Two Books by Yacov Rambsel
A Review Of: Yeshua, His Name is Jesus, by Yacov Rambsel
Yacov Rambsel is a pious man who believes he's found evidence that Jesus is the Messiah, woven into the fabric of the Hebrew Bible. He's laid out his evidence in two books, Yeshua, published in 1996, and the sequel His Name is Jesus, published a year later. Both works were originally published by Grant Jeffrey, Rambsel's friend, who has self-published many of his own books through Frontier Publishing. The books sold so well that the Christian publisher Word later picked them up and repackaged them in mass market paperback editions.
To put it bluntly, these books are painfully naive. Rambsel thinks it quite marvelous that the Hebrew name "Yeshua" should be found encoded in certain passages of the Hebrew Bible that Christians have historically regarded as messianic prophecies. (Rambsel is a Messianic Jewish rabbi. Mainstream Jews don't consider most of these passages to be referring to the Messiah.)
At first glance, Rambsel's work resembles the "Aaron" code discussed in Jeffrey Satinover's book. But there's a difference. Satinover explains why the occurrences of "Aaron" are surprising--because we find far more than one would expect by chance alone. Rambsel does nothing of the sort. Instead, he simply explains where to find "Yeshua" at a number of places in the Hebrew Bible. The question is: why is Rambsel so excited by these findings? Does he really not know that any Hebrew text of even a few hundred characters will have "Yeshua" encoded at various skips?
Rambsel seems to know almost nothing about probability and statistics. His chapter 8, "The Laws of Probability," is a misguided attempt to compute the probability of one man fulfilling a list of messianic prophecies. Leaving thorny questions of theology aside, Rambsel's mathematics is just plain wrong. He doesn't know what he's doing.
In his second book, His Name is Jesus, Rambsel follows up by finding a number of names of people connected to Jesus, also encoded within the same messianic prophecies. Here, he seems to be imitating some of the well-known codes popularized by Michael Drosnin and Jeffrey Satinover, which display multiple "codes" in close proximity. These simple codes all suffer from a fatal mathematical problem -- they have a high probability of occurring in any random text. Therefore, it's impossible to say with any certainty that God or anyone else encoded them into the Bible. This is agreed on by every scientist who has looked at the Bible code, including those who believe that real codes can be found in the Bible.
Rambsel calls his findings "insights." It's very difficult to understand why. What new understanding does he gain from these codes? Does he believe that bad mathematics is a substitute for careful theology?
The issues Rambsel raises have been addressed in some detail by Rabbi Daniel Mechanic, in consultation with Doron Witztum and Harold Gans, in an article titled "Jesus Codes: Uses and Abuses" on the Aish HaTorah Web site. This article does a good job dismantling Rambsel's work. Unfortunately, the critique carries an undercurrent of antagonism to Rambsel's Messianic Judaism, which has misled some Christian readers into thinking that it's a theological debate. It isn't. Rambsel is wrong on purely mathematical grounds.
Some may wonder what theological axe I have to grind. What do I have against Messianic Jews? Answer: nothing. I learned much of the Hebrew I know within the walls of a Messianic Jewish synagogue, Kehilat Ariel in San Diego. I like Messianic Jews, though I am not one myself. What I don't like is bad mathematics being used as an evangelistic tool. And that's what Yacov Rambsel's books are.
There is no statistical evidence that Rambsel's Yeshua codes are anything but random chance. If you still want to buy his books, despite what I've said, be my guest. If coincidences edify you, then read his books and enjoy. Just don't expect those coincidences to edify your neighbor.
Browse on Amazon: Yeshua, His Name is Jesus, by Yacov Rambsel
