SPECIAL update EDITION: DECEMBER, 2009

Numerology of the Beast

666 or 616

P.Oxy. LVI 4499

This late third or early fourth-century papyrus has 616 (instead of 666) as the number of the beast.

(or even 665) — why should it

matter?

W e know that, during the Roman era, educated Greeks were fascinated by puzzles and games based on
number. In Greek, numerals are represented by letters of the alphabet: alpha =1, beta = 2 and so on up to theta = 9.
Then come double figures (iota = 10, kappa = 20) and treble (rho = 100, etc, up to omega = 800).
This means that words and phrases can be assigned numbers by adding up the number-values of the letters they
contain. Put another way, numbers can equal words or phrases. The isopsephic epigrams of Leonides of Alexandria
are a case in point: the letters of the first distich of a four-line poem add up to exactly the same as the letters of the
second distich. Leonides is discussed by Page, Further Greek Epigrams 503-41.

This “popular parlour-game” (Page, 504) could be given a satirical or polemical slant. If numbers can equal words
and phrases, they can also equal proper names. Take the Emperor Nero (incidentally the probable addressee of an
isopsephic birthday greeting from Leonides: A.P. 6.321 = I Page). In Greek, he is NERON (with an omega). Add
up the values of these letters and you get 1005. Add up the letters of IDIAN METERA APEKTEINE (killed his
own mother) and you also get 1005. So Nero = killed his own mother.

However, there is no way the Beast can be Nero, as some have wished to suggest. Even if we ruin his Greek name
by substituting an omicron (70) and losing the final nu (50), the result — 226 — will not work. It is very easy to
make mistakes in figuring out ancient numerology (as noted by Page passim, especially 504 and 509).

One possibility, suggested to me by Revel Coles, is that 666 — chi, xi, stigma — may be the initials of three words.
Answers on a postcard, please. A concise summary of Greek numerals is given on p.53 of Abbot and Mansfield,
Primer of Greek Grammar. The numerological use of the alphabet in magic is discussed by Franz Dornseiff, Das
Alphabet in Mystik und Magie (Teubner, 1925).

Although our system of numerals does not lend itself to word-puzzles in the Greek style, we are still very Greek in
our use of anagrams. Just as NERON = IDIAN METERA APEKTEINE, so ‘Tony Blair MP’ = ‘I’m Tory Plan B’
— with similar polemical intent.

One feature of particular interest is the number that this papyrus assigns to the Beast: 616, rather than the
usual 666. (665 is also found.) We knew that this variant existed: Irenaeus cites (and refutes) it. But this is
the earliest instance that has so far been found. The number — chi, iota, stigma (hexakosiai deka hex) — is
in the third line of the fragment shown below. But why does it matter what the number is? For that, we have
to turn to ancient Greek ideas about numerology (see above article).

Source: http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/beast616.htm