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The Other Side of the Holy Bible
By Joan Voss
FATE :: September 2004
Lately, The Good Book is getting a closer look from people who believe that past tragedies like September 11, 2001, and the future Apocalypse may actually be encrypted in its 3,200-year-old text.
According to the Bible’s plain text, Moses went to the top of Mount Sinai in 1200 b.c. and “saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet a kind of paved work of sapphire stone.” Legend has it that upon this sapphire stone God wrote the original words of the Bible without any breaks between words. From then on, Hebrew scribes kept the Torah as an unbroken string of characters, for it was their opinion that the letters were symbols that would reveal a greater truth. In training, a strict warning was passed down to them: “Should you perchance omit or add one single letter from the Torah, you would thereby destroy all the universe.”
The Christian New Testament points to such precision at Matthew 5:18, wherein Jesus said:
“I tell you the truth, until Heaven and Earth disappear, not the smallest letter, nor the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law [Torah] until everything is accomplished.”
Passages such as this beg interpretation. Jesus obviously knew something that no one else did—and this motivated curious revolutionaries to explore the unthinkable.
The hunt for hidden messages dates back at least to the 12th century, when rabbinical scholars wrote about unearthing secret messages in the Torah. Their writings would later inspire Sir Isaac Newton, born in 1642, who is best remembered for discovering gravity and the mechanics of the solar system. But Newton also spent many years searching for codes, judging from the ample amount of paperwork found at Cambridge University in England. He clearly believed that the prophecies of Daniel and John wouldn’t be understood until the end of history. Shortly before his death in 1727, he wrote:
“[The Bible] is a cryptogram set by the Almighty…a riddle of the Godhead of past and future events divinely fore-ordained. This prophecy is called the Revelation, with respect to the Scripture of Truth, which Daniel was commanded to shut up and seal, till the time of the end. Until that time comes, the Lamb is opening the seals.”
When Newton spoke of “the Lamb opening the seals” he alluded to the Book of Revelation 5:1-3, in which Saint John experienced a vision of Heaven. John claimed he saw God holding the Book of Life fastened with seven seals and an angel proclaiming loudly: “Who is worthy to open the book and loose the seals thereof?” The text continues: “No man in Heaven or Earth, neither under the Earth, was able to open the book, or to look thereon.” He then witnessed a lamb “as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the Earth.”
Though John’s vision chiefly involved God’s judgment of Earth as a vindication of the church’s martyrs, the latter part of the scripture focuses on spiritual warfare between evil forces and God’s people.
The mystery of the seven seals led Newton to presume that conflicts surrounding Christ’s Second Coming would arise in stages. Michael Bar Weissmandl, a Slovakian rabbi, would pick up where Newton left off more than two centuries later.
During the Holocaust of World War II, Weissmandl studied the Hebrew scribes’ ancient writings before Nazis sent him and his family to the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. Weissmandl alone managed to escape, taking two copies of the Torah and 13th-century works referencing the codes. Eventually he continued his research in America, but the devastating grief he felt for his family lead to his death in 1957.
Weissmandl is now heralded as the pioneer of Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) because he noticed that if he skipped 50 letters, then another 50, and another 50—the word Torah was spelled out at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. The same skip sequence again spelled out Torah in the Books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Yet as profound as this finding was, such insight wouldn’t allow for his decoding the Bible’s 304,805 characters. The code had a time lock with its key awaiting an invention for over a quarter of a century: the modern-day computer ...
Read the rest of this article in the September 2004 issue of FATE
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