The Bible Code

But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.

There are few sounds that can transport me to another time more than this song.

Giorgio Moroder’s synthpop masterpiece, Crash, was the intro to Art Bell’s radio show Coast to Coast AM for decades. Art would use the song for his subsequent shows after leaving Coast to Coast. At his peak, Art Bell would be heard by 10 million Americans over both AM and FM radio.

If you haven’t heard Art Bell, he walked so that Alex Jones could run. Art could never have had the brash cynicism of Gen-Xer Alex. Art was thoroughly a Boomer even with his forays into the fringe areas of the paranormal, the conspiratorial, and the apocalyptic. Art could in one breath question the legitimacy of WMDs in Iraq as pretense to destroy that nation, while in another celebrate the ‘moon landing’. The temperaments of the two men were not just a matter of generational divide. Alex was born in the mold of the drive-time shock-jock, while Art was the consummate overnight crooner. Art could as well hosted hosted a smooth jazz show to ease the soul of the insomniac. 

Some of my fondest memories are driving to a convenience store late at night to grab a pack of cigs while listening to Coast to Coast AM. My favorite homes away from home were the parking lots of convenience stores between the hours of 2 and 4 AM. I’d just sit in a Mercury Sable station wagon and watch the sort of people who also come and go at that time of night. I’d take in the night listening to Art interview a 12-year-old boy who thought he was possessed by the Devil, or a psychic predicting the landslide election of W. after 9/11, or peak oil and its immediate disastrous consequences for the world (peak oil, by the way, is bullshit; not sure about the adolescent son of Satan tho, he had me spooked).

Art occupies a large space in my heart. And my hard drive.

I revisit shows from that archive time to time. I’ve some favorites. Father Dr. Malachi Martin was radio gold. But usually I just pick a file and hit play.

In the episode I chose tonight, Art interviewed Sean David Morton. Sean is an intuitive, prophet, remote viewer, and perhaps the least credible of his many titles, an investment advisor. It was the last that cost him millions of dollars in fines to the SEC. His creative accounting with his taxes put him in prison for more than a few years. You can doom-say all you want. But pay the tax man. Even Jesus paid his taxes.

During the episode, Sean used a New York Times best-seller to hawk his prophecies and predictions, The Bible Code.

You can click the link above to learn more about The Bible Code's method of bibliomancy. In short the Five Books of Moses, commonly called the Torah, are used as a matrix of letters. You select an interval, usually a smaller number, and you start with a letter and skip through the matrix using that interval to select other letters. The direction used can be left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up, and you are not limited to orthogonal movement; you can move diagonally as well. You then take the selected letters and find the code provided. For instance, you can find that Bible predicted the JFK assassination. The election of Abraham Lincoln. The rise of Hitler. In fact, it seems as tho the Bible ‘predicted’ most of everything that has ever happened, as long as you choose an appropriate interval and direction of movement and are willing to be creative with things like grammar. 

This may sound like an absurd way to read a religious text (because it is) but the The Bible Code was a big deal in the US for a while. (And it was primarily a US phenomenon). It was especially popular among Messianic Jews and evangelicals given to a hyper philo-semitism. And of course it was also well-regarded by the members of the most credulous American religion, the New Age. 

I’ve been reading the Bible, reading about the Bible, and thinking about the Bible for a long time. So when anything Bible catches the public’s imagination, I like to learn a little about it. And I often find myself accused of being in the company of the strangest of bedfellows by other Christians who are not so interested in how the Bible is imagined in the wider culture.

The problem I faced during The Bible Code frenzy, and still to this day because of its legacy, is that the Bible does indeed contain codes. This is simply a fact. It contains many types of codes. And if you are a reader who is sensitive to this ancient understanding and manner of reading the Bible you will be met with a great deal of suspicion by most Christians. The average conservative Christian reads with a hermeneutic that treats the Bible more like a divine Wikipedia than a document of antiquity written for antiquity using the methods of writing of antiquity and the expectations of readers and hearers of antiquity. 

These real Bible codes, which have been used to read the Bible prior to the advent of Christ and by the Fathers of the Church, seem strange and weird to the modern mind. And there is no mind more modern than that of the conservative American Christian as much as it claims to rail against modernity.

So a new category of posts will be appearing: the bible code. I attend a parish that is on a three-year lectionary based on the Revised Common Lectionary. My wife usually has to hear a gripe or two or a dozen after each sermon. So much that is interesting about the Bible is passed over in sermons and Bible studies. And that which is passed over, in my experience, provides a great deal of richness to Biblical literature. And bolsters the credibility of the Bible as a divine oracle. 

Hearing this episode tonight was a bit of kismet as I had been thinking a little about how to introduce this topic. I’ll post about once a week or so on some thoughts based on a selection from the weekly lectionary. And along the way discuss some of the real Bible codes. 

While some of my musings might seem a bit far-fetched, I promise not to try to sell you a guide on how to get rich quick in crypto.