The Beast From the Earth # 2

The number 666 is commonly regarded as an example of gematria, an ancient numbers game in which each letter of the alphabet was assigned a numerical value. Any name could be encoded in a number representing the total of the letters in the name. John makes it clear that 666 is man's number, or "the number of a person" (NRSV). The problem is that with a bit of ingenuity many prominent names in every generation can be made to add up to 666. One commentator wrote that such identifications "lead to nothing just because they lead to everything" (Hendriksen 1939:273). The numbers work quite well, for example, with the name Adolf Hitler.

But in order to convey any meaning at all to John's original readers, 666 must have pointed to a name they recognized in their own time. The most common suggestion is Nero Caesar. But as Robert Mounce has pointed out (1977:264), "this solution asks us to calculate a Hebrew transliteration of the Greek form of a Latin name, and that with a defective spelling." When the Latin form of the name is transliterated directly into Hebrew, the result is 616, and sure enough, in the western Roman Empire where Latin was dominant, there were manuscripts in which the number was recorded as 616 (Irenaeus noticed this already in the late second century in his Against Heresies 5.30). Clearly, the scribes who copied the book of Revelation were familiar with gematria, and it may well have played a part in John's riddle. Yet because of its indeterminacy no solution based on that phenomenon alone is likely ever to be proven or to find general acceptance.

A more cautious approach starts from the simple recognition that 666 is linked to the characteristic interest in the number seven throughout the book of Revelation as a number of completeness or perfection. The number 666 falls short of the magic seven three times over--at the level of hundreds, tens and single units. William Hendriksen (1939:182) defined its message as "failure upon failure upon failure." The point is subtly different from the dividing of seven in half to yield three and a half years, the equivalent of the "42 montes" or "1,260 days." These numbers, as we have seen, represented a divine limitation on the authority of the dragon or the beast, while the number 666 attempts to characterize the beast himself. At the very least, the ancient philosophical notion of evil as a lack or a deficiency of the good seems to be at work in John's mysterious number of the beast.

Beyond this, the interpreter--any interpreter--is on thin ice. For what it is worth, some (for example, Rissi 1966:76) have pointed out that 666 is what is called a triangular number, that is, the sum of every whole number from one to 36. Thus if we were to lay out on a sheet one dot, then two, then three, then four and so on up to thirty-six, we would form a triangle made up of 666 dots. The number 36 is of interest not only because it is the square of six but because it too is a triangular number, the sum of every whole number from one to eight. In geometrical terms the two-dimensional triangle becomes a kind of pyramid. In a later vision (17:11), the beast will be called "an eighth" after a series of seven, and the argument is that 666 in chapter 13 is in some way equivalent to "an eighth" in the later chapter. This suggestion, although speculative, is of interest because Revelation 17:11 is introduced similarly: "This calls for a mind with wisdom" (17:9). It can only be evaluated, however, in the context of the later reference.

The most important thing for the modern reader to remember in connection with the celebrated 666 of verse 18 is that its purpose is to characterize, not identify, the beast. If the name Nero Caesar is somehow concealed here, the point is not that the beast from the sea is Nero, but that the beast is like Nero in its character and evil acts. Clearly the emperor Nero in the sixties was the major oppressor and persecutor of Christians within the historical memory of John's readers. If 666 is simply an expression of evil as anything that falls short of the good, then its purpose is to dramatize the point that the beast is evil and therefore to be resisted at all costs, and possibly also that it is doomed to "failure upon failure upon failure," as the next few chapters will show.

In any event, the modern reader should give priority to verse 10, "this calls for patient endurance and faithfulness," over verse 18, this calls for wisdom. The believer's responsibility is not to know everything in advance, but to be faithful no matter whether the threat to faith comes from the final antichrist figure itself or from one of its many predecessors--for example, false prophecy as represented by the rider on the white horse in chapter 6. In our preoccupation with the beast in Revelation, we should not forget the words of 1 John 2:18: "Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour." It is every bit as vital for Christians to resist the "many" as "the one."

~Bible Gateway~