According to one controversial biblical scholar, Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson, the global pandemic may have been foretold thousands of years ago in the Bible.
Glazerson made a video earlier this month in which he lays out his thesis that the coronavirus can be found in the Torah if one uses Bible codes, a concept that first became popularized in 1997 after a reporter published a book called "The Bible Code." Its controversial thesis was that secret codes hidden in the Torah can predict major events that have and will take place thousands of years after the Torah was written. .
Pointing out numerous news stories that point to the coronavirus outbreak originating from China's markets – which were reported to have included everything from rats, snakes, bats, fish and still living wolf pups – Glazerson explained an excerpt from the Book of Leviticus that spoke about the importance of not eating impure food.There, he highlights consistent letters highlighted equidistant from one another in the text – something known as the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) on which Bible codes scholars heavily rely. This ELS contains the Hebrew letters kuf, reish, vav, nun and hey: "Corona." He also points out other highlighted ELS instances in the same section. One spells out vav, yud, reish, vav and samech: virus. The other spells out alef, bet, reish, mem, het and yud, which spells out the phrase eiver mehai, or limb from the living. This, he said, refers to the sin of eating the limb of a still-living animal.In another part of the excerpt, he highlights the letters samech, yud, nun and yud, which spells sini, or Chinese."You have it exactly in the section of the Torah that says things you should not eat," Glazerson explained, pointing to a highlighted verse with excitement. "I separated for you the impure things, then you will be for Me a holy people," he continues, translating a verse from the Torah. "It's amazing finding this: coronavirus, China and the limb from the living, which causes what we see now," he said.But Bible codes are not widely accepted by mainstream Jewish or non-Jewish religious authorities or scholars. The journalist who wrote the Bible codes book, Michael Drosnin, based his piece on an article that had been published by mathematicians in a mainstream journal. But even they pushed back at Drosnin's notion that the Bible could predict the future.Glazerson has published more than 30 books on the Bible codes and related subjects. He is listed on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem website and is associated with a movement working to bring the Jewish messiah.