Why Cipher Hebrew Into Another Hebrew-Shaped Script

Because Passing the River ciphers Hebrew rather than Latin, its practical use case differs from Celestial and Malachim's: a sixteenth century Christian occultist working with Hebrew divine names, angel names or scriptural phrases, all common material in Renaissance ritual magic drawing on Christian Kabbalah, could render that Hebrew content in Passing the River's alternative letterforms rather than in the standard Hebrew square script, a substitution that changes the visual presentation without changing the underlying Hebrew text or its gematria values, since the cipher maps directly onto the existing Hebrew letters rather than replacing their linguistic content.

The script's letterforms are generally described as bearing a family resemblance to Hebrew letters themselves, angular strokes echoing rather than wholly departing from the shapes a reader of Hebrew would recognise, in contrast to Celestial's rounded, unrelated forms, which may reflect a deliberate design choice on Agrippa's part, or on the part of whatever earlier source he compiled the script from, to keep the cipher visually anchored to the Hebrew original it exists to represent.