Meaning
Albam cuts the alphabet into two rows of eleven, alef to kaf and lamed to tav, and exchanges them letter for letter: alef with lamed, bet with mem, gimel with nun, and so on to kaf with tav. The name is the first two pairs, alef-lamed and bet-mem. Like Atbash it is a substitution; our chart takes the standard value of the substituted word, which can be far from the original's.
Albam belongs to the rabbinic period. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 lists it beside Atbash among the permutations of letters; unlike Atbash, it is not found in the Hebrew Bible itself.
How it is counted
שלום, shalom, "peace", becomes יאפב: י 10 + א 1 + פ 80 + ב 2 = 93.
נחש, nachash, "serpent", becomes גקי: ג 3 + ק 100 + י 10 = 113.
אמת, emet, "truth", becomes לבכ: ל 30 + ב 2 + כ 20 = 52.
Because the swap moves small letters into the hundreds and large ones down to the units, totals jump about: love, ahavah, rises from 13 to 210, while truth, emet, falls from 441 to 52.
Why the substitutions are behind "more"
Atbash and Albam are kept behind "more ciphers" because they answer a different question from the counting methods: they transform a word before it is valued. A total under either belongs to another string of letters, which the chart shows beside it.
Albam and Atbash compared
Both substitutions are their own reverse: applying either twice gives back the original word. They differ in the pairing. Atbash folds the alphabet end to end, so the first letter meets the last; Albam slides one half over the other, so the first letter meets the twelfth. The Hebrew calculators list further pairings of the same kind, such as Atbach and Ayak Bakar; we do not compute them.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Jewish Encyclopedia (1906)
- Lists Albam among the letter permutations sourced
- Reference tables
- Name it beside Atbash as a classical substitution sourced
- A substitution, then a sum
- The swap is a cipher; the gematria is the value taken afterwards our construction
How the schools read it
- The rabbis
- One of the classical permutations, beside Atbash.
- Hebrew calculators
- Carry it among the substitution methods.
- EsoTerrier
- Behind "more ciphers": the swap, then the standard value.
Claims about it
-
A letter substitution such as Albam is itself gematria.
falseWhat the record shows: The swap replaces letters and adds nothing; gematria is the sum of the result. The chart does both and shows them apart.
