In the early years of the Twentieth Century, Dr. Oskar Goldberg published a Torah study entitled The Pentateuch – A Number Edifice: Discovery of a Uniformly Executed Numerical Script. The Pentateuch, or the Torah, is the collection of the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
Just before World War II a Jewish rabbi, apparently following the study of Dr. Goldberg, made an interesting discovery. Rabbi Michael Weismandel noted that the word Torah appeared if you started with the first Hebrew letter tav in Genesis 1:1 and counted every fifty letters. Rabbi Weismandel called this Equidistant Letter Spacing, or ELS. This was done manually, without the aid of a computer.
Next Rabbi Weismandel found the same thing in the first verse of Exodus. The word Torah appeared in spaces of fifty letters. When he came to Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy it did not work. Then he found that in the beginning of Numbers and Deuteronomy the word Torah appeared, but was spelled backwards in spaces of fifty letters. Finally, in his studies he found that the Name of God, JHWH, appeared in Leviticus, beginning in the first verse, in equally spaced letters of eight.
What we have is a design in which the word Torah points toward the center book, Leviticus. In the first two books, it is written forward. In the last two books it is written backward. In the center book is the Holy Name of the Lord. Remember, there are NO coincidences in God's Word.
Mathematicians in Israel took the work of Rabbi Weismandel and applied the power of a computer. They discovered a fascinating array of names in the Torah. For instance, they found the names of twenty-five plants native to Israel encoded from Genesis 2:7 through Genesis 3:3, which in the surface text speaks of the Garden of Eden. ELS only works in the Hebrew Masoretic text Bible. There is a Hebrew Samaritan Bible. It does not work. ELS does not work in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace. It only works in God's Word, and only one version at that.
Yacov Rambsel is a Brother-in-Christ who was born a Jew. He is a small, older man and the minister of a church. I had the pleasure of hearing him speak several years ago. Being Jewish, Brother Rambsel has the advantage of reading and understanding Hebrew. When the concept of words encoded in the Bible was discovered, he began to search the Hebrew Bible manually letter-by-letter. He has written several books showing his many discoveries. One of Brother Rambsel’s works is The Cryptic Dictionary of Genesis One, a 314 page book listing the words, names and phrases found encoded in only the first chapter of Genesis!
My favorite discovery of Yacov Rambsel is in Proverbs 30:4, which in the surface text reads:
We, as Christians, know the answer to this last question. But the answer is also found encoded in that very verse. Beginning with the first yod (English equivalent “Y”) and counting spaces of 22 letters, the Hebrew words Yeshua shai are found. In English, that says “Jesus, the gift.”
Praise God for the many, many facets of His Holy Word. I have no doubt that when we get to Glory, we will find that we have not even scratched the surface of the mysteries of His Word.