Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: 666

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

Today, Chuck and Josh dive into that scary number...666. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Hale Satan. This is short stuff.

You're Josh, I'm Chuck, and that's Bruce Dickinson standing right over there for some reason. Yeah, there was a 0% chance of Iron Maiden not making an appearance in this. You got to. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's their best album, Power Slave is probably their best album, but that's pretty far up there.

Although, simmer down everybody, there's really no such thing as a bad Iron Maiden album. I wasn't that into them, I need to give them a shot. Yeah, they age really, really well. It's just really well done music. They're almost the prog band of metal. Of metal, interesting. They're just so ridiculously talented,

every single one of them. So yeah, it's good stuff. I highly advise you to get back into it, OK? I will. And what we're talking about today is the number 666. And our old pal Dave Ruse put this together for HowStuffWorks.com. And one of the first things he says is his article is like,

would you buy a car with a license plate ending in 666? And dude, my pickup truck has 666 on the license plate. No, it doesn't. Oh yeah, we talked about it a while ago when it came in. Well, I was delighted. I hit my head since then, so I've forgotten. That is beautiful. That was a while ago.

Wow, we. It's great. You need to get like some sort of graphics on the side or whatever, like devilmobile or something like that. Maybe I will. So the answer to that question from Dave then for you is yes. There's a lot of people who wouldn't, who would not. It's mostly God fearing people who believe

that there is a book in the Bible. Well, they don't believe it, like they actually use a book in the Bible. But in this book of revelations, I think chapter 13, or no, chapter three, verse 18 says this. Here is wisdom, let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man,

and his number is 666. Yeah, so if you've ever seen the movie, I mean, this has been in plenty of movies, but the movie, the Omen is the most famous movie to make use of this because young Damien, and it's still one of the great moments in movie history when they're searching through his hair on his head. And they see that 666, it's clearly tattooed,

but tattooed by God, I guess. Sure, yeah, by the Holy Ghost. Yeah, it's pretty scary. It is, that is a good scene, that's a good movie too. But yeah, the whole thing is this number, what this Bible verse is saying is there's a, basically Satan, the beast has a number so that you can recognize him.

When you see this number, you can recognize that this is Satan, or an agent of Satan, or somebody who is going to kill you if you don't worship him, who is the converse of God, who is in opposition to God, and is the opposite of everything right and good. And so here, me, the writer of revelations, is going to make you wise to this

and just look out for 666. And to those of us alive today, we have no idea what that means. Like, how are you gonna say somebody has a number? But back in the first century CE, among Greek speakers, this is a very common form of word play that they would have immediately recognized. And they think that back in the day,

anybody reading the book of revelations around the first century of this millennium before this one, they would know exactly who the beast was and who this was talking about. Yeah, because there weren't numbers like we think of them in Greece at the time, in Greek. The Arabic nobles came around hundreds of years later. So in Greece, each letter of the Greek alphabet

and in Hebrew actually had a numeric value. So there was this thing that we're gonna talk about after a message break here in a minute called isopsephi, isopsephi. Yeah, and it's- Isopsephi. I added an S in there. Keep going.

Aluminium. It's isopsephi. Good job. It's in there somewhere, I'm guessing. It's gotta be. That's right. And that means in Greek equal in numeric value. And that was a way for in the first century, basically, where you could, it was sort of like, not Morse code,

but a- Numeric code? Just those games, yeah, those games kids play when you send like a numeric code to someone and then they have to translate the code by what letter it represents to get the final, I guess in Christmas story, it was what, drink your Ovaltine?

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine? It's a crummy commercial. Yeah, so bad. Yeah, but it wasn't like you didn't need a secret decoder ring, everyone walking around speaking Greek knew that alpha was interchangeable with one, beta was two, pi was 80, which is weird because I thought pi was 3.14, et cetera.

Yeah. Psi is 700, for example. And so if you added together letters, you could come up with a number for that word or that name. So you could say that a name had a number and that's what this is talking about. That's right.

So that's the setup and we'll talk a little bit more about Isop Saffi right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

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bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, Chuck. So just exactly like, say, if your name was spelled alpha, beta, pi, psi, your number would be 783. You could also take 783 and figure out whose name that meant.

It's way harder to do in transverse. But if there's, say, some famous people that maybe you suspect that the author is talking about, you could say, oh, well, does that equal 783, or in this case, 666. And there's one guy in particular who the writers of revelations would have very much focused on as potentially the beast and agent of Satan

who would want to mark you with his number so that you couldn't buy or sell anything without that mark, or again, who would kill you if you didn't worship him. And that particular guy was named Nero. Yeah, so that was a pretty famous isopcesphi, God. I keep adding an S in there, isopcesphi. You've got to put your word butcher apron on.

Well, it is a weird word, I-S-O-P-S-E-P-H-Y. But there was a very famous one early on that was, it goes a little something like this. A calculation knew, colon, Nero, his mother slew. So in this case, Nero equals 1005, which has the same value of the phrase, his mother slew. So basically that's like, oh my God, Nero killed his mom. Yeah, that's the thing about the isopscesphi's

having like equal value is that if one word had a numeric value, and that's the same as say, another word or another phrase, that meant that there was some mystical, metaphysical connection between those two. So to people who were like, yeah, Nero's terrible, he probably murdered his mother. The fact that Nero, his mother slew,

and Nero had the same numeric value of 1005, that was just proof positive. Like you didn't need to look any further, give me my crystal ball and my Birkenstocks. Right, so you might be saying yourself, wait a minute, you guys said Nero was 1005, but you also said that some people believe that they were referring to Nero as the 666.

You gotta rejigger this a little bit in that case. You have to use the full name Caesar Nero in Greek. That translated into Hebrew, Hebrew is, did I say Hebrew? I love it, dude. That's a much more modern version of that word. He's my Hebrew, N-R-W-N-Q-S-R, which is Nero-N-K-S-R. And then that adds up to 666. Some people say, okay, all right, sure, why not?

The thing is, there's a big objection to that one that I ran across and that is that Revelations was written in Greek for Greek speakers who may not have actually known that you were supposed to transliterate this into Hebrew and may not have been familiar with Hebrew and not known how to do it. That doesn't necessarily mean, oh, no, this is wrong.

Like if you're encoding a message, having an extra step involving another language is definitely not against the rules. But from what I can understand, this is much more widespread and normal pursuit or a diversion, this kind of isopsesophy. It is hard to say, isn't it? It is.

Then this would be, like that's an extra big step compared to what they normally did. Like there's graffiti that they found in the ancient world that uses isopsesfies. Yeah, like, hey, you know who I'm into? 786. Right. So some lady in town would be like, ooh, I'm 786.

Yeah. So some people say, I don't know about that, translating it into Hebrew, and then it making sense as 666. I don't know about that one. It seems like a bit of a reach, but I don't know enough about it. I do think it's interesting though,

that the idea that they were using this coded language, possibly in the Bible. Yeah. I guess it was, it sounds like it was all the rage back then. Oh, you like that, huh? It was the hot thing? Yeah, it was.

It was very hot. So some people who say, okay, this is way off. It wasn't Nero, because by the way, the other thing about Nero, really kind of dates revelations, you know what I mean? Like it's meant to be kind of a timeless classic. And a lot of people are like, well, the beast hasn't even been born yet.

And everyone knows that the barcode is the mark of the beast. So the idea that it's just Nero, who has zero effect on our world today, it doesn't play very well that interpretation. Other people have interpreted it as meaning that it's not even, it's not talking about a specific person, which is tough to get around

because the translations, all of them that I saw is that it's a number of a man, a man. Not man, meaning like humankind. It's like a human number, which is I think exactly how Iron Maiden's guy puts it on number of the beast. But it's the number of a man, like a specific man. But if you throw that A out

and you just take it like it's a human number, is what it means. Then this interpretation is saying that it's actually pointing out that Satan is a cheap imitation, a cheap parody of God and the grace of God. And so this is what you're looking out for. This is the different interpretation.

Well, one thing I know, if man is five and the devil is six and God is seven, then this monkey is gone to heaven. That's right. Man, wiser words have never been spoken. Agreed. Love that song. So yeah, that's the point,

is that the symbolic number of God is seven and Satan's is six. So it's like Satan's a cheap imitation of God, so don't fall for his jam. That's right. So there you have it, 666. It's either Nero or it's just saying that Satan is a cheap imitation of God.

However you slice it, it's a really good Iron Maiden album, okay? Agreed. And that's it for short stuff, everybody. Go out and read about this on how stuff works if you want and definitely go listen to some Iron Maiden. It'll do you good.

Short stuff is apt. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.