Chapter 79 Chapter Seventy-Seven

Lan made it clear that Teabing had just written all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet from memory.With permission, he used the corresponding Roman letters instead of the Hebrew letters, but even so he pronounced them with the unmistakable Hebrew pronunciation. ABGDHVZChTYKLMNSOPTzQRShTh Teabing read: "Alef, Belt, Dalet, Hei, Vav, Zayin, Chet, Te Tet, Yud, Kaf, Lamed, Mem, Nun, Samech, Ayin, Pe Pei, Tzadik, Kuf, Reish, shin, TaV." Teabing wiped his brow exaggeratedly, then continued to study hard. "In the official Hebrew writing system, vowels are not required to be written. So, if you spell the word Baphomet in the Hebrew alphabet, you will lose three vowels, leaving only—"

"Five letters," Sophie blurted out. Teabing nodded and began to write again. "Well, this is the correct way to spell the word God Baphomet in the Hebrew alphabet. For clarity, I have also written the three vowels omitted here." BaPVoMeTh "Of course, you have to remember," he went on, "that Hebrew is usually written from the opposite direction, but here we can still use the Etbash code. Next, we must put all these Letters, rewritten in the reverse order of their original arrangement, and in this way create our own substitution system." "There's an easier way." Sophie took the pen from Teabing's hand. "It works well for all reflexive substitution ciphers, including Etterbash. Trick learned at Royal Holloway." She wrote the first half of the letter from left to right, and then the rest of the letter from right to left below. "Cryptanalysis experts call it ghosting. It's complicated when you look at it alone, but it's easy to understand when you look at it again."

┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐ │A│B│G│D│H│V│Z│Ch│T│Y│K│ ├─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┤ │Th│Sh│R│Q│Tz│P│O│S│N│M│L│ └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘ Teabing glanced at what Sophie had written, and said with a smile, "It's not bad. I'm really happy to see that Holloway's juniors have specializations in their studies." Looking at the replacement matrix drawn by Sophie, Langdon couldn't help trembling even more.He thought that the excitement of those scholars who used the Etbash code in the past when they deciphered the mystery of the famous city of Sheshach (Sheshach) was nothing more than that.For many years religious scholars have been puzzled by the mention of the city of Shisak in the Bible.Because I checked all the maps and all the documents, I couldn't find this city, but it was mentioned many times in the "Book of Jeremiah" in the "Bible", such as the king of Shisak City, Shisak City, and the subjects of Shisak City.Finally, a scholar used the Etbash code for analysis, and the results displayed almost made people faint.Analysis shows that Shisak City is actually synonymous with another particularly famous city.Its parsing process is very simple.

Shisak, spelled in Hebrew: Sh-Sh-K. Sh-Sh-K, if replaced by the above password matrix, becomes BBL. BBL, in Hebrew, is the city of Babylon. The analysis shows that the mysterious city of Sheshach is the city of Babylon, which is commonly referred to as Babylon, and since then it has caused a craze for textual research on the Bible.Within a few weeks, several puzzling words in the Old Testament were explained again, through analysis using Etbash codes, revealing many hidden meanings that hadn't even occurred to scholars. out of the water. "We're almost there, too," Langdon whispered, unable to contain his excitement.

"Not so much, Robert," Teabing said.He glanced at Sophie and said with a smile, "Are you ready?" Sophie nodded. "Okay, God Baphomet, in unvoweled Hebrew, this is: BPVM-Th. Now, we simply convert these letters into five-letter password." Langdon's heart skipped a beat. BPVM-Th.Sunlight is pouring in from the windows.He looked at Sophie's cipher substitution matrix and began to make the conversion slowly. B is Sh... P is V... Teabing was as happy as a kid at a Christmas party. "Also, the Etbash code shows—" He stopped suddenly. "My God!" His face turned pale.

Langdon looked up immediately. "What's the matter with you?" Sophie asked quickly. "You won't believe it." He looked at Sophie. "Especially you." "what do you mean?" "That's—so clever," he murmured. "Insanely clever!" Teabing rewrote it on the paper. "Come on, give me some encouragement. Here's your password!" He showed them what he had just written: Sh-VPYA. Sophie was a little displeased: "What the hell?" Langdon didn't see it right away, either. Teabing's voice trembled, as if full of awe: "Actually, this yu means wisdom in ancient times."

Langdon looked at the letters again. "An ancient word containing wisdom can reveal the secret of this scroll." After a while, he finally understood.It never occurred to him that this would be the case. "An ancient word with wisdom!" Teabing laughed loudly, "Exactly!" Sophie looked at the word, then at the dial, and soon realized that Langdon and Teabing had made the same serious mistake. "It can't be a cipher," she argued. "The cryptex on the dial doesn't have an Sh. It's the traditional Roman alphabet." "Look at this." Teabing urged from the side. "There are two points to keep in mind. First, the symbol representing the Sh sound in Hebrew can also be pronounced as the S sound, which can be determined according to the dialect accent, just like the letter P can also be pronounced as F."

"SVFYA?" thought Sophie, bewildered. "What a genius!" Teabing added. "People often use the letter V instead of the vowel O!" Sophie looked at the letters and tried to read them: "Sofya." She couldn't believe her ears when she heard her own voice reading: "Sophia? The word spelled Sophia?!" Langdon nodded eagerly. "That's right! Sophia literally means wisdom in Greek. Your name, at its root, literally means wisdom." Sophie suddenly missed her grandfather very much.He actually used my name to compile the code!Her throat appeared to be tied in a knot.Everything seems so perfect.Yet when she turned to look at the five letters, she realized there was another problem. "Wait - Sophia has six letters!"

Teabing kept smiling. "You look at this poem again. Your grandfather wrote it like this: 'An old word with wisdom.'" Teabing blinked. "In ancient Greek, the word 'wisdom' is spelled SOFIA."