The number 666 is commonly regarded as an example of gematria, an ancient numbers game in which each letter of the alphabet was assigned a numerical value. Any name could be encoded in a number representing the total of the letters in the name. John makes it clear that 666 is man\'s number, or \"the number of a person\" (NRSV). The problem is that with a bit of ingenuity many prominent names in every generation can be made to add up to 666. One commentator wrote that such identifications \"lead to nothing just because they lead to everything\" (Hendriksen 1939:273). The numbers work quite well, for example, with the name Adolf Hitler.
But in order to convey any meaning at all to John\'s original readers, 666 must have pointed to a name they recognized in their own time. The most common suggestion is Nero Caesar. But as Robert Mounce has pointed out (1977:264), \"this solution asks us to calculate a Hebrew transliteration of the Greek form of a Latin name, and that with a defective spelling.\" When the Latin form of the name is transliterated directly into Hebrew, the result is 616, and sure enough, in the western Roman Empire where Latin was dominant, there were manuscripts in which the number was recorded as 616 (Irenaeus noticed this already in the late second century in his Against Heresies 5.30). Clearly, the scribes who copied the book of Revelation were familiar with gematria, and it may well have played a part in John\'s riddle. Yet because of its indeterminacy no solution based on that phenomenon alone is likely ever to be proven or to find general acceptance.
A more cautious approach starts from the simple recognition that 666 is linked to the characteristic interest in the number seven throughout the book of Revelation as a number of completeness or perfection. The number 666 falls short of the magic seven three times over--at the level of hundreds, tens and single units. William Hendriksen (1939:182) defined its message as \"failure upon failure upon failure.\" The point is subtly different from the dividing of seven in half to yield three and a half years, the equivalent of the \"42 montes\" or \"1,260 days.\" These numbers, as we have seen, represented a divine limitation on the authority of the dragon or the beast, while the number 666 attempts to characterize the beast himself. At the very least, the ancient philosophical notion of evil as a lack or a deficiency of the good seems to be at work in John\'s mysterious number of the beast.
