My wife and I had been toying for months with the romantic idea of selling our house, most of our stuff and living aboard a houseboat when we found the boat. Designed and built by an engineer who'd emphasized functionality over looks, she was not pretty, but she was spacious above and below, had the structural integrity of a tugboat and possessed a waste recycling system that was "as good as you'd find in most small towns." I was in love.
She seemed to have her own intelligence, and I suppose I'd projected that same evaluation onto Fred, the current owner, who did not disappoint -- that is, until the tour was done and the price haggling had given way to small talk and a complaint about his recent troubles with the utility company. Having received a notice that he'd underpaid, he was asked to please remit payment, by check or money order, in the amount of $16.66. He'd phoned to say that, no, he absolutely would not. He would, however, send a check for $16.67, or come by and pay $16.67 in cash, provided they issued a cash receipt in that amount, but no way would he pay a bill for $16.66 because the number contained "the Mark of the Beast."
Numbers are language, and John of Patmos, author of The Revelation of John, loved numbers. Sixes, obviously, in triplicate, a few 10s, and sevens -- especially sevens: Seven messages to seven communities, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. It is the author's "single most insistent motif," writes Jonathan Kirsch. Adele Yarbro Collins calls it "an organizing principle" of the whole of the work." But why sevens? Why not twos, eights or nines? Collins tells us that the late Pythagoreans as well as Philo of Alexandria, Jewish biblical interpreter and philosopher, agreed that "all reality is ordered and that order is expressed in patterns of seven ... [because] ... [t]he symbolic significance of this number is cosmic." And, as Kirsch points out, it was God's resting on the seventh day that signified creation's completion, making seven a "symbol of divine wholeness in Judaism."
All this would have made sense to the seven communities John had in mind and as he took up his pen, around the year 95 C.E., he was writing to them, not to us, and in a language of symbol and imagery that were as current and familiar to them as it is ancient and weird to us. Which brings me back to Fred, an obviously bright fellow, yet whose assumption about the meaning of 666 is characteristic of the inevitable flattening-out that results when ancient, complicated texts are read as if they are stories from old newspapers.
Where seven typically represents completion, six represents incompletion. But why three sixes? Think cryptology, John writing in code to those in the know. Craig R. Koester tells us that the author employed gematria, a system of Kabbalistic numerology. In fact, in the third chapter of Revelation, verse 18, it seems obvious that John assumes his audience will be familiar with the system: "Here is the key, and anyone who has the intelligence may work out the number of the beast. The number represents a man's name, and the numerical value of its letters is six hundred and sixty six." The numbers, Koester says, point to Nero, Emperor of Rome from 54-68 C.E., as the likeliest candidate.
But why the code? Why didn't John just name Nero? After all, Domitian now sat on the throne. And yes, Nero was five emperors back, 30 years dead and a ruler so vile that Rome had proclaimed him an enemy of the state. But he had been Emperor, a Caesar and Rome had decided that its Emperors were Gods, which was less about theology than state unity. To acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor, though as a God, not the God -- the Romans were polytheists -- was a way of saying "I'm for Rome," rather than "I'm against Rome." The slightest accommodation would have been enough, explained Kirsch in an interview with Beliefnet, "nothing more than casting a pinch of incense on a little brazier of hot coals set up in front of an image of a dead emperor." But the Christians (and the Jews) refused even to do that much. Already Domitian didn't like them, so for John to have named Nero as the third beast, he may as well have spit in the Emperor's eye and declared to his face that he was the Beast, too, sort of. Which he did, sort of, but in code and on the page, copies of which went to cities on the far eastern edge of the Empire. John, however strange he may seem, was not stupid.
Finally, a bit of fun. "With a little ingenuity," says Koester, "people in every generation seem capable of finding an adversary who can in some way be linked to the numbers." Of today's candidates, one may surprise you. Drawing from The New Millennium Manual, A Once And Future Guide, Koester writes the following: "Start with 'Cute Purple Dinosaur,' then change the U's to V's [as in formal Latin inscriptions] and extract all the Roman numerals in the phrase (CVVLDIV). Convert these to Arabic numerals (100 5 5 50 500 1 5) and add them up." Yes, it's Barney. There is a precedent in pop-culture, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, who became the vessel for the evil Gozer. Whether his numbers put him in Barney's class, I can't say.