During the Middle Ages, a very famous rabbi, Moses Cordevaro, wrote, "The secrets of the Torah are revealed... in the skipping of letters." In the 18th century, the greatest Jewish thinker of his time, Rabbi Elijah Solomon said, "All that was is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible."

However, the thorough statistical analysis of huge quantities of text could only be possible with the development of the computer.

In 1994 the old tradition received a sound scientific basis when three Israeli mathematicians, (Professor Elyahu Rips, from the Hebrew University, Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg), used statistical methods and computers to research the Book of Genesis, searching by "equidistant skip interval" for the encrypted names of 32 sages who lived between the 9th and 18th centuries, checking every n^th letter, where n can take any value. They published their study, Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis, in the scholarly journal Statistical Science, about what they called ELS (Equidistant Letter Sequences) in Genesis. The program found most of the names, with the odds against this occurring by chance calculated at 62,500 to 1. Their summary said: "When the Book of Genesis is written as two-dimensional arrays, equidistant letter sequences spelling words with related meanings often appear in close proximity, with analysis showing that the (statistical) effect is significant at the level of 0.00002," (i.e. the odds are 62,500 to 1). This study gave mathematical and statistical evidence that information about personalities, events and dates can be found encoded in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The researchers, for comparison purposes, did similar analysis in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace, a scrambled Book of Genesis, and other texts. In none of them were the results different from what would occur simply by chance.

Other researchers discovered that the name of Itzjak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, which is found encoded only once in the Hebrew Scriptures, (in Deuteronomy, from chapter 2, verse 33 to chapter 24, verse 16), appears crossed, (as in a crossword) by the phrase assassin will assassinate. When Rabin was murdered, the Bible Code's theory became the center of international interest and passionate controversy.

The equidistant skip interval is a decryption method that takes every n^th letter, (where n can be any number, from a minimum of 1 to a user specified number which can be several thousands), and checks if they form a previously specified word or phrase.

The program first arranges the Torah into a continuous string of 304,805 Hebrew letters, then it starts searching, from the first letter of Genesis (or from any other specified starting point), skipping from letter to letter by the specified distance.

If the program does not find the specified word, it starts with the second letter and repeats the skip search. Then it starts with the third letter, on and on until it finds the specified word.

When the word is found, the program rearranges the text into a two dimensional array or matrix where the length of each line in the retrieved text is the nth distance in the equidistant skip interval. For example, the name Itzjak Rabin (in Hebrew) was found encoded only once in the whole of the Torah at an equidistant skip interval of 4772, (i.e. a skip interval of 4772 between each of the letters that form the name). The program retrieves this text arranging it in lines of equal length (4772 letters in each line, with no spaces between them.) In this way the code Itzjak Rabin appears in a vertical column.

Dr. Jeffrey Satinover in his book, Cracking the Bible Code, states the following: "There is a tendency for meaningfully related words to show the cluster effect, appearing in the array more closely together than unrelated words."

Taken from The Bible Code 2000 Computer Program, Help Topics

Throughout this issue of the Prophetic Word, you will see reference and matrixes from The Bible Code.