666: Making Sense of Revelations and the Roman Connection
The Book of Revelations is a total trip. It is hard to read its apocalyptic foretellings and warnings of chaos and catastrophe without feeling that someone, somewhere, was smoking something pretty strong.
Perhaps the most strange thing in all this strange psychic fantasy is its inclusion at all. There have been weirder books and writings touted for inclusion in the canonical Bible, but that fact this made the cut is a real surprise.
Here be dragons, with seven heads no less. Here be serpents, too, beasts and monsters and terrible foes who will arise to terrorize the world ahead of the second coming of Jesus.
All of this is foretold by “John,“ a prosaically named prophet sitting on the Aegean island of Patmos. It was here he dispensed his visions for the future to the “seven churches of Asia” filled with these vivid, lurid warnings.
There are other apocalyptic sections of the Bible, perhaps most famously associated with Daniel, and there are many more such writings in the Apocrypha, that cloud of non-official Christian writings which float round the Bible like so much fanfic. But few are as poetic and artfully down, and it may be this very artistry which merited the book’s inclusion.
Putting aside the poetry though, was John OK? Was he at the bottom of a drug-fueled bender, or perhaps suffering under some kind of mental instability? From where do these visions come?
If you were to ask the average person what was contained in the Book of Revelations, what the content of these visions was, and you would probably get one of two things in reply. The first would be something about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and they are indeed a key part of the Book.
These are not death, famine, war and pestilence, as they are commonly glossed today, but they are there and it is their arrival, with the breaking of the first four of the sacred seven seals of the scroll held in God’s right hand, that ushers in the Day of Judgement and the End Times.
The other thing most recall about the Book of Revelations is arguably the most famous number in the world. 666, the Number of the Beast, has penetrated the public consciousness to the point where almost everyone knows its association with the devil, whether they know its source or not.
Puzzling number, no? Why 666? Well, it turns out that in understanding this number we are given the key not just to the “Beast” of this final book of the Bible, but to the entirety of the visions therein as well.
The Demon Emperor
Numbers are important in the Bible, and certain numbers appear repeatedly, with 40, 12 and 7 being perhaps the most frequent. 666 however is a little too specific to fit into this general pattern of “important” numbers, and to understand its meaning you need to know a little about the world in which the Book of Revelations was written.
The “world” for John of Patmos at this point was the Roman Empire at the end of the first century, near to apex of its historical power and only a couple of decades away from achieving its greatest size. Everything within the Book has to be seen within this context: the “Asia” that the seven churches are found in is the Roman Province of Asia Minor, for example.
Christians were subject to heavy persecution throughout much of the latter half of this century, persecution which would continue for the next century and beyond. They knew who to blame for this, as do we: the ruling elite of Rome, and at their head the Roman Emperor.
Can it be coincidence, then, that the number “666” has a second way of being read? The Christians may have been afraid to openly state his name in their religious revelations, but they wanted to record who they blamed encoded within this number. They blamed Nero.
The name “Nero Caesar” transliterates in the Hebrew alphabet to NRON QSR. The Hebrew alphabet can be in turn translated into numbers, and the numbers associated with these letters are 50, 200, 6, 50 again, 100, 60, and 200 again. These numbers total 666.
Once this link is made, the Book can be understood as a metaphor. The monsters and visions of the Book of Revelations can be understood anew, and the clue again is in the numbers.
John sees a woman with a crown of twelve stars who brings forth a man child to rule the world. The “twelve” here is not a reference to the disciples, this being a much more Old Testament-flavored book. These instead are the twelve tribes of Israel.
John then sees a great dragon with seven heads, seven crowns, but ten horns. The oddly unbalanced number ten here seems clumsy until you realize that the earlier apocalypse of Daniel also had a beast with ten horns, and these were the ten kings of the Seleucid Empire.
This empire was formed in the fourth century BC by Macedonian generals after the death of Alexander the Great. For three hundred years they would dominate Hellenistic Europe and the near East, tyrants against whom the Hebrews revolted and who in turn crushed them.
This Seleucid dragon then is the Babylonian monster Tiamat, standing ready to devour Israel as the Seleucids had done. He is even given a name: Satan. And it takes a host of angels to cast him back.
Next, and most famously of all, John sees the Beast, raised from the sea and given power by the falling dragon. This beast also has seven heads and ten horns, but this time it is not the Seleucids.
The Seleucid Empire fell in 68 BC when they were finally annexed by the new dominant power in the region. The dying dragon passes his power to this new beast: the Romans.
So, was John writing of the current woes of Christians under Nero and the Roman Empire? Well, as always it is not as clear as all that. Aside from anything else, it seems near-certain that the Book of Revelations was written around 90 AD. Nero committed suicide in 68 AD.
Then there is the fact that Nero’s persecution of Christians (and Jews) was somewhat limited, only really given any force in Rome itself. Comparatively, the persecutions of the Emperor Domitian (died 96 AD) were far crueler and wider ranging.
Why Nero, then? Was the Book written three decades earlier and saved for the beauty of its poetry? Was the number supposed to conjure the idea of a Roman Emperor, and their actions in the style of Nero?
This is perhaps, the final mystery of the final book of the Bible.
Top Image: 666: John’s visions from the Book of Revelations, including the awkward creature with seven heads and ten horns. Source: Dion Art / CC BY-SA 4.0.
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