The Number of the Beast Explained

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.    – Rev. 13:17-18

This post is for those of you out there that have not had the benefit of discovering biblical scholarship or the profuse amount of material written by some brilliant and very hard working biblical scholars. I was introduced to the world of biblical scholarship when I ran upon a book in the post library at Fort Hood, Texas called "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong. That was in 1997. From that point, I became sort of an amateur biblical scholar myself, emphasis on the amateur.

Over the course of not only my period of amateur biblical scholarship but most of my life, I have been fascinated with the Book of Revelations, particularly the part quoted above. So much fear and misinformation in our society is based on this passage. Why? I'll tell you why; not because it was originally intended by its author to have that effect but because it serves as a tool for propagating fear and therefore control. But that's another post. And besides, there has been so much written on the topic of religion based fear that I would be delusional to think I could do it justice.

My purpose is to kill the myths surrounding this bit of literature and hopefully eradicate some of the fear.

The current wisdom on the subject is that it symbolizes the Roman Emperor Nero based on the fact that the Hebrew alphabet had a numerical value assigned to each of its letters and the sum of the values of the letters of his name total, you guessed it, 666.

Bust of Nero at Musei Capitolini, Rome

But this parlor trick can be performed with any number of names of leaders from biblical times as well as modern. The theory has merit, possibly more merit than all others on the subject.

An alternative theory, and one that I've held for some time until reading about the one above is this: the symbols of the Roman numeral system that existed at the time Revelation was written (D, C, L, X, V, and I, M was added later to accommodate larger numbers) add up to 666. D (500) + C (100) + L (50) + X (10) + V (5) + I (1) = 666, implying that Rome, itself, was the Beast. I liked this one for a long time but it doesn't account for the specific physical description of the individual unless we start performing more parlor trickery.

Either way, the author of The Book of Revelation was definitely NOT referring to any 20^th or 21^st century figure as Christian zealots and fundamentalists would have us believe.

If you want to have some fun with your fundamentalist friends, show them this:

Bar codes work by means of interpreting black as a binary "1" and white as a binary "0". Red dots mark the areas on this particular code that represent the number 6, "101" in binary which converts to the number 5 in decimal, or the sixth number in the binary sequence of decimal numbers which of course starts with zero. Every manufactured product you buy (yes, even stuff bought in Christian book stores) has one of these on it and every one of them has a binary 101 at each end and in the middle to frame the code in order for the reader to decode the correct product number regardless of the distance from the reader or angle in which it is read. So the mark of the beast has been with us for years. How many of us live our lives without purchasing manufactured products?