The concept of “Bible codes” was something that became popular in 1997, helped by a mass marketed book on the subject. It's a completely bogus idea that there are hidden strings in the first five books of the Bible, and these hidden strings foretell the future.
The hidden strings, or Bible codes, are allegedly found by looking at individual characters of the Bible, starting at some offset, and taking every Nth letter thereafter to form a phrase. It works much better with a Bible in Hebrew because the classic written form of that language does not have any vowels. Hence, you can construct many possible phrases depending on which vowels you choose to put in and where you choose to end a word. “BLLGTS” can be interpreted as “Boil leg & toes” or “Be a li'l gutsy” or even “Bill Gates.”
When you find a Bible “code” you frequently find other related phrases around it. Of course, you can often find clouds in the sky that have shapes that look like animals, and the reason is exactly the same: people tend to see what they want to see. There's a huge amount of sky and clouds to look at, and you can always find something if you look at enough random stuff.
I thought it would be fun to write some Bible code software in Java, so I put it on the book website at afu.com/jj6. There's a program there that you can run to search for arbitrary patterns in the Bible (a copy of the King James Version is also there). See Figure 21-14 for the results when I set it to search for the string “Java”, which is a place and language unknown in biblical times.
As you can see, it has found the word along with other astonishing and highly meaningful phrases (“knowledge of Java, a great blessing, bit, net”). You can run the program for yourself and find other phrases of your choice.
One of the promoters of the Bible code concept challenged his critics to find hidden messages in non-Bible texts like Moby Dick. He thought there weren't any. He was dead wrong!
You will find that Moby Dick contains predictions for the deaths of Indira Gandhi, President Rene Moawad of Lebanon, Martin Luther King, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss of Austria, Leon Trotsky, Sirhan Sirhan, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Princess Diana, among others! Figure 21-15 shows the Diana prediction from Moby Dick.
“Lady Diana, Dodi, foolishly wasted, mortal in these jaws of death!” There are two likely conclusions. Either Herman Melville was the Supreme Creator of the Universe and he encoded Bible code style predictions in Moby Dick as well as in the Bible. Or, another possibility is that the notion of hidden messages encoded in revered works is a bunch of nonsense put about by some people who should know better. I don't know about you, but I'm going with the simpler of the two explanations. The meaninglessness of the codes doesn't impugn the origin of the Bible. It just says that people can be wrong when they try to project their own interpretations onto any text.
There's a copy of Moby Dick on the website, along with the Bible code software to search it. I'd like to find out what hidden messages there are in the Sherlock Holmes books. This is what programmers do when they have too much time on their hands.