Temurah is one of the three ancient methods used by Kabbalists to rearrange words and sentences in the Bible, in the belief that by this method they can derive the esoteric substratum and deeper spiritual meaning of the words. (The others are Gematria

Gematria

Gematria or gimatria is a system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other, or bear some relation to the number itself as it may apply to a person's age, the calendar year, or the like...

 and Notarikon

Notarikon

Notarikon is a method of deriving a word, akin to the creation of an acronym, by using each of its initial or final letters to stand for another word, forming a sentence or idea out of the words. Another variation entails using the first and last letters, or the two middle letters of a word,...

.) Temurah may be used to change letters in certain words to create a new meaning for a Biblical statement. The Hebrew alphabet

Hebrew alphabet

The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...

 is an Abjad

Abjad

An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....

or consonantary alphabet. Techniques that applied to English will mostly transform sense into a nonsensical series of letters are more feasible in Hebrew.

There are three simple forms of Temurah:

• Atbash
  Atbash
  Atbash is a simple substitution cipher for the Hebrew alphabet. It consists in substituting aleph for tav , beth for shin , and so on, reversing the alphabet. In the Book of Jeremiah, Lev Kamai is Atbash for Kasdim , and Sheshakh is Atbash for Bavel...
  
  : Replacing the first letter with the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the second with the next-to-last, and so on.

a=z, b=y, c=x, etc.

• Avgad: Replacing each letter with the preceding letter.

a=b, b=c, c=d

• Albam: Replacing the first letter of the alphabet with the twelfth, the second with the thirteenth, and so on.

a=l, b=m, c=n, etc.