Very good read that was ... as a sync I bought The Dictionary of Symbols this week by Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant this week after reading and article on dragons.
Hi Isaac! Good column with a lot of food for thought. You know of course that 666 was “the number of a man,” and that number is generally thought by scholars to represents Emperor Nero. In some translations of the Book of Revelation, it is 616. Different versions of Revelation exist and depending of the spelling of Nero, which is in code. Check out this link from the Universit of Chicago if you want to go down that rabbit hole:
“If the Latin (rather than the Greek) spelling "Nero Caesar" is transliterated into Hebrew (nrw qsr), the final "n" in Neron being omitted (and its corresponding value of 50), the name computes as 616, which is the number indicated in the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament (the fragment illustrated below). If "Neron Caesar" is correct, it may be that the Latin was transcribed incorrectly, perhaps because the copyist realized that this transliteration did not equate to 666 and so omitted the letter, which changed the sum to 616. Still, each digit of 666 is one less than seven, the perfect number (just as there were seven planets, seven heavens, and seven days in the week), and such mathematical play may have tended to establish 666, rather than 616.
“Regardless of the number, Nero is the only name that can account for both 666 and 616, which is the most compelling argument that he, and not some other person, such as Caligula or Domitian, was intended. Too, for the number to have any significance for a reader of the first century AD, it would have to refer to a contemporary historical figure "for it is the number of a man." That other personages can be considered is a quirk of letter numeration. While it is a simple matter to determine the value of a word or phrase by adding the numerical equivalent of its letters, it is impossible to reverse the process with any certainty. The number alone is not sufficient to determine the corresponding word; rather, there needs to be additional information.”
By the way, I think you’d love the Alan Dean Foster book I published a few years ago :
Very good read that was ... as a sync I bought The Dictionary of Symbols this week by Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant this week after reading and article on dragons.
Hi Isaac! Good column with a lot of food for thought. You know of course that 666 was “the number of a man,” and that number is generally thought by scholars to represents Emperor Nero. In some translations of the Book of Revelation, it is 616. Different versions of Revelation exist and depending of the spelling of Nero, which is in code. Check out this link from the Universit of Chicago if you want to go down that rabbit hole:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/nero.html
But the real meat is here:
“If the Latin (rather than the Greek) spelling "Nero Caesar" is transliterated into Hebrew (nrw qsr), the final "n" in Neron being omitted (and its corresponding value of 50), the name computes as 616, which is the number indicated in the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament (the fragment illustrated below). If "Neron Caesar" is correct, it may be that the Latin was transcribed incorrectly, perhaps because the copyist realized that this transliteration did not equate to 666 and so omitted the letter, which changed the sum to 616. Still, each digit of 666 is one less than seven, the perfect number (just as there were seven planets, seven heavens, and seven days in the week), and such mathematical play may have tended to establish 666, rather than 616.
“Regardless of the number, Nero is the only name that can account for both 666 and 616, which is the most compelling argument that he, and not some other person, such as Caligula or Domitian, was intended. Too, for the number to have any significance for a reader of the first century AD, it would have to refer to a contemporary historical figure "for it is the number of a man." That other personages can be considered is a quirk of letter numeration. While it is a simple matter to determine the value of a word or phrase by adding the numerical equivalent of its letters, it is impossible to reverse the process with any certainty. The number alone is not sufficient to determine the corresponding word; rather, there needs to be additional information.”
By the way, I think you’d love the Alan Dean Foster book I published a few years ago :
https://www.centipedepress.com/sf/fosterdirector.html
can I send you a complimentary copy? No strings attached!
What a wild ride. Don't know what to think. If it's wild ideas , I know you'll be there like a moth to a flame. Keep nimble!