Where Do Hebrew Acronyms Come From?

Brian Kaye writes:

I know that acronyms are rarely used in Semitic languages like Arabic and are not present in biblical Hebrew. The Talmud, which is mostly written in Judeo-Aramaic, contains some mnemonics to help remember various facts. These do not seem to be true acronyms as are, for instance, the names of famous medieval rabbis like Rashi [Rabbi Shlomo Yitsḥaki] or Rambam [Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon]. When did acronyms start being used in Hebrew? Was their introduction the result of an influence from European languages?

In talking about acronyms—that is, abbreviations generally composed out of the initial letters of the components of names or phrases—we need to distinguish among three different types. In the first type, these initial letters are verbalized as the phrase or name for which they stand. When, for example, we see “etc.” written on a page, we say or read it not as “ets” but as “et cetera” (Latin for “and the rest”). “Etc.” is thus simply a shorthand notation. And this, as we shall see, is how acronyms originated in ancient Latin and Greek.