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Jewish Words

Atbash

October 28, 2008 10:23

By

Rabbi Julian Sinclair,

Rabbi Julian Sinclair

1 min read

Readers of Dan Brown's blockbusting thriller, "The Da Vinci Code," will recall that the atbash cipher plays a crucial role in the verse clue that Jacques Saunière constructs as the key to the outer cryptex. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry and read on.)

Dan Brown's knowledge of Judaism is highly unreliable, but this happens to be one of the few things he got right.

The atbash cipher is a Hebrew code, which works by substituting the first letter of the aleph bet for the last, the second for the second last, and so on. So aleph becomes tav, bet becomes shin, hence the name, atbash.

The Talmud discusses the method and gives a mnemonic for recalling the substitutions (Shabbat 104a).