3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
caveat lector, October 3, 2008
This review is from: The Handwriting of God: Sacred Mysteries of the Bible (Paperback)
For a knowledgeable review of this book's content, see Stephen Meyers' detailed examination of the carelessly sensational content, faulty documentation, and plainly inaccurate assertions. Meyers cares about the truth and is patient in his refutation -- not the kind of reviewer who can be casually demonized or dismissed. His concerns are applicable to other books by this author as well. [...]
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A not-so-great sequel to a terrible book., March 24, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Handwriting of God: Sacred Mysteries of the Bible (Paperback)
After his previous book, "The Signature of God" what I found was better than I had expected. This time he actually documented some of his sources with footnotes, although some of them are of little help. Chapter 12 has a quote from the "Tell el-Amarna Tablets and the endnote reads "Tell el-Amarna Tablets" without telling us anything about the publishers, translators or date. Not much help. Jeffrey does some good work with the chapter on the Trinity but topics like that are theological and do not contribute to the overall purpose of the book which is to demonstrate that the Bible is trustworthy. He spend a considerable amount of time on the Bible Codes again. Grant Jeffrey becomes even funnier when he contradcits himself. On page 115 he states in bold italics, "Bble Codes do not reveal any hidden theological sentences, teachings, or doctrines." Only "names, places and occasionally, dates ... which provide confirmation of the supernatural inspiration and origin of the scriptures." Yet, on page 124 he says, "Surely, the discovery of the name of Jesus Yeshua in dozens of messianic passages throughout the Old Testament provides powerful evidence to any unbiased reader that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah of God." Sounds like a theological / doctrinal statement to me. He is not very consistent to be sure. He rightly takes Michael Drosnin (The Bible Code) to task but for the wrong reasons. He faults Drosnin for using codes to predict future events but concedes that certain events can be found only after the event has taken place. However he ignores the fact that anything can be found encoded in any literature, as has been proven over and over again. Try some unparalleled "scientific" drivel: He says on page 225 that 1 Corinthians 11:8 "For man did not come from woman, but woman from man" is not referring to the creation of Adam and Eve (even though verse 9 refers to creation) but to the fact that the father's chromosomes determinbe the sex of the child. And people call him a Bible scholar? On page 227 he says that "Every person's blood is determined by the father" (his "proof" is that we have paternity tests as opposed to maternity tests) - therefore the blood of Jesus (whose blood was "determined" by his father) was unique in the history of the human race providing a sinless sacrifice for fallen man. Read any book on genetics and you'll know that blood type is determined by BOTH the father AND the mother. Where does he get these silly ideas? So far I have just skimmed the book and I have found much that is useless and baseless. Mike Somerville
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13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
DECODING THE BIBLE CODE, December 10, 1999
This review is from: The Handwriting of God: Sacred Mysteries of the Bible (Paperback)
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.
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