Bible Codes

Also known as Torah Codes or Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) Codes.

A book by Michael Drosnin that promoted the concept that the Bible contains prophecies which are hidden by a special code. The argument is made that God hid these prophecies in the patterns in the holy scriptures.

This modern method of making predictions was based on finding a pattern of letters that spell a word by choosing letters that occur after counting a specific number of letters. Any number can be chosen to count this distance.

The words can appear like a crossword puzzle, in a diagonal, vertical, horizontal pattern, with the spelling in a normal or reverse order. Certain translations of the Torah or the Bible are used to find these patterns with the assistance of a computer.

Some predictions that are claimed include:

  • World Trade Centre Attack
  • Mad Cow Disease
  • Columbia Shuttle Disaster
  • SARS (Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome)

This belief became popular during the 1990s, but collapsed when it was found that similar codes could be extracted from any book of similar length.