In recent years, there has been an interest among Bible scholars in a phenomenon called "equidistant letter sequences", or ELS's, in which the reader, by starting at a particular point in the Bible and taking letters at regular intervals, finds that words or phrases of particular significance appear to have been "encoded" by G-d. A recent book, "The Bible Code", by Michael Drosnin, makes the case that many of these ELS's predict the future. Some Christian authorities have even claimed to find ELS's which foretold the coming of Jesus; they have found ELS's of "Yeshua" (Jesus's Hebrew name), often as part of a meaningful phrase. For instance, Leviticus 21:10 contains the phrase, "hein dam Yeshua" - "behold the blood of Jesus" - at a skip of three letters. The odds of finding this phrase in the Book of Leviticus by chance at a skip of three or fewer letters have been calculated by Guy Cramer and Lori Eldridge as one chance in 69,711.30 - apparently an impressive find.
This is not, however, the whole story. First of all, the odds they quote are somewhat disingenuous. Instead of calculating the odds of finding "behold the blood of Jesus" in Leviticus at a skip of three or less, they should have calculated the odds of finding the phrase in any book of the Bible, at any skip distance. (After all, they are not ascribing significance to the fact that the find was in Leviticus instead of some other book or that the skip distance was three instead of, say, five.) I have neither the time nor the inclination to perform these revised calculations, but you may rest assured that the number 69,711.30 is vastly inflated.
More importantly, however, is the presence of negative and even blasphemous ELS's in the Bible. After co-authoring the above-cited article, Guy Cramer reversed himself and renounced Bible codes altogether! Hebrew professor Dr. James Price confronted him with an ELS, starting with the 67th letter in Isaiah 53:12 and working backwards at a skip distance of 20, which reads, "I lust after treachery, Jesus is my powerful name." The odds of finding this phrase in Isaiah at a skip distance of 20 or less are one in 439.5 trillion! Again, Dr. Price found an ELS in Genesis 41:27, starting with the 27th letter and working backwards at a skip distance of 63, which reads, "We will awaken, YHVH (the proper name of G-d) is an abomination." The odds of finding this phrase in Genesis at a skip distance of 63 or less are one in 2.4 trillion! Dr. Price found many other ELS's which were equally blasphemous. Clearly, G-d did not purposely encode the blasphemous ELS's in the Bible; they must have appeared there by random chance. But, then, the Yeshua codes may also be there by chance. And this is the problem with trying to use ELS's to prove a doctrine: since there is no verse in the Scriptures or the Talmud that explicitly mentions the existence of Bible codes, even the most unlikely ELS can quite easily be there by chance. The standard of proof in Scriptural interpretation is proof beyond the shadow of a doubt; even the slimmest odds of a chance occurrence are enough to disqualify an ELS from being a coded message from G-d.
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