The History Channel was showing what I think was part two of a two part show about a code that is supposed to be written into the bible that might be used to predict the future.
Yes, you read it right. I said the History Channel, not the SciFi channel.
The Bible Code uses, I guess, one of the earliest Hebrew versions of the Old Testament, so at least it's going to a rather better source than, say, Billy Sunday's New Free Bible.
The idea is that when the Hebrew characters are set up in a matrix, written out to look more like a word find than a paragraph, and then a computer analyises the matrix, certain patterns will emerge that coorespond to world history and politics.
The proceudre basically consists of a guy telling the computer that it should look at every, oh, tenth letter in the Old Testament, specifically looking for places where e tenth letters line up to spell words like "genocide", "Hitler", and other Holoucaust words. The computer goes through and pops out places where every tenth Hebrew letter lines up together to spell the Hebrew equivilent to genocide- just like a word search.
The only compelling thing about the whole proceudre is that these words will turn up in proximity to each other- within the same chapters. People believe that when this occurs, it is proof that there is a code that will tell all the history of the world.
However, it seems that the "code" can only be used to find what you're looking for. You have to tell the comptuer to find whatever words you want, so you have to pick out an historical event and look for words related to it. Like I said, if you want to find Hitler, you have to go looking for him.
One of the only predictions for the future is the word "comet" plus a year, plus a few phrases about destruction. This is taken to mean that in whatever the year is (2012, except that Biblical years are not exactly anything to set your calendar by) a asteroid will either hit the earth, or god will save the earth from being destroyed by an asteroid.
My question is, "if you're finding the word comet, why are you saying asteroid?" As far as it has anything to do with the Bible, the word comet is much more provoking than asteroid. There is some suggestion that the Star of Bethlehem was actually Halley's comet. So, if you were a religious guy and wanted to read it that way, a comet coming to earth in 2012 seems to be a suggestion of Jesus. Jesus's return is supposed to be a nasty little thing called The Second Coming. Why the religious types aren't even looking at their code in the correct pretext, I cannot fathom. Addition: Oh, wait, most of guys doing this can read Hebrew, and are most likely Jewish. Scratch that.
Naysayers of the Code suggest that you can do the same thing in Moby Dick (since it's about as long as the Old Testament) and find proof of the Kennedy assassinations. This suggests that it's all a nifty coincidence plus the beleif that coders are finding only what they want to find. Like people who played their records backwards to hear about Paul McCartney's tragic car accident. There are very few suggestions that the Olympic Gold Medalist lists are mentioned in the Code, or any good things at all.
Why would the Old Testament, which is full of good things and bad things, talk mostly about bad things in our modern times? Lots of things have happened since WWII, but even more before that- Revolutions, falls of Empires, the Middle Ages, etc. etc. What proof is there that these things occured?
I have not read The DaVinci Code, but I always got the idea that this was the sort of thing it was about. Now I'm still not sure whether I want to read it or not.