Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" . '' Jeremiah 25:26, is supposed to be equivalent to Babel (
Babylon
Babylon ( ) was an ancient city located on the lower Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about south of modern-day Baghdad. Babylon functioned as the main cultural and political centre of the Akkadian-s ...
), according to a secret mode of
writing
Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of language. A writing system includes a particular set of symbols called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language. Every written language ...
practiced among the
Jews
Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
of unknown antiquity, which consisted in substituting the last letter of the
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet (, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicase, unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably ...
for the first, the next to last one for the second, and so on. Thus the letters sh, sh, ch become b, b, l (forming the word ''Babel''). This code is called the Atbash Cipher and was utilized to decrypt.
The city "Sheshach" does not appear on any map nor in any other documents, save the
book of Jeremiah
The Book of Jeremiah () is the second of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and the second of the Prophets in the Christian Old Testament. The superscription at chapter Jeremiah 1#Superscription, Jeremiah 1:1–3 identifies the book as "th ...
. The Atbash Cipher was applied and out of "Sheshach" came the word "Babel". This is supposed to be confirmed by a reference to Jeremiah 51:41, where Sheshach and Babylon are in parallel clauses. There seems to be no reason to doubt that Babylon is here intended by this name.See Streane's ''Jeremiah''
A similar instance of this Hebrew cryptographic method occurs in Jeremiah 51:1, where ''Leb Kamai'' is code for
Chaldea
Chaldea () refers to a region probably located in the marshy land of southern Mesopotamia. It is mentioned, with varying meaning, in Neo-Assyrian cuneiform, the Hebrew Bible, and in classical Greek texts. The Hebrew Bible uses the term (''KaÅ ...