Why is the mark of the beast 666 vs some other number like 777 or 88888888?
Short answer: Because it says so in the Bible.
Slightly longer answer: Judaeo-Christian mythology attaches meanings to certain numbers; from here:
Repeating the number 3 times is supposed to have some significance too, but I forget what it is.
(someone will also be along shortly to point out that it isn’t 666, but six hundred and sixty-six)
G’day
The number of the beast is 666 in Latin bibles, but it was 616 in the Greek originals from which they were translated.
The reason seems to be that if you count the first letter of an alphabet as 1, the second as 2, the third as 3, etc., then if you add up the letter-values of the letters in the name of the Emperor Nero you get 666. But if you add up the values of the Greek version of his name (don’t forget to use the Greek alphabet) you get 616.
So the Early Christians were into numerology, and they thought Nero was a beast.
Regards,
Agback
I think you may be a little misinformed there Agback; the Bible doesn’t mention Nero or any specific emperor by name, only that the ‘number of his name’ is 666.
As I recall, the number given is 666 in most manuscripts, but 616 in others. I don’t believe there’s a clear “early 616 Greek”/'late 666 Latin" split.
That said, one of the more popular theories is that “666” stands for Nero. There’s bee no shortage of candidates over the years, using all sort of numerological schemes. Example: A = 100, B = 101, etc. Using this, “Hitler” = “666”. In [BWar and Peace**, Tolstoy has onecharacter work out “l’empreur Napoleon” as 666, even though he has to fudge it a bit. About 20 years ago someone pointed out that each name in “Ronald Wilson Reagan” had six letters, making him 666. Compred to all of this, the “666”-shaped birthmark in the mpovie [BThe Omen** is silly and crude.
It’s a great tim-water and game, but as far as I know there is no definitive explanation of how the man is supposed to be represented by “666”, or who it’s supposed to be.
I’m not sure about why it’s 666, but I hear it’s on UPC bar codes. It’s the mark of the beast!!!
Yeah – interesting UL spread among the evangelicals, I hear. There was an artice explaning and ebunking thi in Skeptical Inquirer a couple of years ago.
Which reminds me of a GREAT .sig:
668 - neighbor of the beast
Mike Leigh’s film Naked helped to promulgate the idea of the “Mark of the Beast” barcode. The central character in that movie gave a bizarre monologue in which he spelled out his conspiracy theory about barcode tattoos and the Bible. It isn’t clear to me whether he really meant it or was just exercising his considerable talents as a virtuoso bullshitter.
Mangetout has provided the best answer, so far. In Jewish numerology (inherited to a limited extent by the early Christians), 7 was the perfect number, signifying God and 6 was the imperfect number, falling short of God’s perfection. (The other specific meanings mentioned by Mangetout may or may not have actually entered Christian folklore, but the perfection of 7, superperfection of 8, and imperfection of 6 certainly did.) And, as mentioned, repeating the number three times made it a superlative or “most imperfect.”
There are several ways that numerology can be used to arrive at the name of Nero–although different applications will provide different names. Either Nero (actually Domitian, viewed as Nero redivivus, or “Nero returned to life”) is probably the best guess, but it could also have been simply the use of the “most imperfect” number with no particular human intended.
We’ve discussed this a few times, previously. Notably in (but not limited to):
Why is this post evil?
The Number of the Beast
The “616” figure is not a Greek/Eastern Latin/Western division. It appears in only one of the earliest majuscule texts, C (Gregory 04), the Codex Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus. All later texts that include it seem to be traced to copyists using Codex C or its source as their source. Since the Codex Ephraemi is not supported by either the Codex Vaticanus or the Codex Sinaiticus and since 616 does not show up in either the Greek Textus Receptus nor the Latin Vulgate, it is pretty clear that 616 was simply a copyist’s error that got propagated through a number of texts. St. Irenaeus (mid second century) knew of a manuscript that used 616 and noted that it was an error, even at that point.
My friend wants to make a shirt with 667 on the front and “I live across the street” on the back. I’m not sure if that would go over well though.
(I hope he doesn’t mind me posting his idea!)
IIRC, and I’m not going to provide cites I don’t have easily to hand, the whole ‘666’ thing was originally quoted in Greek texts.
If that’s the case, and I’m calling on my three years of Classical Greek which I was never any good at anyway, this would actually have been written ‘zzz’ (or, correctly, ‘zeta zeta zeta’). The reason to classify the ‘mark of the beast’ as numeric was because ‘zzz’ didn’t translate to anything.
So if you want to get literal when you’re looking for the antichrist, look for someone with a mark that looks like three squiggles next to each other.
Actually it’s not “zeta, zeta, zeta”, it’s chi xi stigma, which is not “6…6…6” but rather “600…60…6”.
Well, Agback didn’t say “the name Nero is in the Bible”, he said that the “number of the Beast”, decoded according to the rules of numerology of the time, means Nero. I’ve seen that interpretation before, including the reference to the apparently erroneous manuscripts with “616”; as Tom says, those sources may be placing too much emphasis on the 616 copyists error, but Nero is one of the more widely accepted interpretations of the number (to again echo Tom, possibly referring to Domitian, “Nero Reborn”, not Nero himself).
I didn’t say that any bible did mention him by name. Read my post again to make sure.
Regards,
Agback
Isaac Asimov, in Asimov’s Guide to the Bible:
Fair enough; sorry for the misunderstanding.
re: the barcode theory, I know how the debunking goes (ie the three longer marks are not actually UPC '6’s, but merely resemble part of the UPC code for a 6), but I’ve wondered something ever since I read about that.
As I understand it, the justification for that theory is in the following verses, from Revelation, chapter 13:
(Emphasis added. From the NIV, quoted from here)
Obviously it’s a pretty flimsy theory to begin with, as it sort of ignores the right hand/forehead stipulation. BUT, my idea was, perhaps someone involved in the original design and introduction of UPC codes was feeling particularly mischevious, and, aware of that particular bit of the bible, thought to him/herself “Hey, that sounds sort of like this UPC thing I’m working on! It’d be cool if I could mess with people’s heads and make it look like ‘666’ is embedded into these things, heh heh heh.”
So who did invent UPC codes? And are they a known pesky atheist or something? Heck, I would’ve done it for a lark, if I’d been in their shoes.
IBM did. We are all going to Hell. The first item scanned was Wrigley’s Gum.
The longer bars in UPC/EANs only looks like a 6 as it appears in some parts of the barcode; the symbology does not (as, for example code 3of9 does) define a fixed pattern of lines for any given number/digit, so a 6 is not always represented by a pair of narrow bars, neither does a pair of narrow bars always represent a 6.