Short Stuff: 666

no such thing as a bad Iron Maiden album. I wasn't that into them. I need to give them a shot. Yeah, they age really really well. Um, it's it's just really well done music. They're almost the prog band of metal of metal. They're just so ridiculously talented, every single one of them. So yeah, it's good stuff. I highly advise you to get back in to it. Okay, I will. And what we're talking about today is the number six six six and our old pal Dave Rus put this

together for how stuff works dot com. And one of the first things he says is his article is like, would you buy a car with a license by ending in six six six? And dude, my pickup truck has six six six on the license. No it doesn't. Oh yeah, we talked about it a while ago when it when it came in. Well, I've delighted. I hit my head since then, so I've forgotten that is it's great. You need to get like some sort of graphics on the side or whatever, like devil Mobile or something like that.

Maybe I will. Um. So the answer to that question from Dave then for you is yes, there's a lot of people who wouldn't who would not um, it's mostly god fearing people who believe that there is a book in the Bible. Well they don't believe it, like there actually is a book in the Bible, but there in this book, Book of Revelations, I think chapter thirteen or

no after three, Verse eighteen says this, here's wisdom. Let him who has understand and calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man, and his number is six six six. Yeah. So if you've ever seen the movie, I mean, this has been in plenty of movies, but the movie The Omen is the most famous movie to make use of this because young Damien and it's still one of the great moments of movie history. When they're searching through his hair on his head. Uh,

and they see that six six six. It's clearly tattooed, but tattooed by God, I guess, yeah, by the Holy Ghost. Yeah, it's it's pretty scary, it is. That's a good scene. That's that's a good movie too. Um. But yeah, the whole thing is this number. What this Bible Versus saying is there's a basically Satan, the beast has a number

so that you can recognize them. When you see this number, you can recognize that this is Satan, or an agent of Satan, or somebody who is going to kill you if you don't worship him, who is the converse of God, who is in opposition to God, and is the opposite of everything right and good. And so here me, the writer of revelations, is going to to make you wise to this, and just look out for six six six And do those of us alive today, we have no idea what that means, Like, how are you going to

say somebody as a number. But back in the first century ce Um among Greek speakers, this is a very common form of word play um that they would have immediately recognized and they think that back in the day, anybody reading the Book of Revelations around you know, the first century of this, uh, the millennium before this one, um, they would know exactly who the beast was and who this was talking about. Yeah, because there weren't numbers like we think of them in Greece at the time, and Greek.

The Arabic nibbles came around hundreds of years later. So in in Greece, each letter of the Greek alphabet and in Hebrew actually had a numeric value. So there was this thing that we're going to talk about after a message break here in a minute, called I sup sess fee, I subsess fee. Yeah, and see added in there, keep going sefee. Good job, it's in there somewhere. I'm that's right,

And that means in Greek equal in numeric value. And that was a way, uh for in the first century basically where you could it was sort of like, uh, not Morse code, but a those games. Yeah, those games kids play when you send like a numeric code to someone and then they have to translate the code by what letter it represents to get the final I guess. In Christmas story, it was what drink your ovaltine. Be sure to drink your ovaltine. It's a Crumby commercial. Yeah,

so bad. Yeah, but it wasn't like you didn't need a secret Dakota ring. Everyone walking around speaking Greek knew that alpha was interchangeable with one, Beta was two, Pie was eighty, which is weird because I thought pie was three point one, four, etcetera. Si is seven hundred, for example, and so um, if you added together letters, you could come up with a number for that word or that name. So you could say that a name had a number,

and that's what this is talking about. That's right. So that's the setup, and we'll talk a little bit more about is up sefee right after this. Okay, Chuck's just exactly like say, if your name was spelled alpha, beta, pie, si, your number would be seven eighty three. You could also take seven eighty three and figure out whose name that meant.

It's way harder to do in transverse, but you you if there's say some famous people that maybe you suspect that the author is talking about, you could say, oh, well does that equal or in this case six six six, And there's one guy in particular who the writers of Revelations would have um very much focused on is potentially the beast and agent of satan Um, who would wanted to mark you with his number so that you couldn't buy or sell anything without that mark, or again, who

would kill you if you didn't worship him, And that particular guy was named Nero. Yeah, so that was a pretty famous isap ces fee god. I keep adding an s in there. You gotta put your word butcher apron on. Well, it is a weird word. I s O P s e p h y uh. But that was a very famous one early on. That was it goes a little something like this a calculation new colon nero his mother slew. So in this case, nero equals one thousand and five, which has the same value of the phrase his mother slew.

So basically that's like, oh my god, Nero killed his mom. Yeah. That's the thing about the isobsess fees having like um equal equal value is that if one word had a numeric value too, and and that's the same as say another word or another phrase, that meant that there was some mystical metaphysical connection between those two. So do people who were like, yeah, Nero's terrible, He probably murder his mother. The fact that Nero, his mother slew and Nero had

the same numeric value of one zero zero five. That was just proof pause ative, like you didn't need to look any further, um, giving me my crystal ball and my birkin stocks. Right, So you might be saying yourself, wait a minute. You guys said Nero was one thousand and five, But you also said that some people believe that they were referring to Nero as the six six six. Uh, you gotta rejigger this a little bit. In that case, you have to use the full name Caesar Nero in Greek.

Um that translated into Hebrew. Hebrew is don say Hebrew, I love it, dude. That's a much more modern version of that word. He's my Hebrew uh n r w n q s r, which is neuron keys are And then that adds up to six six six. Some people say, okay, all right, sure, why not? Um. The thing is, there's a big objection to that one that I ran across, and that is that Revelations was written in Greek four

ee speakers who may not have actually known that. Um, that you were supposed to transliterate this into Hebrew, and may not have been familiar with Hebrew and not known how to do it. That doesn't necessarily mean oh no, this is wrong. Like if you're encoding a message, having an extra step involving another language is definitely not against

the rules. But from what I can understand, this is much more widespread and normal, uh pursuit or a diversion this kind of sefe it is hard to say, isn't it It is then then this would be like that's an extra big step compared to what they normally did. Like there's graffiti that they found in the ancient world that uses iop sess fees. Yeah, like, hey, you know who I'm into six, and so some lady in town

would be like, oh, I'm seven eight six. Yeah. So some people say, I don't know about that trans trans inslating it into Hebrew and then it making sense as six six six. I don't know about that one. It seems like a bit of a reach, but I don't know enough about it. I do think it's interesting though, that the idea that um, they were using this coded language possibly in the Bible. Yeah, I guess it was. It sounds like it was all the rage back then. Oh you like that, Yeah, it was. It was very hot.

So some people who say, Okay, this is way off. It wasn't Nero because, by the way, the other thing about neuro really kind of dates revelations, you know what I mean, Like it's meant to be kind of a timeless classic, and a lot of people are like, well, the beast hasn't even been born yet, and everyone knows that the bar code is the mark of the beast. So the idea that it's just Nero, who has zero effect on our world today, it doesn't. It's it doesn't

play very well that interpretation. Other people have interpreted as meaning um that it's it's not even it's not talking about a specific person, which is tough to get around because the translates all of them. That I saw is that it's a number of a man, a man, not man meaning like humankind. It's like a human number, which is I think exactly how Iron Maiden's guy puts it on number of the beast. Um. But it's the number

of a man, like a specific man. But if you throw that a out and you just take it like it's a human number is what it means, then this interpretation is saying that it's it's actually pointing out that Satan is a cheap imitation, a cheap parody of God and the grace of God, and so this is what you're looking out for. This is this is a different interpretation. Well one thing, I know, if man is five and the devil is six and God is seven, then this

this monkey has gone to heaven. That's right, Man, wiser words have never been spoken. Agreed. I love that song. So yeah, that's the point is that the symbolic number of God is seven and Satan's is six, So it's like a just kind of Satan's a cheap imitation of God, so don't fall for his jam. That's right. So there you have at six six six. It's either nero or it's just saying that Satan is a cheap imitation of God. But however you slice it, it's a really good Iron

Maiden album. Okay, I agreed, And that's it for Short Stuff. Everybody, Um, go out and read about this on How Stuff Works if you want, and definitely go listen to some Iron Maiden. It'll do you good. Short Stuff is apt stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works for more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.