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
Institute's 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, let's 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.
Let's 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 "It's righteous living in Livn."
For another example, let's take "MORMON" and run it through this atbash code. The result is "NLINLM." Nothing
too meaningful. For that matter, Livn wasn't 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 God's 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 Jeremiah's 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 doesn't 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 Jeremiah's day for Babylonians," according to
Hoskisson.
Jeremiah 51:41 pairs
parallel phrases with Babylon in one line and Sheshach in the other.
Jeremiah wasn't using the coded language to hide the prophecy's 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