236 Preston Kavanagh distant Judah. Surely Jews in Babylon absorbed punishment for Zedekiah’s revolt and for any others. Second Isaiah wrote, “This is a people robbed and plundered, they are all of them trapped in holes and hidden in prisons” (Isa 42,22). These were dangerous times, times calling for riddles and ciphers. Certainly those writing scripture for circulation in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon had strong incentives to use codes. Before the Babylonians leveled Solomon’s temple, worship at Jerusalem had been a focus of Jewish religious life. But with the temple gone, what could then bond God’s people? The answer was a profusion of scripture. In the sixth century the amount of scripture may have doubled. Second Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Dtr Historian, perhaps the P Source, and others sent forth entire books of hope and judgment. More than any other nation, the Jews in exile became the people of the book. And what better medium for coding than scripture itself, the thing that commanded the attention of every displaced Judean? This very reliance upon scripture makes coding within scripture credible. Readers should not think coding means only baffling gibberish. It can also come in a plain wrapper, concealed within sense-making language. And the language conveying information to the exiles would have been biblical Hebrew. Coding would certainly have added weight to the word of the Lord. Moderns separate word and act, but in the ancient world there was less distinction. And until recent times, in the Near East that still held true. To illustrate, an Arab accompanied by his son chose to walk away from an argument with another man. But when his antagonist began to shout insults, the father pulled his son to the ground and threw his cloak over him. He had to protect the boy from the bullet-like impact of the words. In the mouths of the prophets, the Word of God was heavy, unstoppable, and never returned without accomplishment. Coding underneath God’s words would have added still more weight. Is there a Bible code? Several decades ago, using word associations, I detected the name of a previously unidentified biblical writer. I then used that name to see how the author might have signed his work. Eventually, a pattern emerged that used one letter per text word taken from words at regular intervals. Next, a customized computer program was applied to speed searches, but it lacked a sound basis for evaluating output. Herman Chernoff, Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, kindly helped to remedy that problem. He identified the sampling and probability elements required to produce more understandable results. By the early 1990s the search program was finding interesting things — among them that the Priestly Benediction in Numbers chapter 6 contained coded values. In 2004, when a final report on the Ketef Hinnom amulets appeared, I realized that the code could help to establish the age of the amulets. Thus this article came to be. 2. The Ketef Hinnom Amulets In 1979 excavations led by Gabriel Barkay at Ketef Hinnom uncovered two silver amulets containing the earliest citations of scripture ever found. These were unearthed in a family tomb below Jerusalem’s Old City walls. Portions of Num 6,24-26, called the Priestly Benediction, are partly inscribed