666 (area code of the beast)

Joseph Crea Joseph.Crea@worldnet.att.net
Tue, 25 Nov 1997 20:55:01 +0000 (00880512901, 19971125205459.AAA25276@LOCALNAME) 

Hello,  John!

At 04:21 PM 11/25/97 +0000, you wrote:

>Since we are talking about it, maybe one of you folks knows about this:

>

>A few years back, I read on a usenet group that not all mss have 666 as

>the beast's number.  The individual claimed (I think) 616 appeared

>sometimes.  The interesting thing was that this person said that there

>are two ways to spell Nero Cesar, one of which added up to 666, but the

>other one added up to 616.  Pretty neat.  Does anyone know whether 616

>does really appear in some manuscripts?  Does anyone have a book or

>journal article recommendation on the subject?



  See the article on "Six Hundred Sixty-six"  in  __The Oxford Companion to
the Bible__ where the author, David H. van Daalen writes: [ in the interests
of accurately reproducing my quoted text, I'm taking the liberty of
representing long vowels by the doubling of the appropriate letter -- thus a
"long e" would be represented as "ee"]

   "The number was arrived at by presenting Nero's Greek name Kaisar Neroon
in Hebrew letters which also function as numbers: qsr nrwn;  q = 60, s =
100, r = 200, n = 50, w = 6, so qsr nrwn adds up to 666.  (Some western
manuscripts read "six hundred sixteen";  the scribes possibly did not
understand John's usage of the Greek kaisar theos, the "god-emperor", which
would add up to 616 using the Greek letters as numerals;  but it is more
likely that they simply dropped the final n:  qsr nrw for Kaisar Neroo,
making 616."


    Hope that this helps.


With Mettaa,

Joseph Crea
<Joseph.Crea@worldnet.att.net>



>I'll also be out of town for thanksgiving (driving home to beautiful

>Kalamazoo [and it actually *is* beautiful when compared to large parts

>of Iowa!]), so I'll say thanks in advance for your help, and wish all of

>you a safe and happy holiday.  And to all the veggies--enjoy that big

>plate of mashed potatoes, and that squiggly cranberry blob!  I know I

>will.

>

>peace,

>john phipps

>