The language of the Old Testament or "Tanach" is ancient Hebrew. It is not necessary to learn Hebrew to understand the Bible code, but there are a few features of the language which can cause confusion if not understood. Hebrew is written from right to left, which is an unnatural direction of reading and writing for English speakers. In this program, it is possible to reverse the direction of the display to left to right in the Options menu, but the default and correct orientation is right to left. Another quirk of Hebrew is that vowels are indicated by small dots and dashes under and next to the Hebrew letters, and not by separate letters. For example, the Hebrew word for "king" is "MALAK", and this would be written "MLK" in Hebrew. The Bible code has been much criticized for the practice of omitting these vowel points. However, the vowel points were not in the original Hebrew, and were added around the fourth century AD to make the language easier to read. The critics are simply wrong! As languages evolve, it is the vowels that change more quickly than the consonants, so the omission of vowels would be a wise decision if one wanted to preserve the text unchanged for many generations. Of course, an unchanging text is essential for preserving a code. The lack of vowels does make Hebrew words shorter than most English words, and therefore more likely to occur at random.
Several other features of Hebrew are noteworthy. Unlike English, Hebrew letters are used to represent numbers. Hence, each word in Hebrew has a numerical value. This is useful to know when searching for dates. The word order in a sentence is not essential to the meaning in Hebrew as it is in English. In stead, word endings are used to indicate what is being done to what. Hebrew makes considerable use of "roots". Words with related meanings tend to have letters in common making up a root. For example,
The Hebrew alphabet is given below together with the letters on the keyboard used to type them, and their numerical values. It would be useful to recognize the alphabet.
Each letter in any language has its own characteristic letter frequency. For instance, in English "S" and "R" are much more common than "Q" or "Z". In any two texts of several thousand characters, each letter will occur at similar frequencies. This principle forms an important part of code breaking, and is also the basis of the scoring system of "Scrabble". These characteristic letter frequencies are used by KodeWize by default (see Tutorial 1 for discussion).
