Notarikon, temurah and atbash: kabbalistic techniques with letters

Alongside gematria, Jewish exegesis and later Kabbalah developed two other techniques based on letters: notarikon, which interprets a word as an acronym of a phrase, and temurah, which substitutes letters according to fixed rules. Both have ancient roots, attested in the Bible itself and in rabbinic literature, and were later systematised by medieval kabbalists and taken up by the humanists and writers on magic of the European Renaissance.

Notarikon, the art of initials

The name derives from the Greek notarikon, linked to the notarii, the stenographers who abbreviated words in order to write faster. The procedure consists in reading each letter of a word as the initial of another word or, conversely, in reducing a phrase to its initials. The Talmud, in the tractate Shabbat, interprets in this way the word anokhi, “I”, which opens the Ten Commandments, as the acronym of an Aramaic phrase in which God declares that he himself wrote and gave the Torah.

From the same logic came AGLA, the Hebrew acronym of the phrase Atah gibbor le-olam Adonai, “you are mighty for ever, O Lord”, taken from the daily prayer. The formula spread far beyond the Jewish sphere and often appears, as a protective word, on amulets, rings and Christian manuscripts of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, frequently copied by people wholly unaware of its origin.

Atbash and substitutions

Temurah includes several systems of permutation. The best known is atbash, which replaces the first letter of the alphabet with the last, the second with the second-to-last and so on: aleph with tav, bet with shin. The name itself joins the first two pairs, aleph-tav and bet-shin. In albam, by contrast, the alphabet is divided into two halves of eleven letters that are exchanged in order, on a principle similar to substitution ciphers. Other systems, such as atbah, follow more complex criteria.

Atbash already appears in the book of Jeremiah. The mysterious name Sheshach, found in chapters 25 and 51, corresponds to Babel, Babylon, encoded in this way, and the expression Lev qamai, in chapter 51, corresponds to Kasdim, the Chaldeans. Scholars debate whether the device really served to conceal the name or was rather a literary artifice, given that elsewhere in the same text Babylon is named openly.

From Kabbalah to the humanists

In the thirteenth century the kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, born in Saragossa and long resident in Italy as well, made the combination of letters the foundation of a contemplative discipline, while the authors of the Zohar and later commentators used these techniques to connect distant verses. In the Renaissance Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin presented them to Christian readers as keys to reading Scripture, and Agrippa included them in his great synthesis of occult philosophy.

Notarikon and temurah reveal an idea common to the whole tradition of letters: the sacred text is a set of signs that can be broken down and recomposed without losing its truth. Whether they served to interpret, to meditate or to encode a name, these techniques helped make the Hebrew alphabet one of the great symbolic laboratories of Western culture. Historians of cryptography still cite atbash as one of the oldest documented examples of a substitution cipher.