Cryptography
Jewish interpreters read Sheshach as a ciphered form of Babel, treating Jeremiah's oracle against the nations as deliberately obscured to outsiders but intelligible to those who knew the agreed-upon key.
In Jeremiah's oracle against the nations, the cup of divine wrath passes from kingdom to kingdom until "the king of Sheshach shall drink after them" (Jeremiah 25:26). No ancient record locates a place called Sheshach. Jewish interpreters from the Talmud onward read it as Babel written in atbash, a cipher that swaps the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet for the first, the second-to-last for the second, and so on. The same device appears twice more in the book, once for Babylon again and once for the Chaldeans.
The oracle dates to the first year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, when openly forecasting Babylon's fall carried obvious risk. Some scholars think a later scribe added the cipher, since the Greek Septuagint lacks it. Others note a literary purpose: inverting the letters of a name matches the inversion of power the prophecy announces. On either reading, the text hides its subject from outsiders while leaving it intelligible to those who know the key.
Cryptography names this practice. The word joins the Greek kryptos, "hidden," and graphein, "to write." Biblical Hebrew has no single equivalent, though its vocabulary of concealment is rich: satar, to hide; sod, the confidential counsel of the divine assembly; and chatham, to seal, the verb used of Isaiah's sealed book.
Modern cryptography is the discipline of shaping information so that only holders of the right key can read it, verify it, or act on it. It serves three functions. Confidentiality keeps a message from unintended readers. Authentication establishes who sent it. Integrity shows that no one has altered it in transit. Each has a counterpart in Restoration scripture.
Sealed Books
Isaiah describes a vision that has become "as the words of a book that is sealed," which the learned cannot read because it is sealed and the unlearned cannot read because they lack the requisite knowledge (Isaiah 29:11–12). Latter-day Saints have long connected the passage to the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Its logic also describes a basic cryptographic condition: possessing a text is different from being able to read it.
The Book of Mormon applies that condition to its own sealed portion. Moroni writes that the record of the brother of Jared will stay hidden until the Gentiles repent and "exercise faith in me, … even as the brother of Jared did" (Ether 4:4–7). Access depends on the state of the reader. The text sets a moral qualification where a cipher would set a key.
The parallel has limits that should be stated plainly. Translation by seer stone is a revelatory act, and the Book of Mormon makes no claim to have been a cipher awaiting decryption. The resemblance lies in the structure of disclosure, in which knowledge is held in trust and released when its recipient is ready.
Alma frames that structure in instructions to his son Helaman: "I will prepare unto my servant Gazelem, a stone, which shall shine forth in darkness unto light, that I may discover unto them the works of their brethren, yea, their secret works" (Alma 37:23). The stone here is an instrument for uncovering what others concealed. The name Gazelem would reappear, in a slightly different spelling, in the Restoration's own use of concealment.
A Restoration Codebook
When the United Firm revelations went to press in 1835, participants appeared under names such as Enoch, Gazelam, and Ahashdah. The code protected the firm's members and was set aside once the danger passed.
The early Church used concealment for the same reason Jeremiah did. When revelations concerning the United Firm were prepared for publication, the names of participants were replaced with unfamiliar ones. Joseph Smith appeared as Enoch and as Gazelam; Newel K. Whitney as Ahashdah. The substitutions occur in seven sections of the Doctrine and Covenants: 78, 82, 92, 96, 103, 104, and 105.
An early apostle who had copied the original manuscripts later testified that the names were absent when the revelations were received. They were added at publication because of persecution in Kirtland and the surrounding region.
The code was retired once the threat passed. Later editions printed the real names in brackets after the substitutes, and the 1981 edition dropped the substitutes altogether. Recent manuscript study adds a further dimension: the new names also gave the revelations an ancient, Adamic register, so their function extended beyond protection. Cryptographers would recognize the basic pattern. A key serves for a season, and a sound system plans for the day it is no longer needed.
The Ethics of Concealment
Scripture treats secrecy as a tool whose moral character depends on its use. The Book of Mormon's most troubling villains are part of secret combinations bound by oaths, signs, and passwords, and their secrecy serves robbery and murder. Yet the same book records a prophet commanding concealment. Alma instructs Helaman to keep "these secret plans of their oaths and their covenants" from the people while making known "their wickedness and their murders and abominations" (Alma 37:27–29).
Alma's instruction is a model of selective disclosure. The moral fact is published, and the operational method stays sealed so it cannot be reused. Security researchers follow a similar practice when they report a vulnerability without releasing a working exploit.
Legal and political philosophers draw a related distinction between privacy and secrecy. Privacy shields persons, their bodies, homes, correspondence, and consciences, from unwarranted exposure. Secrecy, in the sense they criticize, shields the exercise of power from accountability. A society can expand the first while shrinking the second, and the Book of Mormon's judgment of the Gadianton bands rests on this distinction.
In the early 1990s, a loose community of programmers and activists argued that privacy in a networked world would have to be built into software, since institutions could not be relied on to grant it. Their work produced widely used email encryption, anonymous remailers, and early designs for digital cash that later informed Bitcoin.
Keys, Seals, and Identity
For most of history, two parties who wished to communicate in secret first had to meet and share a key. Public-key cryptography, developed in the 1970s, removed that requirement. Each party holds a pair of mathematically linked keys. One is published, and the other is never disclosed. A message locked with the public key can be opened only with the private one, and a signature made with the private key can be checked by anyone holding the public one. Strangers can now establish trust over a channel that anyone may overhear.
Restoration scripture uses strikingly similar language for identity in the celestial world. Those who enter it receive a white stone "whereon is a new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it. The new name is the key word" (D&C 130:10–11). The new name functions much like a private key. It belongs to one person, it is known to God, and it marks that person as who they claim to be.
The revelation on eternal marriage adds authentication. Covenants, contracts, bonds, and obligations "not made and entered into and sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise" have "no efficacy, virtue, or force" after the resurrection (D&C 132:7). An agreement becomes binding when a trusted authority attaches its seal, much as a digital certificate gains force from the authority that signs it.
Temple worship carries the theme further. Latter-day Saints hold certain signs and tokens as sacred and do not discuss them outside the temple. Whatever else they mean, they function as covenantal recognition: knowledge given in trust, by which a person is known and admitted.
The Transhumanist Horizon
Cryptography now does more than hide messages. Homomorphic encryption allows a computer to perform calculations on data it cannot read, returning results only the data's owner can open. Zero-knowledge proofs let one party demonstrate that a statement is true, such as holding a credential or meeting an age requirement, without revealing anything else. These tools make it possible to share work while withholding the material it depends on.
Researchers in AI safety have proposed using homomorphic encryption to contain advanced systems whose goals cannot yet be verified. The system would run entirely on encrypted inputs, and its outputs would remain locked until a separate check confirmed them safe to release. The proposal is speculative, and its authors acknowledge that its value depends on assumptions about physics and computation that could fail. It shows how seriously some technologists take the problem of extending trust to minds more capable than their own.
Other pressures are nearer. Sufficiently powerful quantum computers would break most public-key systems now in use, and standards bodies are already replacing them with schemes believed to resist quantum attack. Further out, if minds come to run on substrates other than biology, identity will need protection of a new kind. A mind that can be copied needs a way to prove which copy it is and to guard its memories from tampering.
Mormon transhumanists affirm that scientific knowledge and technological power are among the means God has ordained for human exaltation. Cryptography fits that conviction in a specific way. Zion is described as a people of one heart and one mind, and no such people exist yet. In the meantime, cryptography lets strangers cooperate without requiring them to trust each other blindly, and it protects the vulnerable from those who would exploit what they know. A community that practices these protections well may be better prepared for the deeper trust Zion requires.
Concealment in Trust
The scriptural pattern runs consistently in one direction. Jeremiah's cipher could be read once Babylon fell. The Kirtland code names were printed once persecution eased. The sealed record waits for a people prepared to receive it, and the new name is given to the one who has become worthy of it. In each case, concealment is provisional and serves a later disclosure. That pattern offers a standard for judging cryptography itself: its use is sound when it protects persons and keeps knowledge in trust until the right time and the right recipient.