Harold Gans, Director of Research for Aish HaTorah, spent 28 years as Senior Cryptologic Mathematician with the National Security Agency, United States Department of Defense.

The phenomenon of hidden codes in the Bible is real, and its implication should not be minimized. While it is tempting to lose oneself in a sea of prophesy, what is truly astounding is that serious scientific evidence supports this contention and points to a divine author of the Bible.

With discussions and advice on every topic from business and health to marriage and relationships, the Bible has guided people for thousands of years. The existence of hidden codes would be yet another piece of "evidence" that this anchor of faith, on which entire belief systems and ways of life have been built, merits careful and serious study. After all, if it is of divine origin, who wouldn't want to consult it on life's most important issues?

While theologians and lay people alike have always found insights in the Bible, and the concept of "hidden" information encoded within the text can be found in the work of many of the classical Jewish commentators, computers and mathematics have now made it possible to examine the Bible in a way never before possible. In a carefully controlled experiment, the internationally renowned mathematician Eliyahu Rips, physicist Doron Witztum, and Yoav Rosenberg successfully searched the Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis for the encoded names and dates of birth and death of 32 rabbis who lived between the ninth and eighteenth centuries. Their study concluded that the existence of this information in the text could not be a chance occurrence. They published their work in the prestigious peer review journal, Statistical Science in August 1994.

In the three years since publication, many have tried to find the "fatal flaw" in the "Great Rabbis Experiment," and none has succeeded. I myself, a cryptologic mathematician with nearly three decades of experience cracking codes for the United States Government, was initially highly skeptical of their results, and was not only able to validate their work, but using their method was able to extend it by pairing the cities of birth and death with the names of the rabbis on their list. Statistical analysis shows that the presence of these names, dates, and cities cannot be reasonably attributed to mere coincidence, the probability of such an occurrence being vanishingly small.

What conclusion can be made about these and other statistically verifiable codes? Only one--that the information was deliberately placed in the Bible by its author. Yet the Bible has existed in its present form for thousands of years. How then, could its author have known such details about men who would not be born for centuries? Logic would dictate that the author could not be human, could not be bound by the limits of time. It would then be natural to conclude that the author is a divine being.

Whether you agree with me or not, the implication of the hidden codes discovery is clear and profound: the search for God and the meaning of human existence should be as compelling a pursuit at the turn of the millennium as it was at the beginning.

So, if we cannot use the information in the hidden codes to look to the future, for what purpose can it be used? As I've suggested, only to appreciate the nature of the Bible's author. Several major adult religious educational organizations, including the one with which I'm affiliated, use the codes phenomenon as a tool to re-interest and reintroduce people to the Bible - to suggest that they take a second look at how its wisdom applies to their own lives.

Clearly the presence of hidden codes in the Bible hints at evidence of great mysteries yet to be revealed.

Aish.com

Can Codes be Used to Predict the Future? Many people have asked the following question: "If the future is encoded in the Torah, why can we not use the codes to predict the future?" I will provide a couple of simple answers.

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