Should I Skip This One?

According to Blogger, the post you are now reading is the six hundred sixty-sixth post on the Friar's Fires blog. This is not a number we Christian religious types seek to publicize, as no small number of us suffer from hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. Of course, if you wanted to add up all the posts on all three blogs where I cyber-run my mouth, I hit 666 awhile ago. Just when I have no idea, because I'd have to order them all up by date and figure out which one I published when, and I'm not that bored.

But I am a little bored, so I'll offer a couple of extras here in this Post of the Beast. I draw that title from the fairly well-known phrase "Number of the Beast," which according to Revelation 13:17-18 is 666. But what is the Number of the Beast?

Well, it might be a crappy science-fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, published in 1980. In the later part of his career, Heinlein started smushing his different characters together via traveling in parallel universes, also combining different fictional universes into them. The actual number of the beast is not 666 but instead is (6⁶)⁶, a very large number saying how many parallel universes their ship can access. Lacking some of the old-fashioned conventions that had brought Heinlein acclaim and the title the Dean of Science Fiction, like a plot, logic and coherence, Beast serves mostly as a way for Heinlein to comment on writing and storytelling, while adding in some of the weirder ideas he had about sex that he didn't get to in Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love (Believe it or not, there were some), even though he'll save some of the really squicky stuff for 1987's To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Or it might be the 1982 album by Iron Maiden, the first featuring vocalist Bruce Dickenson. The album title, along with cover art depicting Satan being used as a marionette by Iron Maiden's freaky mascot critter "Eddie," cemented the band's status as one of every 80s youth pastor's least favorite albums. I've never listened to it so I don't have much to say about it beyond that.

Hebrew letters also had numerical value in a kind of game/code called gematria, and the numbers assigned to them added up made the number of a person. Revelation's writer, whether it was St. John or someone associated with him, was thought to have been familiar enough with gematria to use it as a code for someone who was an enemy of the church. The most likely suspect is the emperor Nero, who was beginning persecution of Christians across the Roman Empire and whose name and title, translated from Latin to Hebrew letters, gives 666. Some manuscripts suggest the number was 616, which would have matched with the generic phrase "Cæsar God." Other scholars say that using Hebrew numerology on Greek texts is a strange idea and come up with other variations.

In terms of prophecy, the number is suggested as one that will be associated with the Anti-Christ, or a figure at the end of time who will lead opposition to Christ and attempt to establish himself or herself as a divine figure. This figure is further associated with the Beast of Revelation 13, hence the phrase "Number of the Beast."

While I think the prophecies of the Book of Revelation have some cosmic significance in addition to their historical roots, I don't believe that it was written as a step-by-step code book detailing exactly which world figure will do what at what time in preparation for God's re-creation of the heavens and the earth. The universe is many billions of light-years across and I believe God has a plan for it all beyond this one mudball. So I might in fact make a little fun of the Number of the Beast, not because I disbelieve in the existence of Anti-Christs, but because I find the textual and current events gymnastics people go through to try to correctly assign that number to be somewhat wasted energy.

An e-mail goes around every now and again with some variations on the number -- 664, for example, is the Next-Door Neighbor of the Beast while 665 is the Neighbor Across the Street From the Beast. 1010011010 is the Binary of the Beast, or 666 expressed in binary notation, and 1/666 is the Common Denominator of the Beast. $665.95 is the Retail Price of the Beast, while $656.66 is the Wal-Mart Price of the Beast. "Six...uhhh," is the Number of the Blonde Beast, and the 666i is the BMW of the Beast. MSWord 6.66 is the Word Processor of the Beast -- something that may have more truth in it than some others, considering the language that glitchy Microsoft products may inspire in people is not often heavenly. There are others, but to inflict them on you would be...beastly.