The Numbers 666 and 616 in the Apocalypse

On the Usefulness of Written Reckoning

Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko

(On the Usefulness of Written Reckoning)

This is a draft of an article for a book based on the lecture series “Empire or Christ”, given in Saint Petersburg in January and February 2016. In this note the material is set out in outline and without references (they will be added in the final version of the article).

The Revelation of John the Theologian is the last book of the Bible and the hardest one to take in. We needed to examine certain aspects of this book in the course of an attempt to determine how the first Christians regarded the imperial paradigm. Unexpectedly, this approach yielded a considerable body of material that still awaits reflection. Be that as it may, here are some preliminary results:

1) Many readers and interpreters of Revelation are thrown off by John’s address to the Angels of the seven Churches, seven different cities. We tend to identify these Churches with the Churches of a later age, identifying them in number and in structure and, more importantly, in nationality and in character. In fact, by the time Revelation was written (between AD 86 and 105), the make-up of the Churches hardly differed from what it had been in the days of Paul’s missionary journeys. There was some growth after the destruction of Jerusalem, but at bottom the first Christian communities remained the same household and synagogue communities, which were above all Judeo-Hellenistic in language, mentality and culture.

2) In the period from the destruction of Jerusalem in 72 until the sorry end of the Bar Kokhba revolt, messianic expectations among the Jews ran higher than ever before, and they blended naturally with the first Christians’ expectation of the speedy Second Coming of Jesus Christ. These expectations bore strange fruit. At the same time, Jewish circles showed a growing interest in the Mishnah (the oral tradition, or Oral Torah), an interest in secret knowledge (Gnosticism) and, to put it in modern terms, in every other kind of sect and heresy.

3) Such is the reader of Revelation. It is to him that John speaks, and that is why the language of Revelation is Greek while its whole range of imagery comes from the Old Testament (from its prophetic and apocalyptic writings). For us, as people of another culture, what matters more in the Sacred Text is a clear meaning, a narrative thread, familiar images. Perhaps this is why the genre of lives (of saints and “non-saints” alike) is still so popular. In Revelation we see something entirely different. What is more, to a person who has never opened the Old Testament (the prophetic books) and has confined himself to reading the New Testament alone, the book of John the Theologian seems out of place, superfluous between the same covers as the Gospel. (I venture to suggest that it was precisely this sense of foreignness, together with the memory of who its addressee really was, that kept Revelation off the list of New Testament books in the East right up to the Council of Carthage of 419.)

4) What, then, was the dominant idea in the milieu that John addresses? A simple idea: revanche. The idea of building a new empire of their own, headed by a king-messiah of “their own”. And this idea was received equally well by the Jews of the Temple and by the Jewish Christians. And here it is very important that the example, the model to imitate, which they saw was not Rome, the enemy and antagonist. The model they saw was Babylon.

5) Babylon is the chief “bad word” in Revelation. One can say with confidence that Revelation speaks of the struggle of two ideas, two kingdoms, namely the Kingdom of the Lamb and the kingdom of the Beast. And “Babylon the harlot” serves almost as a kind of refrain in this narrative.

6) On this understanding, the order in which the “horsemen” of chapter 6 appear can be read somewhat differently. The first (and most attractive) is probably the empire of Babylon (it was then that the Jewish community was captivated by the prospect of such an idea, tried on for itself); the second horseman is Rome, war; and after them come famine and death. Step by step, the idea turns into a mechanism of destruction.

7) Who, then, is the “ideologue” of the Jewish revival, of the building of a New Jerusalem? He is a figure of great importance for understanding both Jewish mysticism and history: Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph. By some accounts he was born in AD 17 (which makes him a contemporary of John) and lived to an extreme old age. The Romans would execute him in 135, after the fall of the fortress of Betar. It is with his name that the first written commentaries on the Mishnah are associated, and it is he who would become the unwitting founder of both the Talmudic and the Kabbalistic tradition. In the end, it is he who would proclaim Bar Kokhba king-messiah, and this would secure the Jewish revolt its great initial success. To all appearances, the anti-imperial pathos of the Apocalypse is addressed to Akiva, or at least to his disciples and followers.

8) One of the traditional riddles of Revelation lies in the words: “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” (13:18). Traditionally, in trying to understand what John meant, interpreters point out that in both the Jewish and the Greek tradition numbers were written with letters, so that John’s meaning can be grasped only by working out the sequence of those letters. Most often the interpreters arrived at the name of Nero, less often at someone else’s (though there are versions ranging from Caligula to Hitler and Stalin, as taste dictates). Indeed, if all the horsemen of the Apocalypse are taken to be one and the same Roman Empire, then the beast too is its offspring, and the name of Nero is therefore the more likely; and yet the beast’s somewhat independent existence raises a question.

9) Gematria, the disclosure of hidden meaning (which is, in fact, what Rabbi Akiva largely devoted his life to), involves arriving at a key sum. It is a kind of biblical numerology. What, then, is this sum for the number of the Beast? Adding three sixes gives 18, which is first broken down into 1 and 8, and 1 plus 8 adds up to nine? Is that it? This option too has been examined more than once. Nine stands for the ninth letter of the Hebrew alphabet (Teth) and in gematria signifies goodness, love, spiritual energy. That hardly suits a description of the Beast. So something is wrong? Yes. We are using an incorrect method of reckoning. There were simply no “three sixes”. Arabic numerals were still half a millennium away.

10) In Judea in Second Temple times the sexagesimal, Babylonian, system of reckoning was in use. It is enough to recall the measures of weight and length and the units of money (the mina, the talent, the stadion). This system was uncommonly important in building (360 degrees), in calculating intervals of time, in observing the stars (where did the Magi come from to the Infant Jesus?). In writing, this system used only two kinds of sign: units and tens.

John uses the Greek verb “count”*, which goes back to the counting of pebbles in a vote. This is a hint. Even a simple count of the little tick marks, the “birds”, gives eight, while the mathematical operation, the “gematric” solution proper, first gives the number 17, and the sum of 1 plus 7 gives the same eight.

It can be written roughly like this:

It may be objected that in a great many early codices the number 616 appears instead of 666. That is indeed so, but remarkably, working out 616 in the sexagesimal system also gives eight. This is what 616 looks like:

11) What, then, does the gematria of the number eight correspond to? It corresponds to the letter het:

In the Aramaic script of imperial times the letter looked like this:

Rabbi Akiva’s interpretation of this letter is entirely unambiguous: het is “sin”. And since for John the first empire is Babylon the Harlot, he encodes the notion of sin in Babylonian reckoning. Man (and the angelic host) wrestles with the Beast whose name is “sin”, a human name. And the riddle John sets is very much akin to a children’s one: “how much is three, three, three…”. John uses the Aristotelian principle, easing the whole horror of the picture he has drawn by working a riddle, a kind of charade, into the text. To anyone who knows Babylonian reckoning and the principles of gematria, this is plain.

It may also be noted that the letter Het itself is a symbol of a beheaded beast.

And the author of Revelation gives us a hint in these lines:

3 And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed.

And further on in the same chapter 13:

14 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

12) Thus the main thought of Revelation becomes the opposition between any earthly construction, as the kingdom of the Beast, of sin, and the Kingdom of the Lamb. Perhaps this thought seemed too simple to his contemporaries, since they did not heed the Apostle’s exhortations. Then again, it is not only his contemporaries: their descendants, too, refuse to hear him.

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* ψηφίζω 1) to count, reckon, calculate (Polyb., Anth.; αριθμόν τινος NT): τοις δακτύλοις ψηφίζω Plut. to count on one’s fingers; 2) chiefly med. to cast one’s vote (with a pebble), to vote: ψηφίζω δίκην κατά τινος Soph. to vote (pass) sentence on someone; το ψήφισμα εψηφίσθη Lys. a decree was passed; τα ψηφισθέντα πλοια Xen. and αι ψηφισμέναι νηες Aeschin. a fleet determined by vote; εψηφισμένος θανειν Eur. condemned to death; εις την υδρίαν ψηφίζεσθαι Xen. to drop one’s pebble into the urn; ψηφίζεσθαί τινι Dem. to vote for someone; ψηφίζεσθαι περί and υπέρ τινος Plat., Aeschin. to vote on a question concerning someone (something); 3) med. to decide by casting votes, to resolve by vote (πόλεμον Thuc.; σπονδας ποιεισθαι Arph.): ψηφίσασθαί τινι το διαδίκασμα Lys. to award someone the matter in dispute; ψηφίσασθαί τινά τινα Plut. to declare someone something by a majority of votes; εναντία ψηφίσασθαι Plat. to vote against; τοιούτου γνώματος κοινωνος ων ψηφίζομαί τι δραν Aesch. I join in the common opinion that some action must be taken; μένειν εψηφίζετο Her. (Leonidas) carried the decision to stay.

Source of the dictionary entry: http://superbook.org/UBS/S/D/6368.htm

First published: nestoriana.wordpress.com