I don’t think it’s Hebrew, I think it’s Greek. Greek letters have numerical values too.
The author of Revelation wrote in Greek, and I’m pretty sure was Greek, and would doubtfully have known Hebrew.
I might seem to be contradicting myself a little, but it sound like, even if the author of Revelation didn’t know Hebrew, he was at least familiar with the Septuagint. In Deuteronomy, we are instructed to bind the words of G-d as a sign upon our hand, and wear them between our eyes. (And also write them on the doorposts of our houses.) Anyway, if you have written the name of someone other than the deity in the place where you are supposed to keep the words of the deity, you have supplanted G-d, in a way, so you could certainly be accused of worshiping the beast in a manner.
So I don’t think it’s an accident that the forehead and hand are mentioned.
I would object to having such a permanent mark tattooed on me anywhere on my body because I don’t want to be tattooed anywhere. You might as well ask if you slice gashes into my hand or forehead to cause deliberate heavy scarring. The answer is no. I do not want such alternations of my body. I don’t care what the specific design is, I do not consent.
As for implanting a chip - we do that for material possessions and chattel, like pets or cattle. I am neither and don’t desire to be either. Again, I do not consent.
If someone was making people get a 666 mark, I’d have to assume it was for some whackaloon Revelations-related reason. Some weird strain of fundamentalist Christian or maltheist or Satanist or something.
As for barcodes in general, it’s the forced tattoo part that bothers me, not the barcode part.
Semi-relevant aside: there’s a Jewish day school nearby with a 666 address, and I used to joke that they must have gotten the property cheap because the Christians weren’t buying.
Jared Kushner owns the building at 666 5th Ave. in New York City, sometimes called ‘Spook Central’. I’ve heard that he bears the mark of the devil somewhere on his body. Others say that’s just an imprint left from kissing his father-in-law’s ass.
That would make sense. But I saw a documentary about Revelation just the other day, and the numerology leading to the number 666 from emperor Nero was explicitly referred to as gematria. The person demonstrating it on the program using Hebrew letters was a Rabbi.
It was also noted that the composition and language used in the Greek text of Revelation indicated that the author probably was a native Hebrew and/or Aramaic speaker.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that documentary, but that’s where I got it from.
Back in the 1980s I remember getting a leaflet either handed to me, or left on a NYC subway platform bench, detailing how “The Mark of the Beast” was actually a microchip with unique IDs encoded into them that would soon be invented that The Government, actually controlled by Satan, would have surgically implanted into people.
And furthermore, it wouldn’t be done in a concentration camp serial number type of thing. THEY would develop all sorts of technology based on this unique ID that would make having one of these implants practically a necessity for everyday life, ranging from payment (buying and selling stuff or getting paid yourself into some computerized electronic fund somewhere), identification for travel (replacing physical passports), and so on. People would be getting these things voluntarily! But everyone who did so, would be DAMNED!
Flash forward 30 years and I would assume the apocalyptic conspiracy train of thought would extend to these things being implants that had all the functions of a smartphone directly powered by your body. Get email and messages, and stream music and videos, right to your brain!
I was once playing 7 card stud in a casino. Everyone folded except for me and one other guy. He had a pair of sixes up. I had that beat but I wasn’t showing. He draws a third six up and folds immediately. I don’t know how religious he was. He certainly had no problem smoking, drinking and gambling. I was happy to take his money. 666 is meaningless to me.
I don’t want 666, a barcode or the word “Mom” in a heart tattooed on me. I can’t see ever wanting anything implanted in me. It has nothing to do with religion.
For a long time Post Office Telephones here did not allocate 666 in the London area codes sequence. (Eventually they did allocate it to Croydon, as they were running out of numbers)
I did the math, and in Gematria, “Nero Caesar” is in fact 666 if spelled “נרון קסר”, which is not the standard spelling today - although it could have been in the past.
There was a highway 666 in AZ and NM. They had to change the number, partially because of theft, but also because religious people were freaked out. It got a bit of lore as the devil’s highway and people thought there were an unusual amount of accidents there. The highway was in fact poorly built for the amount of traffic, but I suspect there was confirmation bias too.
Also, what** Ulf the Unwashed** said.
We all pretty much need an ID and at least a debit card in real life. While not literally a mark on your body, I think it’s close enough.
That was an early model Ford. Henry Ford drove a version called the Arrow to the land speed record. Henry Ford was thus The Beast, inverted. Satan does a backflip, right?
I may be slightly amused by ancient myths based on older myths but they’re weak on observable reality and thus frighten me less than bad math. Believers are scary, tho.
Apocalypse was written in Greek where 666 is ΧΞϚ´(say that backwards three times). This lacks the numerical elegance of the Arabic decimal rendition, not yet invented. Why didn’t Jehovah tell anybody about decimals and zero? Lazy sod… Anyway, in Latin it’s DCLXVI, a letter salad that doesn’t trip off my tongue. YMMV. In hexadecimal it’s 29A, sure to strike fear in the hearts of all faithful nerds. Did they boycott HP-29A calculators, or merely exorcise them? Holy water would ruin the chips. Sad.
Religious nutjobs weren’t numbering highways back in the day. The re-designation to 491 (753 in octal, 1EB hexadecimal) occurred in 2003 CE (3723 octal, 7D3 hexadecimal) under devilish Dubya to distract from Gulf War II (10 in binary). It runs through the Pinto Bean Capital Of The World, a land of demonic flatulence, for sure.
The string “666” occurs in several of my accounts and as yet, nothing bad has hap… J9D*&Kdao;(Uo[i8[ LOST CARRIER.
There probably wasn’t a “standard” spelling in the year 100CE, approx. when Revelation was written. In fact, this is probably why there is dispute over whether the number is actually 666 or 616.
Alessan, I hope you don’t mind kibbutzing, but I thought I’d note for the dopers who don’t know Hebrew, that you have used “Neron Caesar,” and the letter which represents the “N” sound appears twice, which is why the value 50 is there twice. The letter, “nun,” has a special form at the end of a word, and that’s why it looks different the second time.
BTW: what is the standard spelling for Nero? ?נירון קיסר? נירון כיסר? נרון קאסר I don’t know why I don’t know this. This is usually the sort of thing I know. I can’t usually spell words like אבטיח correctly, but I can always spell סנהדרין.
Nero is spelled נירון קיסר in Hebrew. I don’t know why it’s always “Neron” and not “Nero”, but it is. As for קיסר (Caesar, pronounced "Kay-SAR), it’s now a regular Hebrew noun, meaning “emperor”. It’s the word used to refer to, say, Emperor Naruhito of Japan or to Sheev Palpatine.
It’s “Neron,” because that’s what it is in Greek, which is a declined language. I don’t know Greek, so I’m not sure which case “Neron” is (probably genitive or dative), and I couldn’t begin to tell you which declension-- I’m not even sure how many Greek has-- but that’s what’s up with the ending.
I know biblical Hebrew, but my Modern Israeli Hebrew is crap. The last time I was in Israel, I think I spoke Russian in shops more than I spoke Hebrew. I must sound funny to people, putting together scraps of biblical Hebrew to get a message across, when someone does not speak English (rare in itself).