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It took a war--a fierce and bloody war--to bring to light, just decades ago, one of the most enigmatic ancient sites in the Near East. If not the most enigmatic, it certainly is the most puzzling, and for sure one rooted in great antiquity. It is a structure that has no parallel among the remains of the great civilizations that had flourished in the Near East in past millennia?at least so far as has been uncovered. Its closest parallels are thousands of miles away, across the seas and on other continents; and what it mostly brings to mind is Stonehenge in faraway Britain.

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It was probably inevitable that with the advent of the modern computer age, some masters of the craft would turn their capabilities to a novel and new goal: the search for a "secret code" in the Bible.
While this is presented in scientific papers and even books as the epitome of modern sophistication, the fact is that this search is actually renewed, not a new, search, albeit with new and more advanced tools. . . .
Discussions by Jewish sages and religious leaders intended to "read between the lines" of the words of the Torah, then of the Prophets, intensified during the exile after the destruction (by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar) of the First Temple, and even more so after the destruction of the Second Temple (by the Romans). The record of those deliberations is the Talmud ("the Study"). Jewish mysticism, known as the Kabbalah, took over and built upon those earlier searches for hidden meanings.
That such hidden meanings did exist, the Bible itself attests. The key was the alphabet, the twenty-two letters.
A simple encoding device, which even schoolchildren often play, is the serial substitution of letters. . . .