# Other tricks in the Bible Code

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/other-tricks-in-the-bible-code/65518>\
**Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\
**Created:** [May 15, 2001, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/other-tricks-in-the-bible-code/65518 "2001-05-15T17:34:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2001, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/other-tricks-in-the-bible-code/65518/1 "2001-05-15T17:34:18Z")

</div>

Referencing

[http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbiblecode.html](http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbiblecode.html)

Drosnin also used the trick that most people don’t know  
Hebrew, to his advantage, in other ways.

When a grid of Hebrew is sitting in front of you, it’s not  
so obvious that the horizontal rows were still just the  
Torah, reading as normally as ever. So he could pick out  
the ancient Hebrew word for chief/tribe leader, and claim  
it was the ancient word for ‘president’, found ‘magically,’  
and that it crossed “Kennedy.” Actually “Kennedy” was just  
three Hebrew letters - transliterated KND.

He found some ancient cities that way, too - they’re just  
sitting there, horizontally.

And he could accept the ancient word for something (like  
‘chief’ for ‘president’), or the transliterated modern word.

And he never pointed out that looking at a grid of say,  
a 17-letter wide Torah, and then picking out skews that went  
at a ‘rise to run’ of two or three, was just taking every  
19th letter or 20th letter, like so:

OAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA  
AAAOAAAAAAAAAAAAA  
AAAAAAOAAAAAAAAAA  
AAAAAAAAAOAAAAAAA  
AAAAAAAAAAAAOAAAA

so he could find some significant word taking every 17th  
letter, find another taking every 20th letter, and “force”  
a grid to make it look significant.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b2d939/32.png) [@C\_K\_Dexter\_Haven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/C_K_Dexter_Haven)\
**Post date:** [May 15, 2001, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/other-tricks-in-the-bible-code/65518/2 "2001-05-15T17:57:37Z")

</div>

Yes, thanks, bup, for pointing out that words like “chief” or “murder” appear all by themselves in the Bible text, and so will also appear in any word-find matrix. Plus, most proper names (people or places) have meanings also; thus the name “Adam” contains the Hebrew “D-M” meaning “blood”, so it wouldn’t be hard to find a fair number of occurrences of the word “blood” in the first chapters of Genesis.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tapioca_Dextrin)\
**Post date:** [May 16, 2001, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/other-tricks-in-the-bible-code/65518/3 "2001-05-16T11:38:44Z")

</div>

IIRC, Hebrew doesn’t have vowels, so the job of finding “hidden” words is relly easy. There is an excellent essay on this subject in Simon Singh’s [“The Code Book”](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385495323/o/qid=990012974/sr=2-1/103-8362661-2828642)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\
**Post date:** [May 17, 2001, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/other-tricks-in-the-bible-code/65518/4 "2001-05-17T01:47:12Z")

</div>

C. W., Y. R. C.

From the Staff Report:

> [@](#):
>
> Ancient Hebrew has no vowels and no punctuation.