The fundamental premise of all Bible code research is that the every-letter sequence of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament has remained unaltered since God prompted the biblical authors to compose their documents. The actual manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, however, inform us very plainly that no two manuscripts are identical, different versions of biblical books exist in those manuscripts (sometimes involving thousands of letters), and the scribes who transmitted the Hebrew text at times made mistakes in transmission, and left notes in their copies about suspect readings in the manuscripts. These data testify unequivocally that the preservation of the every-letter sequence of Hebrew letters is uncertain. The author introduces the English reader to these phenomena so as to visually demonstrate that the certitude of the every-letter sequence required for the Bible code to be real is a demonstrable myth.
To take one example of how the manuscript evidence entirely undermines the foundational premise of a Bible code, the Dead Sea Scrolls, our closest textual witnesses to the original Hebrew Old Testament, have a markedly different way of spelling. In just a few verses there might therefore be dozens of letter differences due only to spelling convention (recall in English the word “color” vs. “colour”). The Hebrew text used by Bible code researchers is much younger than the Dead Sea material, and does not account for the ancient spellings. The significance of this can be dramatically illustrated. One Bible code proponent, Grant Jeffrey, claims to have found dozens of coded names associated with Jesus in Isaiah 52:13-53:12, the Old Testament prophecy of a suffering Messiah. In just these fifteen verses, there are 115 letter differences between the text Jeffrey uses and the Dead Sea Great Isaiah Scroll because of spelling differences. Click here to see for yourself.
