Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Number of the Beast

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Sometime around the year 95, a man who called himself John wrote what became known as the Book of Revelations. In that book, he said, “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666." So, what is the deal with this number and what does it mean? Learn more about the number of the beast and how it has been used and abused throughout history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometime around the year 95, a man who called himself John wrote what became known as the book of revelations. In that book, he said, quote, let him that half understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man and his number is 666, end quote. So what's the deal with this number and what does it mean? Learn more about the number of the beast and how it's been used and abused throughout history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Brilliant.org. Brilliant's mission is to inspire and develop people to achieve their goals. in STEM, one person, one question, and one small commitment to learning at a time. They enable great teachers to illuminate the soul of math, science, and engineering through bite-sized interactive learning experiences. There are courses explore the laws that shape our world, elevating math and science, from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery. If you're interested in learning about any STEM subject, go to

everything-everywhere.com slash brilliant. Once again, that's everything-everywhere.com To understand the number of the beast, it's first necessary to understand the book that it came from, the Book of Revelations. The early Christian church in the first century was mostly a rather small community of believers scattered around the Mediterranean. Letters from church leaders sent between these communities became the basis for many of the books of the New Testament. The book of Revelations was the last of the canonical books to be listed in the New Testament, and most probably the last one to be written. It was written by someone who called himself John. This might or might not have been the same John who was one of the apostles and wrote the gospel of John.

And if it was, he lived well into his 90s. It has also been attributed to a John of Patmos, who may or may not have been the other St. John as well. The important thing is that the author, whoever it was, wrote in Greek, and was probably Jewish, and that it was probably written during the reign of the Emperor Domitian. Domitian was responsible for a persecution of the Christians during his reign, and by this time many of the Christian communities had learned to speak and code with each other. Here, I need to deviate the story slightly to explain something about both ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew. Back then, neither system of writing used separate characters for numbers.

They both used letters to represent numbers. One example you might be familiar with is Latin. The Latin system of numbers is represented by letters, but they only use some of the letters, I, V, X, L, C, D, and M. The Greek and Hebrew systems were very different. The first nine letters represented the numbers one through nine. The next nine represented the multiples of ten going from 10 to 90. The letters after that represented hundreds from 100 to 900.

So in both Greek and Hebrew, you can convert a word into a number. So, for example, my name is Gary. If it was Greek, it could be Gelfa,ama, row, epsilon. Gamma is the third letter and represents three. Alpha is the first letter and represents one. Rho is 100, and epsilon is 400. So my name would be the number, 504, the dreaded mark of the podcaster.

The practice of making numbers out of words is called Gemitria in Hebrew and Isopsefi in Greek. The passage in question is from Revelations 13 versus 15 through 18. The number in Greek is listed as Chai Zai Sigma, which in numerical form becomes 666. It should note that the number is 666 and not 666. six. It wasn't the same character representing six just repeated three times. So, what does this mean, and who is the author referring to? The one name which the vast majority of historians point to is the one which early Christians had reason to hate and fear, the emperor Nero. In the Aramaic

language, which used the same alphabet as Hebrew, the name for Nero would have been Neron Kaiser. It was seven letters, N-R-O-N-Q-S-R. Using the Hebrew-Gembourg, using the Hebrew-Gembourg, matria, you get the numbers, 50, 200, 6, 50, 100, 60, and 200. Add them all together, and you get 666. The early Christians would have had a good reason to both hate Nero and refrain from using his name openly. Nero led the first organized persecution of Christians in the year 64 after the Great Fire of Rome. Even if the Book of Revelations was written after the death of Nero in the year 68. Nero, and hence 666, could have been used as a code for the emperor in the same way that 420 is used today as a code word. Moreover, there was a folk story for the first several

centuries of the Roman Empire, among Christians and non-Christians, that Nero would one day return. In fact, there were several Nero impostors who appeared around the time that this would have been written. Furthermore, there's a good reason why the early Christian community would have wanted not to badmouth an emperor in a letter. If it was intercepted and read by authorities, it could be used as evidence against them. There is a big wrinkle in this story, which most people are probably not aware of. The very first Christians were all Jews. However, not too long after the religion was founded, it expanded to non-Jews. People who wouldn't have known Hebrew or Aramaic necessarily. Most of them would have spoken Greek. In Greek, the name Nero would have just

Ben Nero from Latin. If you use Greek isopsophy, then you get six letters, N-R-O-Q-S-R, which translates into 260, 100, 6, 250. And that only adds up to 616. As it turns out, many of the oldest existing copies of the Book of Revelations have the number 616 and not 666. The oldest surviving version of the text comes from a document called Papyrus 115, which was found in Egypt. It dates back to the 3rd century. It's in fragments, but the number of the relevant line

clearly shows chai iota sigma, or 616, instead of chai zai sigma, which is 666. Another ancient text dating back to the 5th century, the Codex Ephiramani Rescriptus, which also was written in Greek, uses

the same number 616. So, what's the discrepancy. One theory is that the different numbers represent the same thing, but for different audiences. The Aramaic-speaking Hebrew alphabet-using people would have used 666, but the Greek-speaking people would have used 616 to convey the same idea. St. Arranius, who was one of the early leaders of the Christian community in the second century, acknowledged the different versions in his text against heresies. He came out in favor of 66, and said it was a simple transcription error, but that wouldn't explain the third and fifth century text that we have today.

What we do know is that when St. Jerome translated the Greek text into Latin in the late 4th century, he went with the 666 version, and that's what most subsequent translations of the Bible used as a source. Since then, countless people throughout history have been associated with the number 666. It turns out you can link almost anyone to the number 666, or at least 3-6s, and it turns out that almost every notable person in history has been linked to it. Martin Luther in Hebrew comes out to 666. Saddam in Hebrew is 666 and Hussein in Hebrew is 666. Charles de Gaul is 666 in Hebrew, and so is William J. Clinton, if you admit vowels,

which you can sometimes do in Hebrew, and you can also make it fit in Greek, believe it or not. Likewise, the word Muhammad in Greek adds up to 66. Ronald Wilson Reagan adds six letters in each word, which is 666. Leo Tolstoy linked Napoleon to 666. Hitler adds up to 666 if the letter A is 101, B is 102, etc. Another technique used by people is to use Latin, and then only count the letters which are used in Latin numbers. Vicarious Philly Dei, which is a title of the Pope in Latin, adds up to, you guessed it, 666. Using the same technique, the phrase cute purple dinosaur, aka Barney, also adds up to 666.

If you use Asky characters, then the name of noted computer programmer Bill Gates adds up to 663. But Bill Gates's full name is Bill Gates the third, and that three makes for 66. Then there are just weird coincidences. When John F. Kennedy won the nomination at the Democratic Convention, he got $600,000. 66 votes. The day after the 2008 election where Illinois Senator Barack Obama was elected president, the Illinois lottery pick three numbers were 666. What are the odds of that happening? Actually, it was the fourth time that year that that number came up. Fin Air used to have a flight 666. It flew from Copenhagen to Helsinki, where the airport code is H-E-L. There were several times

where flight 666 flew to hell on Friday the 13th. Of course, not every culture has the same fixation with the number 666. In China, the number 6 is lucky because it sounds like the word for smooth. Three sixes can represent something being cool or smooth. I should close on noting one of the only mathematically significant things about the number 66. It's what's called a triangle number. You can create a triangle number by adding up all of the integers which came before it. 666 is the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 36.

This also happens to be the number of all the spaces on a roulette wheel. So if you add everything up on a roulette wheel, you get 66. So the number of the beast, be it 666 or 616, has been with us for almost 2,000 years, and it'll probably be with us for thousands more. If nothing else, it does confirm my long-held suspicions about Barney the dinosaur. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit.

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