The number 666

Where 666 comes from

“Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.” — Revelation 13:18^{[1] Source: Revelation 13:18}

This is the whole of the evidence: one verse, written in Greek in the late first century, that presents a number as the value of a name and asks the reader to solve it. That request only makes sense to an audience that already knew isopsephy, the Greek habit of summing the letters of a word — the same habit that produced love-graffiti at Pompeii and satirical verses about Nero^{[6] Source: Isopsephy}. The verse is, in form, a riddle of a familiar kind. What it never does is give the answer.

The Bible contains one other 666. Solomon’s annual income was “six hundred sixty-six talents of gold” (1 Kings 10:14)^{[2] Source: 1 Kings 10:14}. Some readers see an allusion — wealth and empire as the beast’s temptations — but Revelation does not say so, and the connection is a modern conjecture.

The 616 variant

Not every early copy of Revelation reads 666. Irenaeus, writing around 180 CE, already knew manuscripts with 616 and dismissed them as a scribal slip, insisting that 666 was found “in all the most approved and ancient copies”^{[3] Source: Against Heresies, Book V, chapter 30}. The variant was nonetheless real and old: Papyrus 115, a fragment from Oxyrhynchus dated to the third century, writes the number as χιϛ — 616^{[4] Source: Papyrus 115}. Any solution to the riddle is stronger if it explains why two numbers circulated, and only one of the classical solutions does.

Greek solutions

Since the text is Greek, the first solvers tried Greek words. Irenaeus offers three that sum exactly to 666 — Ευανθας = 666 · Λατεινος = 666 · Τειταν = 666 — “the Blooming One”, “Latin” (the Roman empire) and “Titan”. He then declines to pick one: many names fit, he says, and it is safer not to pronounce^{[3] Source: Against Heresies, Book V, chapter 30}. That caution was well founded, and it has been vindicated by every century since. Medieval Greek polemicists computed the name of Muhammad, spelled Μαομετις, to 666^{[5] Source: Number of the beast}; the Reformation found popes; each age has found its enemies. A Greek word with a value of 666 is not rare. The accuracy page explains why any well-populated value has many claimants.

Hebrew: Nero Caesar

The reading most modern scholars favour was proposed independently by several nineteenth-century critics and works in Hebrew letters. The emperor’s name and title as a Greek speaker would say them, Neron Kaisar, transliterated into Hebrew as נרון קסר, sums to 666:

Drop the final n — the Latin form Nero Caesar, נרו קסר — and the total falls by exactly 50, the value of ן, to 616^{[5] Source: Number of the beast}. One hypothesis therefore accounts for both manuscript readings: a Greek-speaking author encoding a Hebrew transliteration, and a later Latin-minded copyist “correcting” the spelling and the sum together. That coherence is the argument. It is not proof — Revelation never names Nero, the transliteration is reconstructed, and a defective spelling of קסר (without a י) has to be assumed, though that spelling is attested in a document from the Judaean desert. It remains the only solution that explains the evidence rather than merely fitting the number.

Latin numerals

The Latin alphabet was never a numeral system, so “Latin gematria” of 666 has meant two different things. The first is a curiosity of Roman numerals: 666 is DCLXVI, which uses every symbol below M exactly once, in descending order^{[7] Source: 666 (number)}. The second is a method of counting only the letters of a Latin phrase that happen to be Roman numerals. The best-known application, a nineteenth-century Protestant argument, applied it to Vicarius Filii Dei (“Vicar of the Son of God”): V + I + C + I + V + L + I + I + D + I = 666^{[5] Source: Number of the beast}. The site’s engine reproduces that count exactly. The argument fails at the premise rather than the arithmetic: the phrase is not, and has never been, an official papal title. The same method makes many phrases equal 666, since only seven letters count and the rest are free.

The Agrippa table used by online calculators is a different thing again — a sixteenth-century assignment of values to Latin letters — and is covered under English below.

666 in English ciphers

English tables date from 1533 at the earliest, so no English value of 666 has anything to do with Revelation. What they have is structure. The Sumerian cipher is English Ordinal multiplied by six, so every word whose Ordinal value is 111 has a Sumerian value of 666 — and 111 is a common total for eight-to-ten-letter words. This is why lists of “words that equal 666” online are so long: they are lists of words that equal 111, rescaled^{[8] Source: Gematria calculator}. The table below runs a fixed list of candidate words and phrases through all fourteen ciphers; nothing was added because it matched.

Gematria 666: words that match

The 666 gematria matches below are computed from a fixed list of common words — never searched for hits — so the misses are shown alongside the matches. Try any word on the calculator to check a value of your own.

Read the misses as carefully as the hits. Antichrist, Lucifer, Satan and Devil equal 666 in none of the fourteen ciphers; Computer and Santa Claus do. A cipher that puts Santa Claus and Necromancy on the same number is not detecting anything about either — it is showing that both have an Ordinal value of 111. The 111 page follows that thread.

The arithmetic of 666

• 666 = 2 × 3 × 3 × 37; it is not prime, and 37 — the factor shared with 111, 222, 333 and every other three-digit repdigit — is why those numbers are all multiples of it.
• It is the 36th triangular number: 1 + 2 + … + 36 = 666. Triangular numbers were significant to Greek arithmetic, and some scholars think the author of Revelation, who elsewhere uses 144 and 1,000, chose it partly for that.
• It is the sum of the squares of the first seven primes: 2² + 3² + 5² + 7² + 11² + 13² + 17² = 666^{[7] Source: 666 (number)}.
• Its digits sum to 18, which reduces to 9 — a fact that connects it to nothing in particular, as most digit-sum facts do.

What can be said