Why ELS (or Bible Code) Is Not Proof
Not too long ago, there was a big splash in the news concerning the Bible Code,
or ELS (sometimes also known as Equidistant Letter Sequences). There were claims ELS found modern historical events in the Bible's Hebrew text, and that some of these events could be predicted. It also found the names of famous people. Hitler and the Holocaust were just a few of the names, words and events discovered. (The list goes on and on.)
Don't believe it. It doesn't prove anything and it doesn't compare with Bible Numbers 2.0.
First, a brief explanation of how ELS works. Start with the text below as an example.
Was he lying too?
By underlining the first letter, and every third letter after, the phrase why go
appears. There's no rule as to how many letters to skip each time. The number of different searches is infinite. This is how ELS picks and chooses to find hidden words in the Bible.
Mathematicians reject ELS/Bible Codes because they know it almost guarantees you will find something. This can be mathematically demonstrated. And if it is virtually guaranteed you can find something, that means it isn't unique or special at all.
To understand this, consider the following problem. How many ways can you find a three letter sequence, ABC, in a text ten letters long? ABC can start in position 1, 2, 3... all the way up to position 8.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1 A B C
2 A B C
3 A B C
4 A B C
5 A B C
6 A B C
7 A B C
8 A B C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
If we are looking for ABC as a three letter sequence with each letter following immediately after the other, there are only eight ways this can be done within a text of ten letters.
But with ELS, ABC can also be A _ B _ C, with one letter between A and B, and one letter between B and C. (The length of ABC is now five.)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1 A _ B _ C
2 A _ B _ C
3 A _ B _ C
4 A _ B _ C
5 A _ B _ C
6 A _ B _ C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This time there are only six possible ways of finding A _ B _ C.
To fully establish the pattern, consider the next step in ELS, where two letters are in between each of the letters of ABC: A _ _ B _ _ C. (The length of ABC is now 7.)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1 A _ _ B _ _ C
2 A _ _ B _ _ C
3 A _ _ B _ _ C
4 A _ _ B _ _ C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This time there are only four possible ways of finding A _ _ B _ _ C.
This pattern can be described as a mathematical formula (I): L − A + 1 = N, where L is the length of the text, A is the length of the string to be found, and N the number of possible ways the string could be found.
Note that as ABC increases in length, from 3, to 5, to 7, the number of ways it can be found is reduced by 2 each time, from 8, to 6 to 4. This reduction can also be stated as a formula (II): A − 1 = R, where A is the length of the string to be found, and R is the amount N is reduced each time ABC increases in length.
These formulae help us understand what happens when we want to find a six letter word Hitler
in a text containing 1 million letters.
Using formula I: L − A + 1 = N
1000000 − 6 + 1 = 999995
There are 999995 possible ways one might find Hitler
in 1 million letters.
Using formula I to find "H_i_t_l_e_r":
1000000 − 11 + 1 = 999990
There are 999990 possible ways one might find H_i_t_l_e_r
in 1 million letters.
With each additional letter in between each of the letters of Hitler
, the number of possible ways decreases by 5. This will continue until Hitler
is stretched to its maximum length across the entire 1 million letters, and there are only 5 ways of finding it. (Subtract 5 from 999990 over and over until there is only 5 remaining.)
We can calculate the number of steps from 999995 to 5 by division: 999995 ÷ 5 = 199999. This result will be used below.
As seen previously, when all the letters of Hitler
were consecutive, there were 999995 ways it might be found. This was the most number of ways it could be found when the length of Hitler
was the shortest. At the other end, when Hitler
was at its longest length, there were only 5 ways of finding it. Pairing the longest and shortest (999995 + 5 = 1000000), there are a million ways of finding these two forms of Hitler
.
We could also pair up the next shortest form of Hitler
with 999990 possible ways of being found, with the next longest form of Hitler
with 10 ways of being found. This would again give a total of a million ways of finding these two forms of Hitler
.
There are 199999 steps from 999995 to 5, meaning when shortest and longest, next shortest and next longest are paired up, and so on, there will be 199999 ÷ 2 pairs, or 99999 complete pairs.
With each of the 99999 complete pairs having a total of 1 million possible ways of finding Hitler
, that means all together there are 1000000 x 99999 ways, or 99,999,000,000 possibilities (99 billion).
Since there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, this means any point in the text of one million letters has a 1 in 26 chance of being the letter H
. Any point has a 1 in 26 chance of being the letter I
. Thus to find six letters of Hitler
would be 266, or 308,915,776 (300 million).
As can be seen, 99 billion is magnitudes larger than 300 million. The odds would suggest finding over 300 Hitler
s in the text. (99,999,000,000 ÷ 308,915,776 ≈ 323) Thus finding Hitler
is almost guaranteed! It is not unique or special.
Note: This does not mean over 300 Hitler words will definitely be found in the text. There may be more, or there may be less. In fact, if one of the Hitler letters never appeared in the text, not a single Hitler word would be discovered. (This, of course, is would be a very unusual case.) What the math tells us is that it is extremely likely under normal circumstances the word would appear multiple times.
Those who promote ELS/Bible Code claim their findings are unique and special. But did they check all of them? Which Hitler
among the many is most significant? Or are all of them significant? What if there was a Hitler
that contradicted their findings? Sometimes they claim it is the meaning of the text where their discovery was made that makes it special. Why is the text where their word was found more important than the text where other occurrences of the word can be found? Is it only their view that counts? What is meaningful to one person might not be meaningful to someone else.
Other times they claim they found other words, perhaps Adolph
that crisscrosses Hitler
. However, since Adolph is also a six letter word, it too is very likely guaranteed to be found. What they aren't saying is that they did not find Adolph Hitler
all in the same pattern/line, because the odds of this are 2612, or 1 in 95,428,956,661,682,176 (95 quadrillion).
The demonstration of the odds was based on the English language, a six letter word Hitler
, and a text with 1 million letters. Consider what happens if the text was the Old Testament in Hebrew. There are over 1.2 million letters. 1.2 million being 20% more than a million might increase the number of Hitler
words by the same factor, from 300 to 360.
The Hebrew alphabet only has 22 letters. Thus the odds of finding a six letter Hebrew word are much less than the odds of finding a six letter English word. It would be 226 or a 1 in 113,379,904 chance. This is a roughly a third of the odds for English, and would almost triple the number of Hitler
words found to a thousand.
Hitler
in English translates into a five letter Hebrew word היטלר. This again makes it even easier to find.
There are even people using synonyms with ELS. This opens up an even wider selection of choices. Why not try pseudonyms, nicknames, pen names, and textual variants? Of course something is going to be found. And to be thorough one would have to examine all of them. This is an endless futile task.
Those who think ELS/Bible Codes are something special haven't considered the practical math. They are being mentally lazy. And if they refuse to consider the math when confronted with it, they are being wilfully blind and ignorant.
There are other serious problems with ELS. A few are listed below. (Many other websites also criticize ELS and the proof against it is clear.)
- Ancient and modern Hebrew has no vowels in the alphabet, only consonants. (Vowels are marked by small symbols around the consonants.) Any
word
found by ELS can be another word simply by plugging in different vowels. An example of this in English would be the two letters TL. TL could betool
,tail
,tole
,tile
,toil
, orteal
. With no context, any meaning can be assigned to the letters found by ELS. This is dangerous. You can find anything you want in the Bible this way. - We live in a world with many languages. Consider the problem of translation. Do you translate at all? ELS is perfectly capable of searching for English words phonetically translated to Hebrew. (Who decides which phonetic representation is right? If one doesn't turn up any hidden words, another might.) And if English, or Russian is not phonetically transposed but translated, which Hebrew synonym do you use? Can a modern language with over a half million words be adequately translated with an ancient language containing less than 10,000 words? If ELS doesn't find anything with one possibility, another is used. The more you try, the more you find.
- Most of the words found by ELS are short, consisting of 3 or 4 letters. (Without vowels, every word is short.) The odds of finding a specific 3 letter combination on the first try is not very high. The Old Testament has over a hundred thousand letters allowing for millions of searches. Rolling a dice three times is more likely to catch the number 1 than rolling just once. Rolling it a hundred times guarantees you will find something! What makes ELS worse is that different searches are combined. There is no relation or reason between each search other than it working in the author's eyes. The words could be extremely far apart, but the searcher groups thousands of letters together into a block just to make them appear as if they are close together. The odds are not great at all. In order to beat the odds and eliminate the ambiguity of vowels, ELS searches would have to be made for entire phrases (many words) on a single sequence. So far no ELS study has managed this.
- ELS searches for words. It cannot be used to interpret a verse or passage. It has no benefit for those studying the meaning of the text. In reality, ELS distracts the reader from studying what the Bible says. And who is to say those words should be arranged in any particular order? (
I'll go to the store and then to work,
is not the same asI'll go to work and then to the store.
- ELS starts from the searcher's desire to find something. This teaches us more about the searcher than about God’s word. Do we really want to know that John or Jane Doe's name is in the Bible? It has always been safest to let the Bible speak for itself rather than reading our own ideas into it. It's already bad enough that many people read their own opinions into the Bible.
As an example of these combined problems, what would you think if someone found the words: Hitler, Nazi, bitter, sea, and Auschwitz? What would you think if they were each found by different equal letter sequences, but in the same general area of text?
Our hindsight gives us the proper perspective, but suppose this discovery had been made by a German in the 1930s? A frightening alternative interpretation could have been made. Since Hitler and the Nazi party stood for a strong Germany and the cessation of World War I reparations, any German in the 1930s would think the Bible was giving Hitler and the Nazis God’s stamp of approval! Auschwitz was in Poland, a nation constructed out of nothing by the victorious Allies, a bitter symbol of Germany's previous defeat. These words could have been construed to appoint Hitler, the Nazi party and philosophy as God’s chosen instrument to lead Germany out of the Great Depression and into a new glorious age.
This is one example. There might be worse possibilities. Think what the devil could do with ELS. He's a lot smarter than most of us.
Given these serious shortcomings of equal letter sequences (ELS), it is a misnomer to call it a Bible Code
. Codes aren't supposed to change, otherwise no one would be able to decode them. ELS/Bible Codes have no set rules and morph with the whim of the searcher. I feel Bible Numbers are by far superior. A few simple rules are all that are needed. They highlight important lessons God wants us to study. There are no ambiguities. In some verses, the odds are definitely astronomical. Bible Numbers 2.0 is the true bible code.