Have you ever heard of the Bible code? I do not know were it comes from, but I think it is from The Old Testament. I have looked it up a little bit and it says they say the world might end, but there are some choices in the Bible codes. There are about 3 choices. I forgot them all, but here are 2 choices. 1 choice is that a comet will hit earth and destroy earth, another is that we will destroy the comet. The time it says it will happen is 2012. There are all kinds of things that happened already in which they have found, like the twin towers incident. It gave some pretty vivid details about it like who done it and stuff, and also it gave the date. It was all right by each other too and they said the odds of that were 1 million to 1. Are Bible codes real?
Answer
From what I have been able to determine after reading several web sites, both pro and con, the Bible codes can be made to say just about anything the person doing the search wants them to say. Some people have even found, using the methods of the Bible code proponents, such phrases as “YHWH is not God,” “Satan is god,” and “Jesus is Satan.”
The way the Bible code works is that a computer is programmed to search a given electronic text to find words made out of letters at varying distances (every third, eleventh, or 351st for instance). If it finds a word, then it looks for other words in the same vicinity. The words may be forward, backward, up, down, or diagonal, just like in the popular word search puzzles. The odds of finding a word or words vary, depending on the word and the size of the text being searched.
While words may be found in the Hebrew text, they may also be found in any text of any size, including (probably) this answer. Then they have to be interpreted. That is, how do you get the word airplane, as in the supposed twin towers message, out of the Hebrew? Since Hebrew uses few vowels do you count rpln, rplan, irpln, or irplyin (using English equivalents to Hebrew letters) as airplane?
Once you decide which of several options is equal to the word you want, then you have to interpret it in relation to other “words” in the same area. From what I have seen of supposed modern predictions, most combinations can be interpreted several ways. Just as the so-called prophecies of Nostradamus are so vague as to be interpreted only in hindsight, so most of these code messages may be interpreted different ways. In the example you gave about the comet, the words “comet destroy earth” may also be interpreted “earth destroys comet.” It gets even harder when you claim to interpret dates. Since Hebrew numbers are represented by letters, then you have to decide whether bac means 213 or “back.”
If you go into the process trying to prove that it predicted something that has already happened, you can prove almost anything. If you are looking for the word “towers” you will probably find it, although the spacing of the letters may be in the hundreds. Finding the term “al Qaeda” might be harder in an English text because of the Q, but would be more common in an Arabic or Hebrew text.
When it comes down to the basics, if you want to believe you will accept those instances of the code that meet your expectations and reject those that don’t. If you choose to disbelieve, you just have to understand that the theory behind the codes works in any text and can be interpreted in multiple ways.