The Bible code is not a single code, but a collection of codes relating to different subjects, people and events. For example, codes have been found relating to the holocaust, the Gulf war, the assassinations of Yitzhak Rabin, Answar Sadat and John F Kennedy, and earthquakes in Kobe, Japan and Los Angeles. Bible characters, such as Aaron and Abraham, and object such as trees in the Garden of Eden have been found. It is important to realize that the existence of one code does not prove or disprove the existence of another.

How are words coded? The Bible code uses equidistant letter sequences. In other words, you take letters at equal intervals in the bible text you're interested in, and see if they make a meaningful word. Most of these equidistant letter sequences (ELS) will be nonsense, but some will make up real words. Here is the example of a simple ELS code in English:

The city, "BATH" is encoded. In this example, we started at the first letter "B" and then skipped five letters to "A". Then we skip five more letters to "T" and five more to "H". The skip interval is constant, and the letters "BATH" are an equidistant letter sequence (ELS). Another example of an ELS is seen in Genesis. Take the first letter "Y" in Genesis, and then count seven letters along but ignoring spaces. You will find the letter "H". Count seven more letters and you will come to "W", and then count a further seven letters to find another "H". These Hebrew letters spell the name of God, "YaHWeH" (sometimes also translated "Jehovah"). At the beginning of Exodus, the next book in the bible, this same pattern is repeated.

Mathematically, an ELS is an arithmetic progression expressed as ,
a, a + d, a + 2d, a + 3d, .... where a is the starting point and d is the skip interval.

In our simple sentence "Bobby gave Ian to Bertha", a = 1 and d=6. Give each letter a number starting with one corresponding to the first "B". The next letter in the arithmetic progression is the 7th (1+6), which is "A", then comes the 13th and finally the 19th. What happens if we make a = 2? We get the ELS "OVOA", which is meaningless. We could alter the value of d, say to 3. With d=3 and a=2, we get the ELS "OYVAORA".

We can use the fact that an ELS is an arithmetic progression to precisely calculate how many ELS there are in any text for any specific word. The number depends on how long our word is. We can easily see this by considering a seven letter word such as "Toronto". If we had wanted to code this city into a 20 letter sentence, we could only have a skip interval of 2 or 3, otherwise we would run out of letters. In fact the maximum possible skip interval for any word in any text can be calculated easily by dividing the text length by the word length minus one, i.e.
i = l / (w - 1) , where i represents the number of letters in the text, and w is the word length.

The equation to calculate the number of ELS is:
N = (i - 1){2l - (w - 1)(i + 2)} [Equation 1]
where i is the maximum skip interval, l is the length of the text in letters, and w is the length of the word being looked for. It is not necessary to remember this equation, since it is automatically used by the computer program in its calculations. The Torah has over 300,000 letters, and so for a four letter word such as "nrha"" (Aaron) there are over 30 billion ELS!