." The approximate odds against those "Edens" occurring just by random chance are better than 100 to 1, and the approximate odds against those "the rivers" occurring just by random chance are better than 1,000 to 1 (Satinover, p.123-124). That's a lot of encodings in 14 sentences (NIV) for humans to try to create on their own (try it for yourself if you don't believe me), and it's far beyond the possibility of those being accidental or coincidental.
In Genesis 1:29-2:17, which talks about the edible plants that God gave to Adam for food, all 7 species of seed-bearing fruit in Israel are encoded within those 23 sentences (NIV) (Satinover, p.144-154). This passage overlaps the passage in the previous bullet point, so there are even more hidden words in Genesis 2:4-17 than just "Eden" and "the river," which is much farther beyond the possibility of those being accidental or coincidental.
According to ancient Jewish tradition there were 25 types of trees in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 2:7-3:3, which talks about the trees, all 25 types of trees are encoded within those 25 sentences (NIV). The odds against that happening just by random chance are about 100,000 to 1 (Satinover, p.145-146). This passage overlaps the passage in the first bullet point, so there are even more hidden words in Genesis 2:4-17 than just "Eden," "the river," and different species of seed-bearing fruit, which is much farther beyond the possibility of those being accidental or coincidental.
In Leviticus 1:1-13, which describes some of the duties of the sons of Aaron (the first high priest and the brother of Moses), the Hebrew word for "Aaron" can be expected to be encoded in that passage about 8 times just by random chance (Satinover, p.33-40). However, it's actually encoded 25 times in those 16 sentences (NIV), and the odds against that happening just by random chance were calculated to be 2,166,818 to 1 (Satinover, p.33-40).

Again, since there are so many examples of hidden words throughout the Torah, it's virtually inconceivable that Moses could have worked out the hidden encodings of all of those words and then written intelligible passages of Scripture around all of the hidden words. The only other option is that God deliberately hid (encoded) a massive amount of information in the 5 books of the Torah.