Reading Revelation | The Mark (Pt. 20)
Go ahead, spend that $6.66.
If this were a chapter in a book, most people would have immediately flipped to this page. The Beast, the Mark, and the Number are the Revelation version of a whodunit, the puzzle begging for a resolution. It won’t surprise you that going straight for the exciting stuff is why people so fundamentally misunderstand Revelation. It’s like skipping to the middle of the movie and wondering why Old Yeller is locked up in the corn crib and growling at Travis.1
In the next post, we’ll go back and cover the ground we’re skipping. But for now, that strange and mysterious number.
Everyone has a 666 story, probably several of them. Like the time I was at a grocery store, and my few items, plus tax, rang up to $6.66. The cashier froze, then glanced up at me, unsure how to proceed. Her orientation video probably hadn’t covered how to prevent the rise of the Antichrist. After a beat, she said, “I’m just going to charge you $6.67.” She spoke these words with the confidence of a doctor scribbling out a prescription. She punched a few keys on the register, pulled a penny from her apron, and dropped it in the till.
Not today Satan, not this grocery store.
It’s not just superstitious clerks in express lanes. In 2003 the state of New Mexico changed Highway 666 to Highway 491 (The drama that goes into naming US highways makes reality TV seem like a gathering of librarians on a silent retreat). The short version is that two sets of highways on either side of the country ended with the number 60. Following a protracted legal drama, a compromise was reached. This required the newer 60s to be amended to 66. Highway 160 became 166, 260 became 266, and so on. Of course, this meant US Route 660, connecting Gallup, NM, and Cortex, CO, had to become US Route 666 or, as locals dubbed it, the Highway to Hell.
In 2003, then New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, during his first-ever state-of-the-state address, included a line that his administration was attempting to fix the problematic name of the highway. Less than a year later, likely a bureaucratic speed record, the state legislature did exactly that2.
I have driven on Route 666 before the name change, on my honeymoon no less. We did not spot the Beast, satanic cults, or anything Antichrist-related; it’s a beautiful part of the country.
It’s unlikely that either my cashier or Governor Richardson (and, by the way, US Ambassador, Energy Secretary, one-time US presidential candidate, and overall serious human) had much doctrinal substance behind their aversion to that number. They just knew it was in the Good Book and meant something bad.
The enormous cultural impact of the Number is in contrast to the tiny amount of ink it gets in the pages of the Revelation. All the fuss is over these three verses,
16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name. 18 This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.
Revelation 13:16-18
John will later reference punishment for all who bear this mark, but in terms of actionable intel, this is all we have. Yet, somehow, countless books, YouTube videos, and even heavy metal songs are dedicated to The Mark.
It might be worth pointing out what these verses don't say. Nothing labels this figure the Antichrist3. There’s nothing about computer chips, bar codes, or vaccines, all of which have been, and continue to be, popular guesses for The Mark, and there's nothing about your grocery store bill coming to $6.66.
So, where did we find all these fanciful ideas?
(Not) Finding Bigfoot.
There are more cable TV shows about hunting Bigfoot than one would think necessary. They promise “Incredibly rare, never-been-seen-before video footage of a sasquatch. Stay tuned!” Like the patsy I am, I stay tuned. After fifty minutes of “experts” and dozens of probiotic yogurt commercials, they finally roll the video. Here’s what you see.
The screen crossfades to amateur video footage so shaky it’s as if it were filmed by a toddler attempting to flee its parents during an earthquake. The quality is so poor that you’d think it was recorded on a hand-crank film-o-graph.
You squint at the screen, and sure enough, there appears to be a distant and blurry blob between two faraway trees. It could be a shrub or a large rock, but the narrator assures you that this is most definitely, probably, a sasquatch. They helpfully slow the video down and highlight the blur several times, none of which makes it clearer.
If you squint, it could be an elephant or a VW Beetle, or a refrigerator4. Squint hard enough, and the imagination can transform the blur into nearly anything. This “squint approach” seems to be how these verses about The Mark are read.
For example, the Boomer generation heard it had something to do with the European Common Market, a precursor to the European Union. Popularized in The Late Great Planet Earth, this thesis cobbled together with spare parts from Daniel and some questionable logic.5 It's the theological equivalent of trying on a pair of pants from your college days; no matter how hard you pull, things just don't fit.
Depending on one’s politics, there’s been speculation that the Beast might be a US President. In the 80s, some squinted and noticed that Ronald Wilson Reagan had six letters in each of his names. That can't be a coincidence, right? Sure, John was writing in Greek, so the English number/name connection doesn’t work, but since when has logic slowed down a good conspiracy?
The internet era has introduced as many options as there are YouTube influencers. In 2021, Facebook, Inc. officially changed its name to Meta. Meta, as we all know, is Hebrew for “dead."6 Facebook has a marketplace for buying and selling. Do we have to connect the dots? The signs could not be more clear.
We could do this all day, and people have…for centuries. Nonsense is a commodity never in short supply. But what might we see if we stop squinting and read these verses with our Reading Rules?
Our three verses contain three elements, the mark, the marketplace, and the number.
Let’s look at each.
The Mark
The Shema
For thousands of years, practicing Jewish men and women have prayed the Shema. It would have been part of Jesus’s daily routine. It was such an integral part of the Hebrew religious experience that it’s likely the practice was passed along from the first Jewish missionaries to the first Gentile Christians.
Right on the heels of the Shema is this reminder,
Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
Deuteronomy 6:8
Tie what on our hands and foreheads? God’s law or, more simply, God’s expectations for his people.
Contrast that to Revelation, where the Beast forces everyone to,
…receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,
Revelation 13:16
Binding God’s Torah on one’s hand and forehead was, on certain occasions, a literal practice. Still, even the most concrete Hebrew thinker knew Moses was speaking of Torah being so deeply ingrained in one’s being that it marked both actions (hand) and thoughts (forehead).
Ezekiel’s Mark
Hundreds of years after Moses, Ezekiel sees a vision of men coming to execute judgment on the citizens of Jerusalem who have gotten themselves hopelessly entangled in idol worship. Before these men enter the city to take out the unfaithful, another man, clothed in white linen, enters and is told to,
…put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.
Ezekiel 9:4
God isn’t asking the linen-clad man to tattoo anyone or plant a chip in their forehead. This mark, likely an allusion to the lamb’s blood on the doorposts in Exodus, is to protect those who so deeply care about the law of God that they’re heartbroken by the idol worship happening in the heart of the city of God.
John’s (other) Mark
Even in Revelation, the Mark of the Beast isn’t the only mark. In the very next verse, John speaks of the faithful being marked.
Then I looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads.
Revelation 14:1
Guess how much speculation there is about this mark being a barcode, RFID chip, or a tattoo of God’s name permanently inked across every believer’s forehead?
Zero.
Everyone seems to get this mark as a symbol of one's faithfulness to Yahweh7. The Mark of the Beast is a continuation of themes from the Hebrew Bible (Reading Rule Number Three). That fact gets ignored because it’s more exciting to search for clues to a secretive global conspiracy than to actually read what John wrote.
The Marketplace
We’ve extensively covered this in other posts. So I won’t repeat myself here. It’s enough to say buying and selling were already a challenge for Christians. They faced this impossible dilemma; follow Jesus or put food on the table.
The Number
Ancient Greek writing doesn’t have a separate numerical system. The alphabet pulls double duty as both letters and numbers. Therefore, unlike English words, Greek vocabulary had both a dictionary definition and numerical value. Authors could embed multiple layers of meaning in words. Pompeii has an example of ancient Greek that graffiti says, “I love her whose number is 545.” A love-struck teenager scrawling the deepest longing of his heart in a dark alleyway.
This letter/number way of communicating is called isopsephy8, which is how we learn this surprising fact. The famous Number is not triple sixes. Yes, you read that correctly; the Number of the Beast is not six six six. It’s six hundred and sixty-six. My nervous cashier was only off by $659.34.
It’s worth taking another look at the verse. Note the challenge John is making,
This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.9
Revelation 13:18
Part of the wild speculation is because John packages it as a riddle. Who can resist the lure of a good mystery, a good Biblical mystery at that? John drops some major hints. For example, the word “calculate” in verse 18 is the same Greek word from which we get the word isopsephy10.
The overwhelming bulk of credible academic sources references at least one historical culprit who more or less fits the bill11. Note some of the clues.
Early Christian writers thought this person was a good candidate for the Beast12.
He oversaw the demolition of the temple in Jerusalem13.
Later Christian writers credit this person with killing both Peter and Paul14.
And, it just so happens that his official title adds up to the numerical value of, you guessed it, six hundred and sixty-six.
He was so vile that, after his death, they continued to refer to him as a prototypical villain. There was even a rumor that he might come back to life to continue wreaking havoc on the world, like an ancient Rasputin or T-1000 from Terminator 2. He was a figure so dark and loathsome that rumor had it he couldn't be killed, a least permanently.15
Who was this scary, strange figure whose title added up to the infamous number? None other than Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus.
We’re more familiar with his Imperial name, Nero.
In our modern political era, if you really want to land a blow on your opponents, compare them to Nazis. You might even suggest that your opponent's policies were first enacted by the Nazi-in-Chief himself. This comparison to certain fascist dictators is such an inevitable feature of modern internet arguments that there’s even a name for it, Godwin’s Law16. Nero’s infamy was such that, like Hitler, his name was an insult long after his death.
John may not have been specifically referring to Nero as the Beast or loyalty to his regime as the Mark. He may have been using the idea of Nero to give Christians a sense of what was at stake. If we were to interpret John’s apocalyptic language into something more straightforward, those three verses might read like this,
The Empires of Here and Now (The Beast) demand allegiance through fear and the promise of economic stability (Buying and Selling). This security comes at the cost of losing ourselves and, worse, losing Jesus (The Mark). You may gain the world, but you will forfeit your soul.
It’s worth noting, and we’ll explore this in more detail in the next post; there are Beasts in every generation. Every few years, another Nero-esque entity rolls onto the world stage and offers, for a price, what they can’t deliver.
Here’s the bottom line. Our thinking and behavior are marked not by our ideals but by our loyalties. We’re either shaped by Jesus, or we conform to the culture of the Beast. The convicting question for us is to ask ourselves what our thoughts and action truly reveal. Who has captured our thinking, and who guides our conduct?
Next, the Villians of Revelation, including the strangest Nativity you will ever see.
You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.
This is an actual United States Department of Transportation website that includes the words, Antichrist, Nero, and Beast as well as actual quotes from the book of Revelation. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/us666.cfm
The Beast/Antichrist connection isn’t wrong per se; it’s just speculative. It is possible that John is thinking of the same figure that he earlier referenced in his letters of 1 and 2 John. However, in those letters, though he refers to the antichrist (1 John 2:18), he quickly points out that there are many antichrists. The desire to conflate the Beast with the Antichrist isn’t wrong; it’s just unnecessary.
It could even be Barney the Dinosaur. Fun Fact: Big Purple Dinosaur in Hebrew adds up to 666. Is that true? I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter; that’s the joy of conspiracies.
The European Common Market was an easy target for the Beast. It was a treaty signed in 1957, easing the ability to trade between countries in Europe. The treaty was, in fact, signed in the city of Rome. This was all just too much for folks to take. Despite the fact that the passage in question refers to the second Beast, theorists noted that the first Beast would have ten horns. They were convinced that the EU would be composed of ten member nations. This was never the case. As of this writing, the EU has 27 member nations and hasn’t started a New World Order.
This mark for the faithful is also referenced in Revelation 7:3
Ast, R. & Lougovaya J., The Art of Isopsephism in the Greco-Roman World in Ägyptische Magie und ihre Umwelt. ed. A. Jördens; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015, p.82–98
Emphasis mine
Isopsephy. Isos means "equal," and psephos means "pebble" The etymology of the word comes from the even more ancient practice of doing math by putting pebbles together. The word for calculate is derived from this word for pebble.
These commentators quickly point out that this is simply an educated guess. They’re not making a definitive claim to know what John was thinking. Additionally, the theory requires us to interpret Nero’s title, not his name, and to use Hebrew rather than Greek. So, there are lots of steps to get to this conclusion.
The Greek form of Nero’s name transliterated into Hebrew (nrôn qsr) produces 666
Beale, G. K. (1999). The book of Revelation: a commentary on the Greek text (p. 719). W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press. Howeale, while acknowledging this theorBeale y, ultimately dismisses it as too speculative.
In modern times the most favored solution is ‘Nero Caesa.r.’
Morris, L. (1987). Revelation: an introduction and commentary (Vol. 20, p. 168). InterVarsity Press.
Morris is also quick to point out the flaws in this theory. Morris and many thoughtful academics see 666 as a way of describing human attempts at being godlike that fall flat. In short, 666 is an attempt to be a perfect 777 but doesn’t quite achieve its goals.
Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died II, John Chrysostom, Concerning Lowliness of Mind 4, Sulpicius Severus, Chronica II.28–29
The legend of Nero’s potential resurrection was well documented. The Nero Redivivus legend was recorded by a wide variety of sources, including Augustine of Hippo, City of God XX.19.3 This rumor could be what Revelation 13:15 is referring to.