Art Bell replays a June 12, 2001, episode featuring David Ruppe’s confirmation of Echelon, a global NSA-led surveillance network intercepting 3 million daily communications via 120 satellites, allegedly influencing France’s $6B Airbus loss. Mike Heiser debunks Bible Code claims by exposing 63+ letter discrepancies between Dead Sea Scrolls and Masoretic texts in Isaiah 53, arguing scribal errors invalidate encoded prophecies like "Yeshua" or Holocaust terms. Grant Jeffrey counters with statistical improbability—1 in 685 billion odds—and cites Hebrew cipher traditions, while Bell muses on whether similar patterns could emerge in other texts. Callers speculate on New World Order phone policies and black mold crises, shifting to time travel theories before Bell’s playful sign-off. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning or good afternoon, I guess, wherever you may be.
Commercially heard from the island of Guam, out across the dayline and days, my time travels eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north, all the way to the Bowl, and worldwide on the internet.
We simply invited him to participate in an on-air challenge.
Nobody lied about him.
And I went, wah, wah.
And I still go, wah, wah.
Come on, Randy.
That's not an answer to why you're not coming on, at least not one that anybody out there can digest.
ABC aired a Sunday evening show, incredibly entitled Voyage to Atlantis.
And they talked about the Reuters report and Cuba and the location of the lost city.
Well, guess what, everybody?
Linemolt Howe will be here tomorrow night with a big update on that story.
A big update on that story.
And it has legs.
So wait till you hear tomorrow night.
Boy, I'm telling you.
2,200 feet down.
And then there's just one more item that I want to get on before we go to my guest this hour.
This comes under the category of, gee, it sounds like a bad idea.
NASA aims to move Earth.
Cute title, NASA aims.
NASA aims to move Earth.
Scientists' answer to global warming.
Nudge the planet farther from the sun.
Scientists have found an unusual way to prevent our planet from overheating.
Move it to a cooler spot.
All you have to do is hurtle a few comets at Earth, and then its orbit will be altered.
Our world will then be sent spinning into a safer, cooler part of the solar system.
This startling idea of improving our interplanetary neighborhood is, believe it or not, the brainchild of a group of NASA engineers and American astronomers who say their plan could add another 6 billion years of useful Lifetime to our planet, effectively doubling its working life.
Dr. Greg Laughlin of NASA Ames Research Center in California says, quote, the technology is not all that far-fetched.
It involves the same techniques that people now suggest could be used to deflect asteroids or comets heading towards Earth.
We don't need raw power to move Earth.
We just require delicacy of planning and maneuvering.
The plan put forward by Dr. Laughlin, I shouldn't laugh, and his colleagues Don Korikansky and Fred Adams involves carefully directing a comet or asteroid so that it sweeps close past our planet and transfers some of its gravitational energy to Earth.
Earth's orbital speed would increase as a result, and we would move to a higher orbit away from the Sun, said Laughlin.
Engineers would then direct their comet so that it passed close to Jupiter or Saturn where the reverse process would occur.
It would pick up energy from one of these giant planets.
Later, its orbit would bring it back to Earth, and the process would be repeated.
Anybody out there want to vote on that idea?
All right, coming up in a moment, we're going to talk about Echelon with an ABCNews.com reporter who wrote a story about it.
comes next.
unidentified
The End Now we take you back to the night of June 12, 2001, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
The French were said to have lost $6 billion in a contract for Airbus with the Saudi government to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas thanks to echelon intercepts of faxes and telephone calls.
Oh my.
The report given to these British lawmakers says that businesses and ordinary individuals are being spied on and that users should encrypt their emails.
That would be all of us, right?
It said a global system for intercepting communications exists, is no longer, that it exists, is no longer in doubt today.
They do tap into private, civilian, and corporate communications.
Impotent do anything much about it.
The MEPs in Britain pointed out that Britain could be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Well, David Rup wrote an article for abcnews.com.
He is a reporter for abcnews.com and wrote on echelon.
So did they send you, did you already know what Echelon was or did they dispatch you out into the ether to go find out?
unidentified
Well, actually, I've written three or four stories on it, sort of focusing on the controversies over it and trying to explain what the system is.
And so that has involved calling a lot of these journalists that have gone out and actually spoken to a lot of the former employees, former people who worked on the system.
I mean, you just have to look at the U.S. government's own documents that have been released through the Freedom of Information Act, which doesn't specifically describe the system, but it explains in pretty good detail the limitations of the U.S.'s ability to gather communications intelligence.
Can't gather communications against U.S. citizens under certain circumstances.
Now, of course, they'd only be able to hear half of that call because they're only allowed to listen to the British guy, so they couldn't hear me, right?
they could know what it does is it it it it intercepts the communication and international Now, I have seen lists posted on the Internet of these supposed code words that trip echelon.
after the fact Now, here's the trick, is they have very specific rules about when they can target U.S. citizens.
However, the way the system works is it gathers in huge quantities of information and then sort of pulls out the communications that it wants, and then they go and look at it and they see if it's a U.S. citizen.
So if you ask me, does the system collect U.S. telephone calls, taxes overseas, sure, it does, absolutely.
And, you know, if you would speak to U.S. government officials candidly about the capabilities of their collection, as I have, they would tell you, sure, you know, we're bringing in all sorts of things, but we have specific rules designed to prevent the illegal or improper use of U.S. person information.
Well, here's an example, and I'll bring it right to your level.
And that is, let's assume that a reporter from ABC.com or ABC is overseas somewhere and gets a really big story.
They're not ready to go to print yet, but they're going to have a communication back to their editor, what you would normally do.
And so you send an email or whatever it is you send, and the story has obvious, serious national security information.
Yeah, Bin Laden.
Okay, there you are.
Bin Laden, fine.
Is it really reasonable to assume that because you're an American and because You're a reporter, that information would not be processed and if necessary used?
unidentified
Well, it depends.
I mean, see, here's the thing: one of the exceptions that they have that allows them to use communications by a U.S. citizen overseas is if it's necessary for understanding or assessing the foreign intelligence, basically.
So that's a very loose term.
And if they feel like they need this document, if they feel like they need my name to be included in the document because they have procedures for erasing my name if they just want to keep the document, it's a judgment call.
If they feel that they needed to understand the intelligence, then they'll keep my name in.
They have the ability to do that.
But as I understand the regulations, they have to go to the Attorney General first and they have to make a case.
They have to establish some sort of probable cause.
Well, is that the allegation that there was over on the other side of the pond there that was bribery going on?
That's the allegation?
unidentified
That's what the former CIA director said, that through our intelligence intercepts we had uncovered the evidence.
Wow.
But that's old news.
I mean, what's interesting about this is the purpose of the NSA, what it does, and this is our biggest fly agency, and this is the one that runs echelon, basically, at least from the U.S. David, then, is it fair to say that big business is national security?
You know, if you go outside at night, like now, but all within an hour of sunset, about an hour before sunrise, you will see all of these little tiny dots, these lesser magnitude stars, crisscrossing the sky.
You can't miss them.
They're everywhere.
You just stare up there long enough and you'll see them.
Little teeny weeny dots of light.
They're all satellites.
And 120 of those satellites are listening to everything we do.
If you want to do a search at ABCNews.com and see what he has written, a reporter he is for ABCNews.com.
And we were talking about the nature sort of of echelon and what it looks at.
And I wonder if it's fair to say that our economy is national security.
That's another way to put it.
Right.
unidentified
Okay.
So, well, yeah, the debate in Europe is over whether we're using it to spy on their companies or not.
And what came out of a recent report that the European Parliament put out was the allegation that echelon is being used specifically to target European persons, companies for non-intelligence.
Read that as economic motivations.
And that's something we've denied.
But there's an interesting thing here.
If you go to the NSA website, you'll find a definition of the term foreign intelligence, which they give on the site.
It's in their facts section.
Oh, you'll like this.
Foreign intelligence.
I'm reading from it.
Foreign intelligence means information relating to the capabilities, intentions, and activities of foreign powers, organizations, and persons.
very general and you put but i think he should have said I mean, should this really be so surprising?
I mean, you know, wouldn't we presume that our government and other governments around the world would want to know what foreign diplomats are doing, would want to, you know, be able to anticipate, you know, a terrorist attack or a terrorist plot.
And I don't know that I have the answer, but here's how I weigh it.
On the one hand, I hold up my hand and I say, okay, we'll put national security here, bin Laden, terrorist attacks, bombs, people dead, all of that, put that in that hand.
And then over in this hand, we'll put privacy and the Fourth Amendment and all of that sort of thing and try to weigh the two against each other.
And I'm thinking personally, on the one hand, hey, I don't write anything that I'd be afraid to have anybody read.
Honestly, I don't.
In fact, I sort of assume that what I say on the phone is probably monitored by somebody.
But, you know, there is this Fourth Amendment thing, and maybe it's old-fashioned, huh?
Well, it's not important how I do, but the way the NSA has weighed it, the way that their current, let's see, director has weighed it when he spoke before.
Well, did he actually say that in this one?
Anyway, basically, their basic view is U.S. law regulates all of this, and the NSA believes that the law strikes a good balance.
And they use this term balance to describe it.
It's a balance between the need for the privacy, the Fourth Amendment privacy of Americans, and the governments need to have information to be able to do the job that it's supposed to do.
It's a balance that strikes a good balance.
Now, there was a controversy about, I guess it was about a year ago, where one of the committees that oversees the NSA's operations was having problems because the NSA wasn't turning over all of the guidance that its legal department was providing to the people out in the field, telling them where to draw the line.
This committee wanted all of the guidance given to it because they wanted to review it all, and they wanted to see whether or not how far echelon was pushing it, basically.
And so there was sort of a standoff.
And I'm not really quite sure how it was resolved or whether it was resolved or not.
But Congressman Barr, I guess, has still been expressing concerns that echelon may be crossing the line.
Well, haven't the British, for example, helped with Echelon?
Didn't they have a ground station somewhere in Britain or somewhere or another, or several of them in Europe with cooperating partners?
unidentified
Right, right.
We've got the Brits.
This is all based upon lots of reporting done by investigative journalists who've gone out and spoken to people, but basically it comes down to five partner countries, the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
All right, so then if they're participating in this, do they participate in the raw data that issues forth from the system?
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah, kind of in a funny way.
Each country sort of develops its own words that it wants the computers to search for.
And so let's say there's a station in New Zealand, which supposedly there is.
Then each of the five partner countries will feed, will have their code words or their keywords fed into the computers and search all of the information that's brought in by that station.
And then New Zealand will get its information.
Australia will get what it's looking for, UK, U.S., like that.
Well, no, but if the Brits are entitled because they have facilities there, if they're entitled to the information themselves and they can put in keywords themselves, then they could be looking at Boeing and McDonnell Douglas as we looked at their efforts.
unidentified
Well, yeah, there have been allegations in the press or critics of Echelon have said, well, you know, you can sort of get around the legal restrictions by simply having the Brits spy on U.S. citizens and then, oh, you know, happen to pass it back to the U.S. But whether that's happening or not, I can't speak to it.
What I can speak to is the NSA's position that that's absolutely forbidden and we don't do it.
But once again, it comes down to this issue of trust.
I mean, we're not privy to the system.
The general public doesn't, you know, can't get any information from the government about it.
The government doesn't deny the system exists.
It simply will refuse to comment on whether it exists or not or what's involved in it at all.
But again, if we determined that there was wrongdoing with respect to the contract for the Airbus, then why couldn't the British also use the raw data to look, is what I was asking, at our companies here in America doing exactly the same thing, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and, you know, another one.
Well, according to, I guess, interviews and research done by one of the groundbreaking journalists who have covered the system, Nikki Hagar, who's a New Zealander, there's a rule, I guess, or sort of an agreement between the partner countries that they won't spy on each other.
So they'll spy on perhaps everyone else in the world, but they won't spy on each other.
I mean, we've had story after story in the international press of friendly governments, friendly and in quotes, spying on each other.
And so the information is delivered right to their doorstep.
unidentified
Yeah.
You know, it's conceivable, but, you know, how much spying do we really need to do on the Brits?
I mean, they have a pretty open system like we do, and we share a lot of stuff with them already.
You know, it's a hypothetical, I think, that's not really the most pressing issue.
And for the Europeans, the most pressing issue is the fact that U.S. citizens have privacy rights and laws that protect them from this sort of surveillance.
But once you cross U.S. borders, the system can listen to a French person's private conversation or a French diplomat or whoever.
In other words, British could listen to American citizens.
Right?
Or the Aussies could listen to American citizens.
I mean, so this is a fair concern.
Just out of curiosity, David, from a personal point of view, or maybe you hate to comment on that when you're a reporter, but I mean, if you hold out those two hands the way I did, how do you feel about it?
All right.
unidentified
Well, you know, once again, you know, I said that I could see a good need for the system.
Like, frankly, you know, I live in New York City.
I would like to go to sleep at night feeling that, you know, our government and intelligence agencies are doing basically everything they can to make sure someone doesn't sneak in and do something really bad in this city.
So I'm, you know, all in favor of that.
Now, you know, we've got oversight committees.
We've got procedures within the government for making sure that the intelligence community doesn't step over the line.
And, you know, I guess all I can say is so far, at least in the press, I haven't seen any evidence that the system is being abused.
You don't see Republicans charging that the NSA pass off secrets to the Democrats or vice versa.
On the other hand, you're not liable to hear that either.
Well, if that information was used, it probably would be laundered several times before it got to where it was going.
unidentified
Possibly.
However, you did hear it back in the 70s because There were two or three really important congressional investigations that basically exposed the kind of illegal wrongdoing that we're talking about.
The NSA was involved.
They were gathering intelligence on civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King, keeping files on these people.
But the NSA, gosh, aren't they a little like, well, I guess their territory, the FBI is national, and the CIA is international, and the NSA is without borders.
Is that right?
unidentified
Well, it's supposed to work exactly like an intelligence agency, you know, just like the CIA.
It's not supposed to be spying on U.S. citizens, and they say that they don't do it.
But they admit, you know, or at least U.S. government officials have admitted that, yeah, this sort of illegal activity or improper activity was occurring back in the 70s.
But then, you know, these committees, these investigations prompted Congress to set up these oversight committees and develop, you know, some pretty elaborate regulations to try to control the agents.
Well, you know, I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.
The tricky thing is that it's really darned hard to get evidence to the contrary.
So you're left, you know, basically trusting them.
You know, the one thing that might concern people is that there are, you know, serious people in Congress like Senator Porter, who was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you know, who was trying to get all of this guidance, supposedly, that the NSA had put out on, you know, where to draw the line about collecting intelligence on U.S. citizens and everything.
And the NSA said that, you know, well, look, you can't ask just for everything because, you know, I think they claimed executive privilege, but they didn't want to turn it over.
So, you know, that may lead some people to conclude that, well, maybe they've got something to hide.
Maybe they've made some controversial calls in the past or, you know, whatever.
You may not know anything about this, but one defense the average citizen thinks about is encrypting, for example, email, you know, with, say, PGP, which is said to be really good.
But my thinking was, gee, if they're really as good as they suggest they are, number one, an encrypted message would absolutely trip some sort of attention-getting signal.
Number two, if they're really as good as they say, they probably can decipher PGP if they need to.
unidentified
Well, this agency is enormous.
I mean, tens of billions of dollars, and they've got massive computer power.
And so, you know, I'm sure that they can decrypt things pretty easily.
But, you know, what would screw them up a little, maybe, is if everybody was encrypting their email.
Because then their computers would be working overtime trying to bust everything, and most of it isn't any good.
And do they give you, do you get assignments like this all the time, or is this one of the more interesting?
unidentified
Yeah, I found this one particularly interesting, but I have the ability, like quite a number of the other people, other reporters at ABCNews.com, to go out and find our own stories.
Riders of the score, Riders of the Score Into this house we're born into this world we throw Like a dog without a bowl and hacker of a bow Riders of the storm There's a killer on the road His
brain is squirming like a toad Take a love out of the day Let your children play Reviewer Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time, tonight's program originally aired June 12, 2001.
Over the next couple of hours, we're going to have a debate between Grant Jeffery, one of the world's leading authorities on the Bible Code, who's written about it, and Mike Heiser, who wrote a book called The Bible Code Myth.
So you can see where the contentious side of this is going to be.
If you don't know what the Bible Code is, hang tough because we're going to have Grant Jeffery on first, I think.
This is the best way to do it, I think.
Have him explain to us what the Bible Code is.
Then maybe Mike can hang around a little longer.
We'll see how it goes.
But I think that's the obvious way to proceed.
If we're going to debate about the Bible Code, we've got to know what it is first, right?
Grant Jeffery is internationally recognized as a leading author writing about Bible prophecy, apologetics, privacy, and technology issues.
His research in prophecy, as well as apologetics, has been recognized by numerous authorities and authors.
More than 4 million readers have read Grant's 17 best-selling books, 17, as well as many who've enjoyed his videos and audio tapes during the last 13 years.
Very well read in the area that he's going to, well written, I guess I should say, in the area he's going to speak.
Mike Heiser, you probably know, he's been on the program before.
He's currently writing his Ph.D. dissertation in Hebrew, Bible, and ancient Semitic languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Holds an M.A. in ancient history from an Ivy League institution, University of Pennsylvania, major fields, ancient Israel and Egyptology.
I think you get the picture.
Again, Mike Heiser is author of the Bible Code Myth.
brent jeffrey is one of the world's leading authorities on the bible code i thought it appropriate Good evening.
I thought that we'd start out with Grant, and I don't know why I think this, except that I don't know a lot about either one of your professional endeavors, gentlemen.
I don't know a lot about the Bible Code.
And so, Grant, it made sense to me that we would start with you, if that's all right.
Certainly.
Can you tell us, Grant, give us Bible Code 101.
What is the Bible Code?
unidentified
Okay.
First of all, the Bible Code is something that I heard about about 10 years ago in Israel during the trip that some Israeli mathematicians at Hebrew University were analyzing the Hebrew text of the Old Testament.
And they had discovered a fascinating phenomena of equidistant letter sequence, where they would find particular, meaningful, in their mind, Hebrew words spelled out by skipping, let's say, every 25 letters, every 50 letters, maybe every 7 letters.
And they applied computer programs and statistical analysis and convinced themselves that they are infatuated.
This was not accidental.
But it goes really much, much further back.
All the way back to the Zohar 2,000 Years ago, there are references that Jewish rabbis believed that there was something strange about the text, especially of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament.
They believed that God had somehow placed keywords related to future events within the text of the Torah.
He writes the letter to his wife, but the commander, when he gets the letter, knows that by prearrangement, he's going to circle every 12th letter, and then he finds the secret message that there are 20 cannon in the fort and 500 soldiers.
This type of code has been used throughout history.
Simply by skipping an equal number of letters, you find the hidden code words.
Way back, about 600 years ago, a Rabbi Baccha was examining the Hebrew texts of the Old Testament, and he discovered that there were things that were quite strange to him.
For example, beginning with the first letters and words of the book of Genesis, he found the word Torah spelled out at a 50-letter interval.
Well, once at the beginning of Genesis and Exodus, and then in Numbers and Deuteronomy, he found it spelled in reverse every 50 letters.
When the sort of rumors or legends of this began to develop and were written and discussed in the Talmud, this really remained something that only a few of the rabbis were aware of.
But when computers were developed, the Israeli scientists were able to test this.
They were able to analyze the entire text of the Old Testament, the Tanakh as the Jews would call it, by putting in an electronic text into the computer and basically trying various assumptions, various skip distances.
What has happened in the code research that's been done the last 10 years is that there's really two types.
One is done by mathematicians and scientists, statisticians using computers, analyzing, looking for statistical significance that cannot be explained by random chance.
The other type of code research that has been done by many people like Yaakov Ramsel and myself has been done, sometimes in the case of my friend Yaakov Ramsel, actually manually, just looking at the text and counting off the letters, looking at a very specific text that is of interest to us.
For example, Isaiah 53 is a very famous prophecy that Christians have believed is a prophecy 700 years before Jesus was born that clearly predicts the life, the trial, and the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
And even Jewish scholars admit, many of them, that it is a messianic prophecy, although they would, of course, not believe that it points to Jesus.
When the code is found, what does the code tell us, and how many times does it say it?
unidentified
Well, in Isaiah 53, what is most remarkable is you would expect in any sufficiently large text to find accidental ELSs, like the word bat, tree.
Small words, if you skip, if you try enough possibilities in any large text, 100 monkeys, you're going to find.
But what was found here is in a passage which specifically relates to the Messiah, my friend Yakov Ramsel and I were able to discover that there were 41 specific names naming the individuals who were at the cross, the disciples of Jesus, Three Marys, Pilate, King Herod, the name Yeshua, Yeshua is my name, 41 names.
Now, it's obvious that if you only look for two or three names, or if you only found two or three names, in any large text, if you allow yourself to skip a large enough number of letters, you are going to find accidental words that are just simply accidental, E-L-S's.
They're not meaningful.
But here we had a passage that begins in Isaiah 52 in the last couple of verses and goes for 15 sentences, a very small portion of the Bible.
And in that specific passage that dealt with the Messiah, here we find 41 names naming all these individuals and places connected with the event that was 700 years in the future.
I have challenged on the internet, I've challenged in my books for those who believe as researchers that this is accidental, that it's not meaningful, to find any other language, any other passage of literature, to find 15 sentences within which they can find 41 names about any other historical event.
No one's been able to do that.
You can find things like the word Somoza, the president of Nicaragua who was assassinated.
You can find his name if you skip a large enough number of letters.
And what you won't find, though, is what you find in the Bible codes where you find a cluster with fairly low skip distances, say less than 100.
Many of them are less than 30 letters skipped.
And a whole cluster of dozens all together all about one event.
That's what we have never seen anyone demonstrate.
I think the best attempt that's been done is that a group of seven words, very short words, about Hanukkah was discovered in a random piece of literature outside the Bible.
With respect to Isaiah 52, you said 41 names, right?
Yes, I know 52.
People who were there at the crucifixion.
Now, computers are good for everything else, including trying to find this code.
What are the odds of, I wonder if you know what the odds are of being able to find this many names, 41 names of people who were present at the crucifixion in that much language?
What are the odds of that?
unidentified
Well, I've been told by mathematicians that they're quite staggering.
But it's more than that, because if you're just dealing with a short word, especially if it's a four, five letters, you're more likely by accident to find out.
The question is, why would you find so many words all related historically to the events surrounding the cross in one specific place?
But some of the researchers have recently discovered that there's actually some tests they've run where they found a particular one that says Yeshua is my name, and they've extended the code even further and discovered an actual long sentence that they say statistically,
and again I'm not a mathematician, but several of the mathematicians in a site on the internet called Bible Code Digest have made mathematical and statistical claims that are quite astonishing in the unlikelihood that these things could happen by random chance.
The Bible seems very direct in every way and every instruction and lesson.
So why would God write a code?
What's the point?
unidentified
Well, I think if the Bible code phenomena is real, and obviously many ELSs will simply be accidental, but if we do determine that these particular ELSs are purposeful and cannot be accounted for by random chance, I think the reason would be that God knew that this generation would be perhaps the most skeptical, scientifically minded generation in history.
We would have computers and that this Bible code would demonstrate one thing and one thing only.
It would demonstrate the supernatural origin of the Bible because how could anyone, centuries and centuries before it happened, know the names of the disciples and all those people who were there at the cross?
Or in the case of Bible codes that dealt with Hitler, Eichmann, and the names of death camps like Auschwitz, those kind of things.
And there are literally hundreds of examples of clusters of codes.
In other words, 2,000 years passed since his representative was here, and it would make sense that, well, the people that, of course, were live then, they have no problem bleeding.
But after a couple of thousand years have gone by, yeah, a little bit of doubt creeps in.
People get pretty cynical.
It's the modern technological world.
And so here's a way of delivering the message to the new modern technological world.
The Bible code.
unidentified
Let me give you three cautions that I preface my book with.
And I really believe we need to keep these in mind because many people imagine that the Bible codes actually are a message in and of itself.
In other words, they imagine that the Bible codes spell out sentences which might contain doctrine or messages, etc.
What we find are individual words like Hitler and Eichmann and Auschwitz, not sentences.
So first caution, there are no secret messages in the Bible codes.
God's message to mankind, I believe, is the surface written text of the Bible plus nothing.
Second, the Bible codes cannot be used to enable you to become a prophet and predict future events.
And let me explain why this is so.
Because there are no sentences, but rather we find words like Hitler and Eichmann and Auschwitz.
If we went back in time, and let's say we knew about the Bible Code back in 1920, you couldn't find Hitler and Eichmann and Auschwitz because you wouldn't know what to look for.
So it automatically applies to things that have already been already happened, right?
unidentified
And God forbids fortune telling.
And so this is consistent with that.
And Michael Drosden has anybody...
I believe so, but again, it would not help you know anything because one of random accidental DLSs that would spell out the name, you know, Tom, Bill, at any place would mean nothing.
The fact is, only after the fact could you interpret it to know what it meant.
If you found the word Hitler back in 1920, you would have no idea whether it was meaningful.
Sure.
Only the event proves that it's meaningful.
And last caution of the three, this has nothing to do with numerology.
Numerology is an occult science in which people imagine that because the value of your name adds up to the number nine, that that has something to do with your future.
It's irrelevant in the Bible codes whether we skip five letters or 27.
It's just that it's an equal skip distance that results in, hopefully, a meaningful word that is then clustered with other meaningful words within a paragraph or two, not that it's stretched out by skipping thousands of letters or even hundreds and hundreds of letters, because that's much more likely to be statistically accidental.
And if you would, between now and the bottom of the hour, respond to what you just heard.
unidentified
Okay, first of all, it was a very good introduction.
I think that was very helpful.
A quick question for Grant, and neither of us are statisticians, so I'm not expecting precision here.
Grant, how many letter differences do you think in the Isaiah 52 and 53 passage, the 15 verses there, would make a difference, would undermine the code?
What would matter?
How many letter differences?
Well, it would all depend on the length of the particular words that are spelled out in code.
If it's a small, well, let's say it's a small skip distance and it skips right over and the letter variant is simply one letter replaced by another, then that would not destroy the existence of that code word.
If, on the other hand, a letter was removed, then if a particular word was spelled out by skipping over that, you would lose that word and you would never know whether it was intended to be there or not.
Right.
So the important part is would be letters that would be missing in the text or added.
Or missing or added and not just different letters.
How many of those do you think would matter in those 15 verses?
We're not statisticians, but just know I have seen statements on the internet that tell us that there's 17 different letter variations and one actual word that the Dead Sea Scrolls, the word light that is added to verse 11.
I haven't been able to access, because my acrobat is not working on my computer, to access your full site to see what you were claiming.
But the fact of the matter is it seems that most of the problem, well, at least certainly a part of the problem you have with the phenomena is that when you look at some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, you find considerable textual variation from the Masoretic text.
The Masoretic text, for our listeners, is the text that Orthodox Jews have been using for the last thousand years or so, and they believe it has been faithfully copied out and handed down.
Enormous care was taken by the Jewish scholars down through the centuries to literally count the number of letters in the book of Genesis, count the middle letter, count the middle sentence, count up every one of the letters so that they had a control long before computers as to accuracy.
Mike Heiser, author of The Bible Code Myth, along with Grant Jeffrey, one of the world's leading authorities on Bible Code, here tonight.
And I'd say that who's right here is really important.
Wouldn't you?
unidentified
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast A.M. You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from June 12th, 2001.
The End In the in the springtime of the ear, And the trees around the leaves, And the earth shall look and their birds knew, And dressed in ribbons there.
And I was out fretless new in the blue hail of the night.
The shelter trees appear, And leaves the luncheon light.
We got a bit of body, come to your body.
We're turning back down, we breathe, darling, and peace.
We're turning back down, we breathe, darling, and peace.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AN from June 12th, 2001.
In other words, God knew that by the time 2,000 years had passed, mankind would be changing radically.
That's a lot of time, 2,000 years, no matter how carefully text is preserved.
God knew there would be doubters.
And so, inserted in the Bible in key places are codes designed to only be understood when technology has progressed to the point that it can decipher them.
That would be now, by the way, a very elegant explanation of why secret codes in the Bible, and the best I've heard ever.
That's from Grant Jeffrey, who's one of the world's leading authorities on the Bible Code.
Also here tonight, Mike Heiser, who's author of the Bible Code Myth.
Both gentlemen deal in ancient texts, and I'll be right back.
You both, I take it, to a large degree anyway, certainly agree on the original, the validity of the original text that we're talking about here, right?
unidentified
We believe, I think, in total agreement of the inspiration of the Bible that God inspired the writers to record precisely his intention.
One of the things I'd point out, though, in this whole thing is that, for example, when you compare the Torah, the first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy, there's about 304,805 Hebrew letters in the first five books of the Bible.
According to Dr. Jeffrey Satinova, there's only 169 letters that differ in the Dead Sea Scroll text to the Masoretic text that is used by the Orthodox Jews for the last thousand years and that most of the Bible code scholars use on the computer programs as well as manually.
When you compare it to the other major text, the VHS text that is used often by Gentile scholars, there's 130 letters that differ out of the 304,805.
Now, in the case of the Dead Sea Scroll variants of 169 letters, that's only one letter out of 1,803.
So while the letters differ, I think Michael and I would both agree that what differs here is the spelling in these small differences, but the words themselves are not in doubt.
You're saying that there are enough correct consecutive letters to properly be looking for a code.
unidentified
I believe so.
And to the extent there was a mistake, a deletion, or an addition, you might miss that particular code word or maybe several of them.
But you wouldn't destroy the phenomenon.
And Dr. Jeffrey Satinova is a mathematician.
He has stated this, and he said, I'll just quote, in sum, the presence of a limited number of transmission errors will not erase the Bible code if it's really there.
It'll simply sort of cause it to hobble a little bit.
Mike, what about that?
unidentified
Well, with respect to Dr. Satinover, and he is a mathematician, he is not a text scholar, and he is dead wrong.
The spelling differences are absolutely critical.
They are not critical for meaning, and Grant and I would agree about the nature of the text, the nature of the Bible, and I'm quite sure that most of our theological positions would be the same.
But this business of there's only being less than 200 in the Torah simply does not account for spelling differences.
It doesn't account for scribal notations of suspicious letters.
These are all things that I document visually in my book, The Bible Code Myth.
What Satanova is referring to are letter differences, not spelling differences, letter differences between the Masoretic texts that such and such group uses as opposed to another one.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are not used by Bible Code proponents.
And I'm saying that this is the text, everybody knows this in the world, virtually.
I have to say virtually because there must be somebody out there who wouldn't, that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the most significant manuscript discovery, perhaps, in the history of the world.
This is the textual material that is closest to the moment of inspiration of the Bible.
This is the way the scribes wrote.
When you're talking about letter differences of the Masoretes and all this stuff, you're talking Middle Ages a thousand or more years after the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And what I'm saying is that spelling matters for a code.
Now on my website, www.biblecodemyth.com, I know a lot of the audience does not have internet access, but we're going to try to play both sides of the coin here.
There is a visual illustration I go through line by line.
I have on the website the actual script in the Dead Sea manuscript.
So if your listeners have not seen what a Dead Sea Scroll manuscript looks like, this would be the place to go.
Below that, for readability, I type out the Hebrew letters that are in the Dead Sea script.
And then below that, I have the traditional Masoretic text that most people who do Bible code stuff use.
And visually, I have highlighted in color.
You don't have to know any Hebrew to see this.
I have highlighted in color where the scribes at the Dead Sea Scroll area, Qumran, how they spelled every word.
And you can visually see and you can count.
There are 115 different variations in spelling.
Now, one of the reasons I wanted to do this was not just for this discussion, but was for you personally.
Because the last time I was on the show, I had difficulty communicating why letter differences are important and simultaneously do not affect meaning.
What we're talking about for those who don't have internet access are things like, think of British English.
but if you need in a manuscript in a book in fifteen verses in whatever in a letter string if you need the letters to get hits for a code every letter matters Michael can I ask a question?
Michael, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are at least two and probably more copies of Isaiah, right?
Yeah, there's the great Isaiah scroll, Isaiah complete, and then B. And are there variants between those?
Between those texts?
Yes.
B probably favors, oh, let me get this right.
B probably favors the Septuagint a little bit more than A. But the fact that A is a variant there between the two, doesn't that argue that what you've got is error or variation that is occurring in the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The old people who translated the King James Bible, many of us from our tradition believe that God basically not only inspired the word, but was assured it was transmitted and carried down.
Not necessarily that there's not a letter wrong anywhere, but the fact that in the Dead Sea Scrolls you have variant readings when you have multiple examples of a particular passage, doesn't that argue that perhaps the Dead Sea Scrolls, while they're fantastic to confirm the basic text,
that the basic meaning, and it does prove that the words have been transmitted, the message has not been lost or even altered, that in fact the variant spellings in that is not necessarily, but that's the one you should go with.
No, it doesn't prove that at all, because I think we're missing the point between errors as in manuscript differences.
People who are going to the page, I think, should understand that.
unidentified
The same scribes who wrote the great I who copied the great Isaiah scroll use the same spelling conventions as the one who did Isaiah B, which is far less complete.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is the one that I took the example from, and that is within the Masoretic tradition.
We're not talking about different text families.
We're not talking about word disagreements between text families.
We're talking about letter differences, which is crucial for the code.
And I think that the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly this example, is completely undermined.
And in the Torah, it's also that you've got a hopeless degree of variance between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic in the Torah?
Yeah, they use the same spelling conventions.
We're not talking about hopeless errors, okay?
We're talking about spelling.
Again, color versus, you know, OR versus OUR.
It's just a fact, but the fact that the Bible code let me interject something.
If you took a British book, a contemporary British book, and its American equivalent, and throughout the book, or in special places at least, there was a code, is it not probable that there would be enough similar letters, or the similarities would be so much greater than the disparities, that if there was a code, you would see signs of the code.
You could begin to verify signs of the code despite the errors?
unidentified
The way to apply your question is, let's say we took a British book and we did ELS sequencing to it, and then along comes a guy like me that says, wait a minute, take out all the U's from OUR endings and see what you get.
Right, and there would be others.
Every letter shifts.
And here's the important part.
These, you know, 90% of the visual example I have are either things that need to go in MT or are not the Masoretic text.
They're not letter exchanges, as Grant was detailing and did a very good job earlier.
They are things that are just not in the letter chain of the code.
But my point is, even if you assume the worst, and we use the British book and the American book as an example, and assume the worst, with the same rate of error that we've been talking about here, you would still find areas in the book where the computer would begin to verify words.
unidentified
Well, what would happen is what Grant brought up earlier, when he said that the small letters, okay, he admitted that the small letters can be found accidentally.
And you can get that with any text of any length.
The thing is here, with this example, you can't go 50 letters without a letter insertion needed or deletion.
It fits the entire thing in only 15 verses.
There's 115.
If you extrapolated this out to the whole Hebrew Bible or the whole Torah, again, all we're talking about is spelling style.
But if you want to code and you think it's from God, then use the text that is closest to when God inspired the text.
And there's just a vast amount of letter differences.
Why?
Why would the Bible code phenomena be present?
And basically, no one argues that these ELSs are not there.
It's just whether they're statistically and purposely placed there, statistically significant.
Why would they be there and not in the Dead Sea?
I would say first of all...
You're making the mistake here of separating the Dead Sea Scroll text from the Masoretic text.
The Dead Sea Scroll text of Isaiah A is a member of the Masoretic family.
It is a Masoretic text.
Now, if you're going to make that argument, that the later text, the one that's medieval, that the scribes worked on, if you're going to make that argument, then what you're doing is you can't claim divine inspiration for a code.
You have to claim medieval rabbinic inspiration for a code.
And that's a separate act of inspiration.
And personally, my theology doesn't allow for that.
Because if we're taking the text, the Dead Sea Scroll text, that is closest to the way it looked when it was originally written, and then we change it in the medieval period.
The rabbis get to pull letters out and create the Masoretic text because now they're using little dots for vowels instead of extra consonants.
If we get to do that, then we have to give the rabbis credit for this code, and they're not divine.
The King James translators, for example, were using the Masoretic text.
And they were using a Masoretic text that was medieval.
And they believed that this was the inspired word of God, and they translated it to the best of their ability.
And they were right.
They were right, because meaning is preserved.
They were not looking for a code.
Of course they weren't looking for a code.
Well, see, but you're dichotomizing the two.
Well, I'm saying that.
Of course they believe that.
Let's say the Dead Sea Scrolls had never been found, Michael.
Then we would have the Bible we have.
Right.
We have the Bible we have.
Okay, and we would have a Bible.
But your argument is that the Dead Sea Scrolls, wherever they vary from the Masoretic text, is in fact correct and the accurate and then the Masoretic text is wrong.
No, no.
Both texts are Masoretic.
Okay?
This is why when you read in books, and this is true, people aren't hoodwinking us, when they say the great Isaiah scroll agreed 98% of the time with the medieval Masoretic text.
Of course.
That's true.
That's true.
You know why?
Because they're not talking about a code.
They're not talking about a letter sequence.
They're talking about the proper words that convey the proper meanings.
I understand.
Okay?
So that is true.
They're not hoodwinking their readership.
But if you want to, again, say that God put a code in the text via the letters, then use the text that is closest to the act of inspiration.
If you don't, you have to give the rabbis who took those consonants out and substituted little dots and dashes, the medieval vowel system.
You have to give the rabbis credit for inventing the code, and they're not divine.
Grant said that the mathematical probabilities of finding, say, 41 names, Isaiah 52 and 53, would be billions to one.
How do you refute that?
unidentified
Well, if you insert or delete the 215 letter differences I'm talking about, the code evaporates.
Now, up on my website, again, I'm not a statistician, but I have some quotations.
You go up to the website, and by the way, I have to mention that since Art, you've been so kind to have me on again, I am practically giving away the book.
It's 50% off, but only to your audience and only for two days.
And you can't get it through Amazon.
You've got to go through my site.
If you go up there, there's a toll-free number, too.
I have some comments by a guy named Dr. Randall Ingermansen, who is a computational physicist.
He's a friend that I met after the first time I was on for this topic.
He has taken my Isaiah document that I'm referencing you guys to, and this is what he says.
He does all the number crunching there.
He says, what this means, the text results in practical terms, is that just about any three-letter word you could name is essentially certain to be found somewhere in this passage at some skip.
Grant would admit that.
He talked about the accidental hits.
For example, one expects to find the four-letter word Yeshua more than six times, strictly by chance.
There is a stretch of even 50 letters without a deletion.
That means, this is his term, virtually every ELS sequence in this passage, except a few short ones at small skips, are corrupt.
Now this is a computational physicist that the numbers mean nothing once you look at the condition of the text.
And this is my contention in the whole book.
The entire enterprise is flawed because you are working with the wrong data set, the wrong letters.
Well, how can you explain, Michael, something like the Bible code found in Isaiah 53?
It's got 22 letters.
It's the longest one that I know of that has ever been verified.
That's the one that begins at Isaiah 53, 5.
Yeah, gushing from above Yeshua was my mighty name, and the clouds rejoiced.
Gentlemen, this is a very, it's a pedestrian question, but I think I'll ask it.
Randy in Pittsburgh, California asks, who exactly wrote the Bible anyway?
unidentified
Well, we have about 40-some individuals over a period of 1,600 years were inspired by God, Christians and Jews believe, to record these 66 different books.
And so over a 1,600-year period, we have people from kings to shepherds to tax collectors, all of them individually, claiming that they were inspired by God, wrote the individual books that have now been brought together as both the Old and New Testament.
I can tell you the modern scholarly view, which is, I guess, is that around 450 B.C., roughly in the lifetime of Ezra the scribe, and a book of the Bible is named after him, he was a real historical person, most rabbis would say that it was during Ezra's time that all the manuscript data was gathered.
And when I say manuscript data, I mean the pages of the individual books, if I can use a modern term like page, instead of scroll.
And Ezra supervised the final editing and collation and getting it into a good readable form for posterity.
So that, you know, if you want to put somebody at the head of a process like that, that's what most of the time.
Now the books were composed much earlier than that, and Grant and I would, some of the books were composed much earlier than that, and Grant and I would certainly agree there.
But as far as someone within the prophetic community saying, it's done now, and here's what we're going to go with, and here's what we want copied when we go back to the land of Israel.
They were in captivity, going back, usually people consider that person to be Ezra.
Boy, it seems amazing to somebody like myself that the preservation, in the manner that you described and all those involved, that the preservation would be anywhere near accurate enough, now here I go tipping the other way, to support the translation of a code.
unidentified
Well, it is remarkable.
I mean, you know, Grant and I would agree that there, you know, let's face it, in the ancient world, there is nothing like the Bible.
You look at Caesar's Gallic Wars, you know, there was a dozen copies of those, of that or so.
If you just take New Testament, let's just leave the Old Testament out of this.
You take New Testament, there's over 5,000 copies.
Now, that could be the whole thing, or it could be part of a book or some scrap of a manuscript, but 5,400, 5,500 verses, 11.
There's just nothing like the Old and New Testament for the commitment to perpetuate the text.
And the letter differences that we're talking about, when you get up to about 100 AD, at Qumran, there's evidence for three different versions of the Old Testament.
And again, it's not like one guy was copying the phone book and the other guy was copying the Old Testament.
I mean, they're 98% the same anyway.
But you can go across the board and pick a passage, and there might be differences, three different kinds of differences, a word here or there.
So, you know, we have evidence for three sets.
And so about 100 AD, the scribes get together, kind of like I wish people would do today and say, hey, there's 150 English translations.
Let's just narrow it down a little bit.
And they said, let's pick a text That we want to go to.
Now, that decision was motivated to a great degree by the Christian use of the Septuagint in their debates with the Jews over Christ and different things like that.
The Septuagint was the Greek translation of a particular Hebrew text into Greek.
But around 100 AD, the rabbis thought, hey, let's settle on one.
And they settled on one.
That became known as the Masoretic text, which is very, very similar to, again, Dead Sea Scroll material, a lot of it, like we're talking about.
So, you know, one's called pre-Masoretic and the other one's Masoretic, but they're all in the same family.
And so from about 100 AD up through the late Middle Ages, they're copying the same text.
And in the late Middle Ages, they said, hey, let's take out these letters, these consonants, because Hebrew didn't originally have vowels.
And so what the Hebrews were doing, and they started this about the 7th century BC, was they would use consonants to do double duty, to act as vowels in the text to preserve the correct pronunciation.
And so in the Middle Ages, they said, well, let's get rid of this system.
It's just kind of old and clunky.
And let's put little dots and dashes in.
And so they began removing these extra consonants.
And that's what I'm saying is, look, that's deadly to the code, unless you want to give the rabbis who did that the credit for arranging the code.
Well, if the Masoretic text that the Orthodox Jews used, well, all Jews used throughout the world and was used primarily by those who translated the Bible, the King James Bible, for example, if it is full of errors and changes that would be used.
It's not errors.
Errors that were spelling updating.
Yeah, okay.
Well, some of them would be errors, too.
I mean, it's not as if everything's just a.
There are manuscript disagreements.
You and I both believe in an error, Sigram.
Yes?
Let me make my point I was trying to make for about 10 minutes.
Well, I don't think you should use the word error.
if the Masoretic text that the Bible code scholars and researchers use is not the correct text, how in the world can we explain the discovery in Isaiah 53 of the longest Bible code so far of 22 letters, gushing from above, Yeshua was my mighty name.
Thank you for asking.
The mathematician Ed Sherman has calculated that the chance of this 22-letter ELS appearing anywhere in the entire Old Testament is one chance out of 685 billion times 1 billion.
That's anywhere, and they did not discover it by chance anywhere in the whole of the Tanakh except in Isaiah 53, which specifically is a prophecy about the Messiah.
Just to put that number, one out of 685 billion times a billion in context, he uses the illustration that if you covered the entire continental U.S. with quarters stacked 450 feet high, and you took one of those quarters and painted it blue, and you set somebody blindfolded to go search for it,
and when they think they're in the right state, the right county, they dig down as deep as they want, they'd have the same chance of finding that blue quarter as this 22-letter ELS would have of appearing anywhere in the Chanakh, the Old Testament, let alone even more unlikely that it would appear in Isaiah 53.
Well, in that example, and this is on my website as well, just look for the 22-letter notation on my website.
You can go to this page that I'll be referencing.
First of all, that letter sequence begins at Isaiah 53.5.
And again, you can look at that on BibleCodeDigest.com if you want that code sequence.
If I take Isaiah 53.5 and go to the end of Isaiah 53, there are 63 letter differences between that text and the Dead Sea Scrolls of that same passage.
Now, Grant said before the break that it doesn't matter.
Well, I would say if you dump 63 letters into that letter chain, you're only talking seven verses.
The question is, why would it be there?
It matters.
I'll tell you why it would be there.
Why does the code, quote unquote, work?
Generally, I would say the code works because it's not scientific.
And here's what I mean.
Here's an illustration.
If you flipped a coin a thousand times and record the sequence, you know, heads, tails, whatever order they're in, the odds that you would get, the particular sequence that you do when you're done, are, according to mathematicians, 10 to the 300th power to 1.
But you and I both know that's no miracle.
Why?
Because all you did was flip a coin and write down the results.
Now, here's what you need for a miracle.
If you predict beforehand that the thousand coin flips would result in that particular sequence, Then you've got a miracle.
Now, what Bible code practitioners don't do is they don't tell us beforehand what they're going to get.
They don't list the names beforehand that they're going to find.
Not only that, but they don't decide on the names.
In other words, in other words, In 1920, we would not have known the name of the Christian.
unidentified
I know who the disciples are done.
I can list the disciples' names, and I can postulate the scientific method, a hypothesis.
Here's the 12 disciples.
Here's 20 other people associated with the life of Christ.
Here's the way their names were spelled.
And you've got to pick your language.
Grant doesn't do this in his book.
He doesn't pick Hebrew or Aramaic.
And Aramaic was, of course, the language that was spoken during Jesus' day.
He also doesn't pick Greek.
That was the language of the New Testament.
You've got to pick a language.
And let's say it's Hebrew.
The other problem is he doesn't, the Bible code practitioners will use modern Hebrew vocabulary and count something as a hit.
And then they'll turn around and use ancient Hebrew vocabulary for a hit.
You've got to specify what the names are, how they're spelled, what language, what stage of the language, and then Eliminate the accidental hits that Grant talked about earlier, the really short ones.
Try to get something five letters or above.
And then, finally, and here's where I come in, establish the right text, the right data set.
If you can do all of that beforehand, and then out on the other end, you get what you hypothesized.
That is significant.
Okay, what we have is we have people feeding the Hebrew letter sequence into a computer, and then the computer spits out according to whatever parameters you put in, and then they go looking.
They don't tell you beforehand what they're going to find.
In other words, if you could come up with a code as significant as the 22 words and find that in two different translations, would that give you pause?
unidentified
Well, if you could eliminate the two and three letter words from this, this is 22 letters.
You actually came up with the same meanings in two different translations, two different languages.
unidentified
All the words in this sequence, and you can look at this if you go to my website, all of the words, there's seven words, all of them have at least two of the most common Hebrew letters in them.
You can't put that anything that's using the common letters.
Right, but the point is, as you yourself pointed out at the beginning, you can expect, at no odds greater than chance, that you can get certain two and three, and you even said four letter words, meaningful letter combinations that go into words.
You can expect that by chance.
But not 22 letters.
That is what is astonishing.
Throw the statistical three letters in there.
You are using a rabbinic text.
If you want to say that the rabbis divinely produced this code, I mean, I don't like that.
But would we find meaningful phrases of in the back of my book I have an appendix where mathematicians have done this.
unidentified
You know, again, and it does include phrases, and it does include letters.
You know, this, from a statistical point of view, again, and Randall Agermanson's book is the book for this, if you're a techie, okay, if you're a number cruncher kind of person, he says, and he should know, he's the computational physicist, that the hits that people are getting, okay, including this, because the letters in here are so small, and you get to divide them up, you know, how you want, and all that stuff.
But most of them are so small that the hits are not beyond chance.
Now, Grant Jeffrey has written 17 books, and to be fair, I want to give Grant an opportunity to plug the book of His Choice, or all 17, if you would like.
What book, Grant, would you most like to have my listeners read?
unidentified
Well, I think The Signature of God, which deals with the Bible Code and other indications of the supernatural origin of the Bible, medical statements in the Bible, over 100 that are literally thousands of years in advance of their time.
But there are three chapters that deal with the Bible Code phenomenon.
In fact, this was the first book in the English-speaking world that I, as far as I know, to really discuss the Bible Code about a year before Drosden's book came up.
And they can get it by going to the website, grantjeffrey.com, and they can see all the various books that I've done.
You gentlemen have one segment left, so bring out your big guns and go wherever you want to go.
unidentified
Well, there's a real interesting factor that really puzzled me when I first began looking at this, because I'm a skeptic.
And I wondered why in the world there would be a code in the Bible at all.
And it struck me in my research that there actually is another code that is acknowledged by most Bible commentators.
And it's found in Jeremiah chapter 51, verse 41, and also in Jeremiah 25, verse 26.
And here's what it reads.
How is Sheshach taken?
And how is the praise of the whole earth surprised?
How is Babylon become an astonishment among the nations?
Well, the commentators realize and quote the fact that Sheshach is actually a cryptogram, a code, where if it was in English, A becomes Z, B becomes Y. You reverse the letters of the alphabet, and Shishak actually translates into Babylon.
And it appears that in the book of Jeremiah, in two different places, there's actually this code.
They called it the, they used the word atbash, and the Jewish Talmud talks about these kind of strange codes that exist.
Even in the New Testament, you have something that's somewhat similar, in that the mark of the beast is going to be 666, the number of his name.
And so it is intriguing, and it at least sort of gives you a context.
So a lot of those phenomena may not be that strange.
What Grant is describing is a whole lot different than ELS sequencing.
You take the name of, the list of names here, the 41, if you delete the ones that we would both consider accidental, the short ones, you chop off 10, you're left with 31.
Then you get to the problem of spelling of the names.
Again, this is all cataloged up there.
For instance, I think this might be a typo, actually, in Grant's book, but I do list here Herod.
For some reason, he has the ovow in the wrong place.
But there's a problem with the spelling of Herod.
There's a problem with the spelling of Caiaphas.
Peter, he's using the Aramaic, Kifa.
In Aramaic, that's actually spelled completely differently, two-letter differences.
I go through every name, and once you weed out the spelling problems, you're left with 25.
And then you get to what I call vocabulary problems, where sometimes it's biblical Hebrew vocabulary that's used for a hit.
Other times it's modern Hebrew.
And I think you need to be consistent.
There are words like for craz, talav, which does not even occur in the Hebrew Bible.
It's a completely modern word.
You delete those, and you're down to 20.
And then you're left with a very short list.
You've got half the list left.
And if you look at all the words there, every one of those words except one has at least two of the most common letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
So I think it's far less spectacular than what is being conveyed here.
I think you have to be consistent.
You've got to be upfront.
What are we looking for?
What language are we using?
What spelling are we using?
All that kind of thing.
I guess if I could have one last question of Grant, why is Grant not using the text that is closest to the time of inspiration?
But that's the scroll text.
Because if you use that text, all the work that's been done on codes just, I think, is just obliterated because of these dramatic, very dramatic letter differences.
And I haven't even gotten to the notes that the scribes left themselves.
Would you agree it is the closest text to the time?
unidentified
To the inspiration.
The closest in time, yes.
But certainly many Bible scholars would not agree that the Dead Sea Scroll text is always to be preferred to any other text.
The Orthodox Jews, in fact Jews throughout the world who use the Jewish scriptures, they use the Masoretic text that is used by virtually all the Bible code researchers without exception, and most of them would find, I think they would find it kind of a puzzling argument that Michael uses because they believe that the text that they use in their Bibles is the inspired Word of God.
And this was certainly until 1947 in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I think virtually all Christian scholars would have said that the text that was used by the King James and subsequent, they felt that was inspired Word of God.
Well, I think that most would still say that the text we have is the inspired, and as Michael said, most of the differences are spelling differences.
But because there are variants among the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves to the same passage, to take the kind of position that almost implied, but I don't think Michael would say this, that the particular Dead Sea Scroll variants or manuscripts, they're the absolute perfect.
I don't think he would say that.
Here's what I would say.
Here's what I would say.
If the code is put into the text by God and God had the prophet write, okay, the Dead Sea Scroll material is the way the prophets wrote.
This is an archaeological fact.
It is a scientific fact.
These manuscripts are real.
You can go to museums.
They won't let you touch them.
But you can see them.
This is the material that most closely resembles what the prophets produced.
You know, I try not to put the words God and can't in too many sentences.
Jeff proposed.
I'm not opposed inherently to the idea that God could have done something like this, like Grant is describing.
Okay, but the Dead She Scrolls are just one aspect.
The scribes themselves, let me use one of the examples in the book.
There are 33 letters in the Torah.
This is the news in the first five books.
But the scribes themselves, who produced the Masoretic text, who took out the consonants I'm arguing about, and they put dots over the letters.
Those dots signified that that letter was suspect and should be erased.
There's another place where there are thousands.
Some scholars say 1,800, others say a little bit lower, of letters that are confused because they look similar.
The scribes noted this.
They're aware of it.
They're constantly aware of it.
They produce notes.
They produce rings of material telling us that the people who do Bible code research don't incorporate any of this.
I mean, nothing, not a.
They just use the modern Masoretic text, which was developed during the Middle Ages, a thousand or more years removed from the event of inspiration.
And My argument is: if the code is from God, you use the text that the prophets produced.
I do believe that there are Bible code researchers that use the BHS.
And what is interesting is a modern text built on the medieval work of the Masoretes.
But it's a variant from the Masoretic text used by the Jews in their Bible.
And what is interesting is that they find that there are codes, but there are less codes per section, where, let's say, they find 12 codes about Hitler and the Holocaust in the Masoretic text.
They find maybe 8 in the VHS.
We've talked a lot about Isaiah 53, but just to show our listeners, get an example of some other types of codes that are fascinating.
One of the most interesting ones statistically, and by the way, anyone's interested on the internet, go to Bible Code Critic and take a look at the Holocaust codes in Deuteronomy chapter 8 to 12.
I talked about them in my book, and here's what they found initially.
They found the name Hitler, every 22 letters, Auschwitz, Belsen, another death camp, Berlin, King of the Nazis, Levi, An Evil House Rose Up, Eichmann, and a People Cry, Murder, and Slaughter.
And there's a whole lot more they found that that particular internet site goes into it and also a statistical analysis.
I think you'd find it fascinating.
And I would say the same criticism applies.
You take those passages, look at the Septuagint, look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, look at the scribal notations there, work on the text, put the letters.
Much less variance, though, than in your Isaiah passage.
Well, you haven't looked.
I mean, you were guessing, and to be fair, I didn't get this anywhere.
I just did this in preparation for the show, so I'm not saying it's out there anywhere to find.
But since the spelling practices are the same, the material comes from Qumran, they're going to spell consistently.
We've had 50 years to study the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Malachi Martin's dissertation was on scribal practices art.
This is a known fact.
This is how they spelled.
This is how they did it.
British English to our English.
It's the same kind of phenomena going on.
It's everywhere in the Hebrew Bible.
No matter where it is.
I don't care if it's in Deuteronomy or Isaiah 53.
This is how they did it.
And I still don't think I've received a satisfactory answer from Grant that if the code is divine, why are we preferring a medieval text, medieval spelling, as opposed to what the prophets actually produced?
Well, the fact of the matter is the research that has been done is on the Masoretic text, and it has found codes that, according to some of the mathematicians, the long ones like the 22-letter one, are of such improbability that it's billions to one against it happening by chance.
And so the question, and there's lots of questions about Bible codes.
I don't think anyone's got all the answers at all.
But the question is, if the Masoretic text is faulty because of spelling changes, why would such statistically impossible almost codes be found?
If God is the infallible that we believe him to be, then would He not know ahead of time what languages we would use, what changes we would make, and where exactly we would be in the year 2001?
Well, my argument was that he would know what we were doing.
unidentified
He would know.
He would know.
But why hasn't he given us the list?
Okay, here are the lists of manuscripts that accurately produce the letter chain.
Why hasn't he told us?
The problem is we're not omniscient.
And to establish a secure letter sequence for the sake of a code, it requires omniscience, to be sure.
But you're looking at it in the right data set.
Well, the Bible does have phrases such as that not one jot or tittle of the word of the law.
That doesn't pertain to a code, Grant, and you know that.
I'm not talking about code.
I'm just saying that God has affirmed in numerous ways that all scripture is inspired, given by inspiration, that there are verses which strongly imply God's preservation, not only inspiration, but preservation.
Then why do we have manuscript differences?
Well, obviously, you've got spelling differences.
But I believe...
For instance, the book of Jeremiah is probably the most dramatic example.
The Septuagint of the book of Jeremiah is one-seventh shorter than the Masoretic text.
Now, how do we know whether the Masoretic text is too long or the Septuagint is too short?
The answer is we don't.
And if you're talking about Jeremiah, which is 52 chapters long, one-seventh of that book, that is hundreds of verses and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of letters difference.
How do we know that?
That only affects Bible codes, which are within that area or depend on meaning if it's one-seventh difference.
Now, I picked the most dramatic example, and quite frankly, nobody knows what to do with that problem because we're not omniscient.
We don't know whether the Septuagint reflects the accurate text or the Masoretic text does.
I mean, in that place, it's a conundrum because there's such a wide difference there.
Most of the time, it's just a word or two.
So who cares?
There are differences like this that are real.
And this is what textual critics do.
And Bible-believing textual critics wrestle with these problems and try to come up with the best solution that is faithful to a doctrine of preservation.
How does the Dead Sea Scroll?
That's the most difficult example.
How does the Dead Sea Scroll Jeremiah manuscript compare?
Most of the time, this is a generalization now.
Most of the time, the Dead Sea Scroll material agrees with the Septuagint.
Obviously, I just said most of the time.
For instance, in Isaiah 53, though, I think the Masoretic text, where it disagrees with the Septuagint, I would go with the Masoretic readings on just text-critical study principles.
But just as a generalization, most of the time the Septuagint will side with the Dead Sea Scroll material.
And there were places in Samuel that were complete gibberish in the Masoretic text, and people had to guess what the meanings were.
And then when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, they validated the Septuagint readings, and translators were able to put that in and produce better translations.
I kidded a while ago about it being too many English translations.
Actually, this is a worthwhile work because people are just struggling with this, and Bible believers are really trying to make the best effort possible to produce the most accurate text in terms of meaning that they possibly can.
Indeed, but why shouldn't we wonder about the original inspiration?
Why should we even have faith that it's other than something that's very, very old and has been passed down?
How do we know it's inspired by anything?
unidentified
Well, there's a number of answers to that.
One of the ones that I would give and give in my book, Signature of God, is that if God, as a supernatural being, was the inspirer and ultimate author of the Bible, you would expect that it would bear his signatures.
There would be something about it that couldn't have been produced by normal human beings.
And what I argue in the book is that there are a number of things.
For example, there are hundreds of detailed prophecies made in the Bible that have come true centuries after they were made with absolute precision.
Back into the dark mist of the unknown of the night we go with unscreened colors who all should be turning off their radio when I say, Good morning, East of the Rockies.
And our text is called The Early Life and Wanderings of Bronson Pinchot.
And in that text, using the same Bible code technique, actually, in the Book of Tibet in chapter 3, we find the words Balky, Immortal, Oxman, and, coincidentally, Orson.
All of these words having to do with our religious figure, Charles Bronson Pinchot.
I really would like to see some serious work done with other texts.
another was popular modern tax very uh...
the bible code method You take something that is written to disprove the Bible code and go through that, and I would wager you that we would find a number of meaningful words, if not perhaps a whole sentence.
I listened to the debate, and I kind of went back and forth, which I guess says it was a pretty good debate, but I went back and forth in what I was thinking in my own mind about it.
I first had very serious doubts about the Bible Code, but then listening to 22 letters in a row in a meaningful sentence, that's fairly impressive.
I don't know.
I kind of went back and forth, but I guess that means it was a good debate.
Now, everybody, for some reason, always assumes that one world government would mean retraining camps.
It would mean concentration camps.
That Americans would be thrown into concentration camps as seen by pilots flying over the U.S. And all of that kind of thing would happen because not everybody would agree with the new One World Order, right?
And if you take in consideration that it was written in three continents by different people at different times, and the fact that these people were all able to have the same basic message to not contradict each other, to come in the same sequence, is amazing and unique in itself.
But I mean, they're really, these are things that I think would occur to the mind of man, perhaps divinely, but to the mind of man, who was seeking some sort of pure thought.
I mean, how to treat others as we would treat ourselves and, you know, these other basic tenets.
They seem common.
unidentified
But don't forget that a lot of the authors and stuff were very much persecuted.
But now I want to say something about the Bible code.
What I wanted to say is, since this is a book that's so old and so well preserved in its content, I think that you had a brilliant idea when you said God would probably realize that at this time in history, most books would be taken from the Masoretic text.
And thus, he chose the use of that.
Catherine Keating, and I think Father Malachi has mentioned the hidden book, that there's a hidden book of the Bible that would come to light in the last days.
And I think that this is the way God is trying to tell us, because the things that come up so often and seem miraculous are all these words about World War II and the evil that came to light through us and the things that will come to light about the Antichrist.
And there are words in there about the Antichrist that they can even get to tonight.
There would be no extreme left, nor would there be any extreme right.
All those people would be getting abrasions on their knuckles because of the barbed wire.
Right?
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
You know, this West of the Rockies button is going to have to.
West of the Rockies, now you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi.
I would like to suggest an opinion that can reconcile the two opinions on the Bible code.
I didn't hear anybody mention that if, for example, if I was writing a code that nobody can respond to, I would try to put some sort of forward error correction so that whoever decodes it can account for bits and pieces that are getting lost in the code.
Well, yes, but if God was writing this, there would be a divine error correction, which would account for all the time that has gone between, what, 450 BC and today.
In other words, God would know what changes were made, and that would be the error correction.
so it would be el perfecto today.
unidentified
Well, there was still a...
No, by far not.
But they were talking about differences in spelling and how letters here and there from the different spelling can change the offset the code.
And if you have error correction, then differences in the spelling will probably not result in a change in the code, unless it's a really big difference.
I could take a fresh set of photos, I suppose, and I'll get those up.
But I think the ones that I put up earlier, some months ago, would do.
Keith, if you would be so kind as to put a What's New pointer on the website to my Motorhome Pictures.
And it's been kind of sitting out there.
And every now and then I go out and I start it up and I roll it forward and then I roll it in reverse.
That's about the most I get to do with it because of the pressure of the time, of course, to do this program.
And so I am going to take a few days and we are going to escape in the motorhome while we have somebody sit here and babysit the house, which is what we've got to do because of who we are.
But I'll see if I can get Keith to get those photographs up for me.
Keith, if you would please, I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from June 12, 2001.
So if you go to my site right now, under What's New, you'll see Caller Asks for Pictures of RV.
And there are two pages of pictures of my RV.
The only things that you don't see there, really, are the ham rig.
Yes, I've got a ham rig in there, and I can go on all the HF bands.
In addition to that, two meters and 440.
I've got a CB radio in there, so I can talk to truckers.
And there's a really cool instrument that, and really is cool, too, that will tell me to turn right or turn left, and it scrolls, it's GPS with a scrolling map, and it shows you as a vehicle going along the road, you know, and it shows all the little intersections and everything.
So you don't see some of the electronics that are in there, but I've done an awful lot to it.
So there's about how many on there?
Let's see.
One, two, three, four.
There's going to be about a total of eight photographs of it up on the website right now.
So if you want to know what my getaway mobile is, that's it.
And what we'll probably do is take a series of short trips.
At any rate, should you see me on the highway or out and about, you'll know.
Now we take you back to the night of June 12, 2001, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
into the night we go and to our wildcard line you're on the air hello hello hello hello goodbye East of the Rockies you're on the air good morning yes Ark that would be me Ark in Nashville Tennessee 1510 a.m. got the LAC that's the one in Nashville yes sir yes sir several things for you if I don't lose a translator you were mentioning recent day literature that had tests run on the equal letter sequence distancing
Here's the only problem with that whole theory, and that is that the letters that I'm getting today could be prophetic, but we wouldn't know that for four or five hundred years or a thousand years.
So who's to say they're not prophetic?
Nobody until it happens.
So what is written today, if a thousand years from now turns out to be prophetic, would be seen as divine inspirational material, wouldn't it?
And what I was thinking was maybe to send him an edited copy of the tape from the show the other night and put that in a player where he could put it out on his back porch or something and blast it so that...
In any case, the other question that I have for you, though, was I'm sure it's probably already been announced, but probably on the night that I wasn't able to catch the show.
I was just kind of curious as to what did happen to Mike.
Is it possible, if he hasn't answered it already, the next time you have Ed James on, or even the next remote viewer that you mentioned earlier, can you ask him if there's anything anybody can do to keep from being spied on by a remote viewer?
I mean, now when I walk down the street and you get that funny feeling of being watched, I have to wonder, is there a remote viewer looking at me?
You know, are there these invisible eyes in the sky watching what I'm doing?
No, it's actually that the phone company did that some number of years ago to ensure that people would not tie up their equipment ringing numbers for days on end.
You know, like boyfriends trying to get hold of their girlfriends who aren't there, and so they just let it ring until they answer, even if it's 24 hours later.
Believe it or not, even though this is not going to satisfy you, it's the truth.
If you're out there dialing and dialing and dialing and trying to get through, your odds of making it through are just as good the way I do it as if I were to, for example, have some call screener who took all the calls and put them on hold and I just took one after another and somebody was on hold for 30 or 45 minutes.
Your odds are exactly as good.
unidentified
Sure, sure, because I've spent 35 minutes at least trying to call.
Well, the problem is that when you consult the experts, they say yes, and they can identify the type of mold, but they act as though it's always been around.
Well, she's a theologian, a professor of theology at the University of Sydney, or she was for 21 years.
It's an exceptionally interesting book, and she studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, and several other things.
And she's a Ph.D. And she came up with an answer and a theory about there is a code, but it's not the code that the people are talking about on your show this morning.
And it actually is an underlying way of writing so the Romans would not know what they were talking to themselves about.
The message that was being put out, especially in the gospel era, the good news era, which is what gospel means.
And I just think if I get a chance, I'll call you back about this again and give you a little bit more information, but I'm just not prepared to do that at the time.
That's fair, I guess, but it still doesn't tell us about the nature of time.
What I really want to know is, can we travel to previous, what would be the right word, previous linear presentation of events and future presentation of events?
Does the nature of time include the ability to move within it?
unidentified
It would seem to me that eventually we will be able to figure that out.
If we're eventually going to be able to figure it out, even if it's a thousand years in our future, then if the nature of time is like that, that means there are already people traveling back in time.
So we only have to decide what are the rules for the time travelers.
Can they mess around with events or are they just forced by the nature of time travel to observe events, essentially being invisible in any time other than their own?
unidentified
Yeah, because if they were to happen to do something in a pastime, would they eliminate themselves in the future?
In other words, there's no way you can change in this universe what's going to happen.
But if you go back and change something, you essentially, according to Dr. Kaku, last time he was on, would create a whole new universe where things happen differently.
Listen, I got a scoop, shows over, tell everybody out there good night.