Notarikon and temurah

Gematria's two sister techniques — one of which appears as a genuine working cipher inside the Book of Jeremiah.

What it is

Two interpretive techniques used alongside gematria in Jewish exegesis and Kabbalah.

Notarikon treats a word as compressed. Either each letter is read as the initial of a further word, expanding a single term into a phrase, or a phrase is contracted into a new word from its initials. The name comes from the Latin notarius, a shorthand writer.

The standard example: Amen, read as an acronym of ʾEl Melekh Neʾeman — God, faithful King. Another: the first word of Genesis, Bereshit, has been expanded by commentators in numerous competing ways, each yielding a different theological statement about creation.

Temurah substitutes letters by a systematic rule. The best known cipher is Atbash, which pairs the first letter of the alphabet with the last, the second with the second-last, and so on — aleph with tav, bet with shin. Others include Albam, splitting the alphabet in half and pairing across, and Atbaḥ, working by numerical complements. Kabbalists catalogued twenty-two such schemes as the "gates".

Where it came from

Both are attested in rabbinic literature and are listed among the recognised methods of interpretation. Both became far more prominent in Kabbalah, and Abraham Abulafia turned temurah from an exegetical tool into a contemplative discipline.

And Atbash appears in the Hebrew Bible as a working cipher, which is the most interesting fact here.

The Book of Jeremiah twice refers to a place called Sheshach, once alongside a list of nations to be judged. Applying Atbash to the consonants of Sheshach yields Babel — Babylon. A second instance, Leb Qamai, similarly decodes to Kasdim, the Chaldeans.

This is not a mystical reading imposed later. It is a substitution cipher used in a sixth-century BCE text, almost certainly for a practical reason: writing about the coming destruction of the imperial power currently in charge of your country is safer if the name is concealed. Ancient Jewish commentators identified the substitution, and modern scholars accept it.

So temurah begins as espionage tradecraft and becomes theology.

How it is done

Notarikon: take the word, assign a word to each letter, and read the result. Or take the phrase and reduce it.

Temurah: apply the chosen substitution table to a word, and interpret what emerges.

What we can and cannot say

We can say Atbash in Jeremiah is genuine, deliberate, and evidence that the technique was understood as a cipher long before it was understood as a revelation.

We can say the extension to general exegesis is unconstrained in a way the Jeremiah case is not. The cipher in Jeremiah works because one substitution rule applied to one word yields one answer that fits the context exactly. Kabbalistic practice has twenty-two tables to choose among, notarikon's expansions are limited only by the interpreter's vocabulary, and gematria supplies several counting methods on top. The combined space is effectively unbounded.

This is the same point made under gematria and it is worth restating because it is the section's central methodological finding: the impressiveness of a decoding depends entirely on how many decodings were available. One rule, one output, one fit is evidence. Twenty-two rules, unlimited expansions and no constraint on the target is a guarantee of success and therefore evidence of nothing.

We can say the traditional practitioners were not doing what a modern code-hunter does. A commentator using notarikon to expand Bereshit into a statement about the Torah is elaborating a text he already holds to be divinely composed. He is not claiming to have discovered a hidden message that proves the text divine. The direction of the argument matters, and modern code literature reverses it.

We cannot say the techniques produce knowledge. What can be said is that one of them started life as a perfectly sound piece of practical cryptography, which is more than most of this section can claim.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is done

What we can and cannot say

Further reading