From the Riddles of Ancient Egypt to Cryptography in the Renaissance — 3500 Years in the Making - Codes: The Guide to Secrecy from Ancient to Modern Times - page 23

Greek mythology that the above anecdote illustrates, it also shows that even
when a message is correctly deciphered, the plaintext message itself may be in
error.
Hebrew Literature and the Bible
In the Hebrew literature, the most common technique of letter substitution
is called atbash , in which the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet are
interchanged, and the remaining similarly permuted, namely, the penultimate
(second to last) letter and the second interchanged, and so on. In fact, the word
atbash itself is an example of what it denotes. The reason is that it is composed
of aleph , taw , beth , and shin , the first, last, second, and penultimate letters of
the Hebrew alphabet.
Atbash is used in the Bible, in order to add mystery rather than hide mean-
ing. The importance of its use therein is that it inspired the European monks
and scribes of the Middle Ages to rediscover and invent new substitution ci-
phers. Through this development, cryptography was reintroduced into Western
culture, and the modern use of ciphers may be said to have grown from this
phenomenon. An example of the use of atbash in the Bible is given in Jeremiah
25:26 : “All the kings of the north, near and far, one after the other; all king-
doms upon the face of the earth [and after them the king of Sheshach shall
drink].” Sheshach is formed from babel by substituting the letters of the Hebrew
alphabet in reverse order. The first letter of babel is beth , the second letter of
the Hebrew alphabet, and this is replaced by shin , the penultimate letter. The
last letter of babel is lamed , the twelfth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and this
is replaced by kaph , the twelfth-to-last letter.
In the Bible, there is a well-known cryptogram (meaning the final message
after encryption, the ciphertext, encapsulated and sent), although this one does
not involve atbash. It occurs in the Old Testament in the Book of Daniel , which
was originally written in Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew, and generally
thought to have first appeared among the Arameans (a Semitic people of the
second millennium BC in Syria and Mesopotamia) roughly around the late
eleventh century BC. The setting is the great banquet given by Belshazzar,
the Chaldean king, for a thousand of his lords. As it says in Daniel 5:5-5:6 ,
“Suddenly, opposite the lampstand, the fingers of a human hand appeared,
writing on the plaster of the wall in the king's palace. When the king saw the
wrist and hand that wrote, his face blanched; his thoughts terrified him, his hip
joints shook, and his knees knocked.” The king sought his wise men to decipher
the message. Either they could not or would not do so, since the message was
bad news for the king, who was slain that very night. In any case, Daniel
was brought before the king and easily interpreted the words for him. “This
is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, TEKEL, and PERES. Translation:
MENE: God has numbered your kingdom and put an end to it; TEKEL, you
have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom has
been divided and given to Medes and Persians.”( Daniel 5:25-5:28 )
In the above, Daniel deciphers the three terms via a play on words. Mene
is associated with the verb meaning to number ; Tekel with the verb to weigh ;