Jeremiah used a not-so-secret code in some of his writings. According to an article by Paul Y. Hoskisson in the latest issue of the Neal A. Maxwell Institutes newsletter Insights, Jeremiah occasionally employed an alphabet game to hide or perhaps even draw attention to some words.
The Hebrew alphabet game atbash was used in beginning Hebrew classes, according to Hoskisson, to test the pupils knowledge of the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet.��� It was a simple substitution code ��� using one letter to represent another letter.
To see how this would work, lets use our alphabet. The first half of the alphabet on the top line is matched up with the second half of the alphabet on the bottom line except it is in reverse order:
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
ZYWXVUTSRQPON
Each letter on the top corresponds to a letter on the bottom and vice-versa. Lets take the word OREM and run it through this atbash code to see what we get: LIVN. If you were playing with atbash the way Jeremiah did, you might write something like Its righteous living in Livn.
For another example, lets take MORMON and run it through this atbash code. The result is NLINLM. Nothing too meaningful. For that matter, Livn wasnt too spectacular either. But in Hebrew, the game works better because there are no vowels in the alphabet.
Hoskisson, director of the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Research and the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, showed how Jeremiah used the atbash game in Jeremiah 25:26. The verse ends a list of kingdoms that will drink of Gods cup of anger. In part it reads, and the king of Sheshach shall drink after them.
There is no place called Sheshach just like there is no town in Utah called Livn. The King James translators, knowing only that Sheshach was a place name, simply rendered a transcription of the Hebrew (letters).
Sheshach is represented in Hebrew by three letters without the vowel sounds. If you take those three letters and run it through the traditional Hebrew atbash code, you end up with three other letters: bbl. In Hebrew, bbl is how you spell Babylon.
Jeremiah, therefore, had included the king of Babylon in his list of kings and kingdoms that would eventually suffer the wrath of God, Hoskisson wrote.
Hoskisson wrote that this was only slightly encrypted because Jeremiahs Judean audience would be able to figure it out.
In Jeremiah 51:1 he does it again. The Lord says he will raise up against Babylon, which is clearly paralleled with a phrase that says the Lord will go against them that dwell in the midst of them.
Hoskisson wrote that the second phrase says literally in Hebrew, upon the dwellers of lb qmy. But it doesnt make sense. The King James translators rendered lb qmy as midst of them. But if you run lb qmy through the atbash code, you get the Hebrew word for Chaldeans. Chaldeans is synonym in Jeremiahs day for Babylonians, according to Hoskisson.
Jeremiah 51:41 pairs parallel phrases with Babylon in one line and Sheshach in the other. Jeremiah wasnt using the coded language to hide the prophecys meaning from Babylon. It was obvious here. Why he would use it is not clear.
Perhaps, as Hoskisson speculates, it was a way of giving the people things they could not understand (see Jacob 4:14).
The use of such a device could be seen as evidence of widespread literacy ��� since it assumes a literate audience. It also would not translate into Babylonian without first knowing the code in Hebrew ��� further indicating it was intended for a literate Hebrew audience.
Hoskisson believes Jeremiah was speaking to a widely literate audience, and not just a few elite. It also may be evidence supporting Book of Mormon accounts of literacy.
The question comes to mind whether there are any instances of atbash coding used in the Book of Mormon. If Jeremiah used it, did his contemporary fellow prophets Lehi and Nephi use it?
If atbash coding was used in the Book of Mormon, there are several possibilities. The first, and the likely one according to Hoskisson, is that the atbash-coded word would have been translated into English from the underlying uncoded word ��� thus completely obliterating it. Several newer translations of Jeremiah 25:26, for example, translate the atbash-coded word Sheshach as the underlying uncoded Babylon.
It is possible that the translation into English would obscure the underlying atbash word such that even translating it back into Hebrew would not give any clues.
But it is also possible that the translation of the Book of Mormon preserved an atbash-coded word into English. Perhaps sometime soon, someone who can read Hebrew will be able to find a phrase that hides something like Chaldeans in an innocent phrase like midst of them.
This article is based on an article in Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2010.
E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com