But his father refused and said, “I know, my son, I know. He too will become a people, and he too will become great. Nevertheless, his younger brother will be greater than he, and his descendants will become a group of nations.” – Genesis 48:19

Today’s Scripture Reading (July 3, 2012): Genesis 48

The Bible Code is a way of divining the future through the use of equidistant letter spacing in the Bible. Taking, for example, every 50^th letter in a specific passage in the Hebrew Bible might reveal a word. Taking every 35^th letter in the same passage might result in a different word. When taken together, these words speak out some sort of prophecy about the future – a prophecy supposed to have been put there by God himself.

The problem is that the code seems to work well when we know what it is that we are looking for, and not so well when we are trying to divine the unknowns of the future. In the great Rabbi experiment, the Bible Code was able to tell us the names of all the great Rabbi’s and the years of their births and deaths. (Not that we needed the Bible Code to tell us that, we already knew – and knew what we were looking for.) But as far as future claims the Bible Code hasn’t done too well. It predicted a John Kerry victory over George W. Bush in 2004, World War three was supposed to have been fought between 2000 and 2006, and according to some the Bible Code predicted the end of the World on December 21, 2012 – and none of these events happened.

Critics have used the same process on Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” and found that using equidistant letter spacing “Moby Dick” correctly predicted the assassination of Indira Ghandi, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln as well as the death of Dianna, Princess of Wales. (Maybe “Moby Dick” should be added to the Bible.) Mathematician David Thomas did a search using the equidistant latter spacing technique and found the words “code” and “bogus” sixty times in the book of Genesis alone.

The popularity of systems like the Bible Code just shows us how much we really seem to want to know what is in the future. The problem is that knowledge of the future is a God given gift that he doles out very sparingly. And all prophecy, even Bible prophecy, is better understood after the events have already happened rather than before they have happened – although there are a few exceptions.

And one of the exception is this exchange between Jacob and his grandsons Manasseh and Ephraim. Manasseh was the older of the boys, and Joseph lined the boys up in front of their grandfather so that the oldest boy would be on the right of Jacob – the oldest would receive the greatest blessing. But Jacob refuses the set up and crosses his hands. Joseph protests, but the truth was that this had already stopped being a blessing and began to be a prophecy of God. The youngest would be first.

A few centuries later Jacob’s blessing became a reality as the descendants of Ephraim rose up and rebelled against King Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, and led the ten northern tribes away from Judah to form their own nation. That nation biblically went by the name of Israel, but often later on there was a name change, at least in practice if not oficially. It was not Israel, it was the nation of Ephraim that was composed of the ten Northern tribes of Israel. Ephraim had become the greatest over his older brother Manasseh, just as Jacob (Israel) had predicted that he would.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Genesis 49