The Bible code

The Bible code is the popular name for equidistant letter sequences (ELS) in the Hebrew text of the Bible: words spelled by letters that stand the same number of places apart when the text is written out with no spaces between the words. Torah codes and Bible codes name the same thing.

Torah codes is the Jewish term. In Jewish usage the Torah is the Five Books of Moses, where the classic observations and the 1994 study were made; the whole Bible is the Tanakh — the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, twenty-four books. The name Bible code became common with a 1997 book of that title. This site searches both: the Torah, the whole Tanakh, any book or any range of chapters.

A sequence belongs to one exact string of letters. A translation has different letters in a different order, so every search here reads the Hebrew of the Leningrad Codex, the consonants as written.

Choose a starting letter and a skip — a number of letters — and read every letter that many places apart: at a skip of 50, the 1st, the 51st, the 101st letter, and so on. A sequence can run forward, in the text's own order, or backward, which is shown with a negative skip.

To see where the letters stand, the text is laid out as a matrix: rows of equal width, often the skip itself, so that the sequence stands as a straight column. Other words can then be looked for near it in the same rectangle. That freedom — which width, which rectangle, which neighbouring words and which spellings — is what the whole debate turns on.

The Bible Code, by the American journalist Michael Drosnin, was published in 1997 and was widely read; a sequel followed in 2002.

The book said it built on the 1994 paper in Statistical Science and went further: it laid out matrices in which the names of people and events stood near other words — among them Yitzhak Rabin's name beside a phrase about an assassin — and said its author had written to warn Rabin more than a year before his assassination in November 1995. The book presented these matrices as predictions, some of them of events still to come.

The authors of the 1994 paper publicly distanced themselves from the book; Eliyahu Rips, one of them, issued a statement in 1997 that he did not support its work or its conclusions.

Critics, mathematicians among them, answered that in a text of hundreds of thousands of letters, with the skip, the width of the matrix, the spellings and the nearby words all chosen after looking, a matrix of related words can be found for almost any subject.

Drosnin said in a 1997 magazine interview that he would take his critics seriously when they found a comparable assassination in Moby Dick. Brendan McKay, a mathematician in Australia, searched the English text of Herman Melville's novel in the same way and published matrices placing the names of assassinated figures, among them Indira Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., beside words about their deaths.

The statistical record is two papers in the same journal, one for and one against; each is given here as the history page gives it.

Equidistant letter sequences are real in the plain sense: they are there, in the Torah and in any long text, and anyone can count them. The question is whether there are more of them, or closer together, than chance alone would give.

Measured, short words made of common letters appear at some skip almost everywhere — a four-letter word of common letters is expected tens of thousands of times in the Torah at skips of 2 to 5,000 — and long words almost nowhere. That is why every count on this site stands beside the number chance alone would be expected to produce in the same letters, and why control runs shuffle the same letters and search again.

This laboratory measures and claims nothing: it finds the sequences, shows where every letter stands, and prints what chance alone would produce beside every count.

Views differ. Many contemporary rabbis caution against treating letter sequences as evidence of anything or as a way to learn of future events, and urge that the Torah be studied for its plain meaning and its teaching; others have found the observations a reason to look more closely at the text.

Type a word in English and the laboratory offers its Hebrew spellings — the word as the Tanakh writes it, the modern Hebrew word, the established spelling of a name — each with its meaning beside it, so you choose the letters that are searched. Or type the Hebrew yourself.

Choose the scope: the Torah (the default), the whole Tanakh, a single book or a range of chapters. Every count comes with the chance figure beside it, every letter links to its verse, and the matrix shows where the letters stand.

A free account runs 7 code searches, and every search you have run stays open to re-run at any time; without an account, each search shows a preview.

From the first ת of Genesis — the last letter of בראשית — every 50th letter reads ת, ו, ר, ה: the word תורה at a skip of 50. In Genesis, תורה appears at skip 50 3 times; chance alone would give about 2.2.

Every term below has a page of its own: its count in the Torah at skips 2 to 5,000 beside what chance alone would give, its shortest skips with their verses, and its count across the Tanakh.