The Handwriting of God : Sacred Mysteries of the Bible

Rating:
Summary: Informative, but the author is contradictive in his thoughts
Review: Grant Jeffrey has produced another excellent work that follows his "The Signature of God" book. He presents intriguing information on the Bible codes that show to be still more vital evidence of the startling uniqueness and reliability of the ancient Scriptures. This book stands as an excellent introduction to understanding the true intrinsic value, endurance, and power of the Scriptures throughout history. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent Stupidity!
Review: Grant Jeffry's "the handwriting of god" is a perfect example of someone believing what they want to believe- The mental gymnastics needed to follow his made up arguments are staggering, and only someone who really needs to believe such balderdash in order to feel "right" about their life will enjoy this book. I highly recommend it for beginning eveangelistic christians- as a warning of where their tendency toward Black and white thinking kmight take them.. Beware!

Rating:
Summary: DECODING THE BIBLE CODE
Review: It amazes me how some Christian authors have fallen all over the so-called Bible code and missed the obvious. Consider how the Bible code works and then ask yourself is there anything amazing about it at all:

First, the computer is told what to look for by the so-called decoders. They pick an event in history and then list as many key words as they can describing that event. The computer only needs to find two or three of the key words in order to please the decoders. Thus, the assasination of John F. Kennedy might come up as any of the following (using modern Hebrew equivalents): "JKF, killed, Texas" or "Kennedy, Assasin, Car" or "President, Dead, Dallas." The number of choices the computer has for finding an event coded in the Hebrew Bible is as wide as the list of facts and synonyms you can attribute to an event. As for matching dates, every letter in the Hebrew alphabet represents a number (just as with Roman numerals) and so the possibility for matching numbers is huge.

Second, the Hebrew books that the computer scans were written in consonants only. Because there are no vowels and because the matching strings of letters have no context, just a few consonants can be used to make numerous words. Example (using an English equivalent): B-R-D could mean "bird" or "board" or "bored" or "aboard" or "brad" or "bared" or "broad" or"abroad" or "bread" or "bred" or "breed" or "bride" or . . . You get the idea. It's like playing jeopardy with all the vowels being free wild cards. Thus, the possibilities of finding words from your list of key words go up tremendously.

Third, the computer is given a huge range of skip patterns it can try in order to come up with strings of letters that match the desired key words for a given historic event. Thus, the computer starts scanning the Hebrew text of one of the Bible's books by skipping every other letter and seeing if it can come up with a letter sequence that matches one or more of the key words. Then it tries skipping to every third letter, then every fourth and so on throughout the entire book. If necessary it'll skip hundreds of letters. If it still doesn't find any significant matches, it repeats the whole process, starting from the second letter in the book. If, after all of that, the computer still can't find two or three good matches from the key word list, the decoders simply try using another book of the Bible. All that is required for a match to be considered significant is that the key words that are found must be in close proximity to each other. They don't even have to be found using the same skip pattern. The decoders may have discovered "JFK," for example, by skipping to every 186th letter in the book of Genesis. Then, within the area that JFK was found, they may have found "assasin" by skipping to every fourth letter and the modern Hebrew spelling for "Dallas" by skipping every thirteen letters. So long as each of the words are found overlapping the same area of text as "JFK," it's a score.

Finally, consider this: the entire code rests upon the spacing of the Hebrew consonants. That means that if a single letter had ever been dropped out of the text or added to it, all the spacings after that letter would have changed and the entire code would have been scrambled. Although the Hebrew manuscripts were carefully handed down and are, indeed, the most accurately preserved texts of antiquity, I doubt any scholar would argue that not one single letter has fallen from the text or been added to it. All you have to do is compare the existing manuscripts and you will see that they do not agree EXACTLY to the letter. They are incredibly well preserved but they do contain occassional spelling variations or dropped words. So, which manuscript is the only perfect copy in order for the code to work.

Guess what? With all the possible variations the computer has to choose from (and that's why it takes a computer), it makes absolutely no difference which manuscript you use. They will all work because they're all being treated like nothing more than a pile of letters to pick and poke your way through anyway. You can pull the vowels out of Moby Dick and get the same results, or you can pull the bowels out of chickens and get accurate readings of the future, too. (It's been done!)

The code is a crock! If you want interesting predictions, try actually reading the Bible. It's amazing what the letters say when arranged in the order the author intended.

Rating:
Summary: Informative, but the author is contradictive in his thoughts
Review: The book kept you interested because of the points made on the Bible Codes, but he lacked in interest on other topics. It would be interesting to see the all the authors on this topic get together and find some kind of compromise and find out what is real and what is not.

P.S. I liked "The Bible Code" better.