Revelation 13:18

Revelation 13:18. At this point the Seer pauses, and we meet those words which have been so great a puzzle to the Church of Christ in all ages of her history. Here is wisdom. The test of wisdom is then set forth in the following clause: He that hath understanding, let him count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred sixty and six. ‘It is the number of a man,' that is, the number of the name of the beast is one which, when transferred according to the fashion of the time into the letters designating them, will give the name of the beast. ‘The number is six hundred sixty and six,' that is, it is a number which consists of three numerals, the lowest 6; the second 6 multiplied by 10, or 60; the third 60 multiplied by 10, or 600. ‘Let him count the number of the beast,' that is, let him note or weigh carefully the import of these three numerals.

To treat the point now before us with anything like the fulness which it deserves is unfortunately out of the question. The limits of this commentary forbid the attempt. Instead, therefore, of endeavouring either to examine the various interpretations that have been given of the verse, or to trace the history of the inquiry, we shall confine ourselves as much as possible to one interpretation which seems to have been first proposed half a century ago by several German scholars (Fritzsche, Benary, Hitzig, Reuss, etc.; see Schaff's History of the Christian Church, new edition, vol. ii p. 846) who each claimed to have discovered it, and which has of late been accepted as an unquestionable solution by not a few who have paid most attention to the subject and are best entitled to be heard. If we succeed in showing that this particular solution is untenable, we shall not only determine one point at least to which, in its bearings on the Apocalypse as a whole, too much importance cannot be attached, but we shall, in doing so, indicate the lines upon which it appears to us that a solution must be sought. The interpretation to which we refer understands the number ‘six hundred and sixty and six' to represent the words ‘Neron CAESAR.' The argument is that, when written in Hebrew characters, the letters of these words stand as follows: NRON KSR, and that, taken according to their numerical value in the Hebrew alphabet, they supply the following figures: 50+ 200+6+50+100+60+200, or in all 666. The conclusion is obvious, and the ‘beast,' alike of our present passage and of chap. 17, can be no other than the Emperor Nero, the foulest monster that ever stained the page of history with deeds of cruelty and lust and blood. We believe that this solution is mistaken, and we offer the following considerations in connection with it.

(1) Every inquirer allows that the ‘beast' spoken of is not the second but the first beast of the chapter. Sufficient attention, however, has not been paid to the fact that a distinction must be drawn between that beast in itself and in each of the various forms in which it was manifested under its successive ‘heads' (comp. on Revelation 13:2). Properly speaking, the beast itself is no one of these heads singly. It is rather the concentrated essence of them all (comp. on chap. Revelation 17:11). Whatever of evil there is in each of them flows from it, and must be restored to it when we would form a true conception of what it is. We know it only fully when, gathering into itself every previous element of its demoniacal power, it is about to exert its last and fiercest paroxysm of rage before it goes ‘into perdition' (chap. Revelation 17:8). By the confession even of those against whom we contend it is ‘the eighth' mentioned in chap. Revelation 17:11; it is ‘of the seven,' and yet it is so far to be distinguished from them. That this is the correct view of ‘the beast' in the present chapter as well as in chap. 17 is clear, not only from the fact that the beast is spoken of as distinct from any one head, and from the impossibility of interpreting chaps. 13 and 17 unless we suppose the beast of both Chapter s to be essentially the same, but also because in Revelation 13:14-17 of this chapter we have the whole work of the second beast in its service, as well as its own work, set before us as fully and finally accomplished. ‘The beast,' therefore, to which our attention is here called, cannot be Nero, for, even on the supposition that the seven ‘heads' of Revelation 13:1 or the seven ‘kings' of chap. Revelation 17:10 were personal kings and not, as we have already shown, kingdoms, it must be more than any separate individual of the series. (2) The interpretation makes it necessary to have recourse to the letters of the Hebrew instead of the Greek alphabet. But the improbability that St. John had Hebrew letters in his mind is very great. He writes in Greek. On other occasions he employs the letters of the Greek alphabet in order to give, by means of letters, an expression to his thought (chaps. Revelation 1:8; Revelation 21:6; Revelation 22:13). When he uses the Hebrew he expressly notifies that he does so (chaps. Revelation 9:11; Revelation 16:16; comp. John 5:2; John 19:13; John 19:17; John 20:16). Few things are more certain than that the Christians of Asia Minor, for whom he wrote, had little or no acquaintance with Hebrew. It is urged indeed that the Seer resorted to the Hebrew alphabet for the sake of more effectually concealing a name the disclosure of which might have been attended with danger. The assumption is wholly gratuitous. The obvious intention of the Seer is not so much to conceal as to reveal the name, although in a manner that shall illustrate its solemn import. He is dealing, in short, not with a human puzzle but with a Divine mystery, the most essential conditions of which would have been destroyed had he concerned himself about the half-concealed name of an individual. Nor, if his object be to avert danger from the Christian Church, is he consistent with himself. It will not be denied that if the numbers before us point to Nero, the words of chap. Revelation 17:9; Revelation 17:18 point to Rome, and in that case a city, the naming of which must have been as dangerous as the naming of its Emperor, could not have been designated with greater clearness. (3) It is only by force that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet can be made to accomplish the end for which they are referred to. The names of Ewald and Renan stand at the very head of Semitic scholarship in Europe, and neither scholar can be suspected for a moment of any leaning towards the traditions of the Church. Yet both of them have pronounced it almost, if not altogether, impossible to believe that the words Nero Caesar could in the first century have been spelled in the way demanded by the proposed solution. The former, accordingly, first inserts an additional letter in the KSR, then substitutes Rome for Nero, and lastly obtains the number 616 (of which we have still to speak) instead of 666 (Johann. Schrift. 2 p. 262). The latter, agreeing with Ewald as to the spelling but not as to the number represented, gives it as his explanation that the author of the Apocalypse has ‘probably of design suppressed the additional letter in order that he may have a symmetrical cypher. [1] With that letter he would have had 676 (L'Antechr. p. 416). It is surely too much to expect that men shall readily receive an explanation so heavily encumbered.

[1] The Hebrew word for Caesar was spelled in the first century not by the letters KSR but by KISR.

Another circumstance has yet to be noted which has been adduced by a well-known and influential writer of the day in the following words: ‘If any confirmation could possibly be wanting to this conclusion (that afforded by the reference to Neron Caesar), we find it in the curious fact recorded by Irenaeus, that in some copies he found the reading 616. Now this change can hardly have been due to carelessness. But if the above solution be correct, this remarkable and ancient variation is at once explained and accounted for. A Jewish Christian, trying his Hebrew solution, which would (as he knew) defend the interpretation from dangerous Gentiles, may have been puzzled by the. in Neron Kesar. Although the name was so written in Hebrew, he knew that to Romans, and Gentiles generally, the name was always Nero Caesar, not Neron. But Nero Kesar in Hebrew, omitting the final n, gave 616, not 666; and he may have altered the reading because he imagined that, in an unimportant particular, it made the solution more suitable and easy' (Farrar, The Early Days of Christianity, vol. 2 p. 298). At first sight the argument is plausible, but it breaks down on the fact that the ancient father to whom we owe our earliest information as to the reading 616 instead of 666 knew nothing of the proposed explanation. Although himself offering conjectures at the time as to the meaning of the mysterious symbols, he makes no allusion to either Neron Caesar or Nero Caesar; and, after mentioning one or two solutions, he concludes that St. John would have given the name had he thought it right that it should be uttered. It is a curious fact, illustrating the little importance to be attached to the argument under consideration, that the father to whom we refer preferred another rendering Teitan (T=300, E=5, I=10, T=300, A=1, N=50, in all 666), from which, if we drop the final n, we get Teita, numbering 616, and a better representation than Teitan of the Emperor Titus by whom Jerusalem was overthrown. When we find therefore that, notwithstanding the desire to penetrate into the meaning of the enigma which marked the early Church, this solution was not discovered, we have a proof that the discovery has been made by a false process, and is worthless. (5) We venture to ask whether in conducting this discussion sufficient attention has been paid to St. John's use of the word ‘name,' and to the precise manner in which he makes the statement of this verse. In all the writings of the Apostle the ‘name' of any one is much more than a designation by which the person receiving it is identified. It marks the person in himself. It tells us not only who he is but what he is. It has a deep internal signification; and importance belongs to it, not because the name is first attached to a person and then interpreted, but because it has its meaning first, and has then been affixed, under the guidance of God, to the person whose character or work it afterwards expresses. Keeping this in view let us carefully note the manner in which the statement of this verse is made. It is not the name, it is the numbers that are emphatic not the name deduced from the numbers, but the numbers deduced from the name. Upon these numbers we are mainly to fix our eye. But there must be a bond of connection with the name deeper and stronger than the bare fact that the numbers were yielded by it. Familiar as the writer snows himself to be with the method of transposing letters and numbers then in vogue, he must have known that many names would yield the number 666, probably quite as many as the long list which swells the history of the interpretation of this text. Of what use would it have been merely to call attention to this? The questions would instantly arise, Which is the true solution? Wherein is one name so given better than another? There must be some additional element in St. John's thought. Let us endeavour to discover it by making the supposition that he had been dealing with the human name of the Redeemer, ‘Jesus' He cannot fail to have known that the letters of that name in Greek give the number 888 (ι = 10, η =8, σ =200, ο =70, υ =400, ς =200), but many other names must also have done so. What would lend peculiar importance to the fact that the correspondence existed in the name of Jesus? The combination of two things does it; first, the meaning of the figures; secondly, the meaning of the divinely-bestowed name. The two correspond; behold the expression of the Divine will! The figure 8 had a Divine meaning to the Jew. It was upon the 8th day that circumcision, the initiatory act of a new life, was performed. The 8th day was ‘the great day' of the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7:37). What in Matthew 5:10 is apparently an 8th Beatitude is really the beginning of a new cycle in which that character of the Christian which had been described in the seven previous Beatitudes is thought of as coming out in such a manner before the world that the world persecutes. Upon the 8th day our Lord rose from the grave, bringing His Church with Him to her true resurrection life. But the name ‘Jesus' has also a Divine meaning (Matthew 1:21). In the very spirit of this passage St. John might have spoken of ‘the number of the name' of Jesus as eight hundred, eighty, and eight. As it is, he is occupied with one who, in his death, resurrection, and second coming, is the very counterpart of our Lord. He has a ‘name,' a character and work, the opposite of Christ's. That name may be translated into numbers yielding 666. Ominous numbers! falling short of the sacred 7 to the same extent as the eights went beyond it; associated too with so much that had been most godless and impious in Old Testament history. The nations of Canaan had been 6 in number (Deuteronomy 20:17). The image set up by Nebuchadnezzar, and for refusing to worship which the three companions of Daniel were committed to the fiery furnace, had been sixty cubits high by six cubits broad. The weight of gold that came to Solomon every year, in token of the subjection of the heathen nations around him, had been 666 talents (1 Kings 10:14; 2 Chronicles 9:13). On the sixth day of the week at the sixth hour, when Jesus hung upon the cross, the power of darkness culminated (Matthew 27:45). What dread thoughts were connected with such sixes! The argument then is, these numbers correspond to the name of the beast when its meaning, otherwise known, is taken into account. Both tell the same tale; behold how God expresses Himself regarding it! Now for all this the words Nero Caesar were utterly useless. The second of the two words might have a meaning, but the first was meaningless. It was simply the name of an individual. Merely to count up the numerical value of the figures obtained from Nero Caesar would not have answered the apostle's purpose, and could never have filled his mind with the awe that is upon him in this verse.

These considerations seem sufficient to show that the mere equivalence of value between the letters of Nero's name (as of many other names of that and every following age) [1] and the number 666 is no proof that the Roman tyrant is mysteriously indicated. When we add to this some of the other points previously spoken of, more especially that the beast is before us in its complete development, and that the homage it receives is paid to it as a beast that had died and risen from the dead (facts never asserted of Nero at that time), we are justified in concluding that the whole Nero theory will most probably prove but an illustration of the manner in which exegetical, not less than other, fancies have their periods of temporary revival as well as decay.

[1] Among the names which have at different times been suggested may be mentioned the following: Lateinos, Emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, Mohammed, Luther, Calvin, Beta, Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III. These with a little gentle manipulation by no means unfaithful to the names are all found to yield the number 666 (see Schaff's History of the Christian Church, 1883, vol. 2 p. 841). Another name has been recently suggested by a French writer who makes it Nimrod, son of Cush, in Hebrew letters.

It is scarcely necessary to allude to an interpretation of an altogether different kind which has found favour with many, and which depends on the form rather than the numerical value of the figures. Written in letters rather than in words the figures 666 are the following ϰξς, the first the initial letter of the name of Christ, the last the first double letter of the Greek word for cross, in the middle the twisted ‘serpent.' There is nothing inconsistent with the ideas of the time in what may appear to be only too fanciful to be true. It is a sufficient argument against it that the verse which we have to explain was addressed to the ear rather than the eye.

All other proposed solutions may be omitted. We have confined ourselves to that which is by far the most plausible, and the consequences of which, could it be established, would undoubtedly make this verse the keystone of apocalyptic interpretation. Our readers, we believe, will not ask more. It will be noticed, too, that we have indicated, in what has been said, the most important condition to be fulfilled by any solution which is to obtain general acceptance. The ‘name' of the beast represented by the figures must have itself a meaning expressive of the beast's position or character or work. Only if this were the case could the coincidence of its name with its number be of consequence to those who were to learn from it.