Originally posted by I Like Pencils
Why does it contain so many numbers? It’s so unorthodox to put as many numbers in a normal book as there are in the Bible.
What is the Bible code?
Well, for one, the Bible isn't a "normal book" - it was compiled from a variety of sources over a long time. Their main consistency is that all the books have something to do with God. It was "unorthodox" because it makes clear that God was completely separate and different from the many other gods that were popular during its history. This "complete otherness" is the principle of the word "holy".
One form of this "uniqueness" was expressed by the ancient Hebrew in the
Gematria - a numerological system where each letter in the Hebrew alphabet had a specific value, also found in the Roman numerals I, C, M, X, etc. It can be seen as an early form of geometry, although the main idea was that God created structure (fixed proportions) among chaos - numbers and letters became "building blocks" of meaning. This was made very visible when the Tower of Babel could not be completed when the builder's "words" were confused.
These values could be used to decribe connotations and information without having to use explicit words, and they also had symbolic meanings. A name could written in code form to protect the writer, while the meaning remained intact. They seven days of the week are a direct example of such a use (the seven-day week is the only chronological structure that can't be derived from nature itself). A modern example is the structure of a sonnet, although the numerological relationships of the Gematria have the air of 'being discovered' rather than 'invented' - like the Law of Pythagoras existed even before it was discovered. Some have said the whole universe was constructed using mathematical principles that can be expressed using words. The Hebrew for "Ten Commandments" are literally "the ten words". The Bible as the "word" of God is another example. John also shows something of it in the sentence "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).
The Bible Code is an attempt to reconstruct
the whole of the Bible using this system, and to look for hidden meanings and connections that appear. I think that because most of the Hebrew Bible was originally oral, the Hebrews used mathematical and alphabetical patterns to memorize it, many connections
are found this way, but there is no way of kwowong which of these "codes" are intentional and which are unintentional. The codes were in any case only supportive, creating structure and emphasizing meaning, but not "hidden messages" by themselves. To make to much of it is defeating its purpose.
