Twice in Revelation Yeshua warns us that something will take wisdom to figure out; first in this verse and then again in chapter 17 verse 9. Both are in reference to the seven-headed beast prophecy. This should indicate to us that the obvious interpretation will not be the correct one!

We believe that the best way to begin to understand any difficult verse of scripture is to look at the words in the original language and work outward from there. So we will work through this verse one line at a time and you can follow along on the Bible page below. First, let’s cross out the words not found in the original and add in any that are missing.

The Greek word translated “reason” is Strong’s g3563 νοῦς, nous. From Thayer’s Greek Lexicon: The mind, comprising alike the faculties of perceiving and understanding and those of feeling, judging, determining; hence, specifically, the intellective faculty. So, we could replace “reason” with “intelligence” and it would be more in keeping with our modern English way of speaking. So, the first line of the verse would be better understood in the twenty-first century as:

Here is wisdom: let the person who has the intelligence count how many there are of the beast.

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We’ll use the same strategy for the remainder of the verse. The numerals χξϛ need to replace the written out words for now, but we will be addressing them later. The three main words we’ll be addressing in this section are: anthropos, haytou, and arithmos.

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for it is the number ^forof a man ^{it is}. And its ^thenumber^{of it} is six hundred and sixty-six^χξϛ.

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Anthropos

The Greek word translated “of a man” is Strong’s g444 ἄνθρωπος anthrōpos. From Thayer’s Greek Lexicon: Man. It is used universally, with reference to the genus or nature, without distinction of sex, a human being, whether male or female: and in this sense with the article, generically, so as to include all human individuals. This means that anthropos indicates all of mankind, not one individual.

We can look at another way the word anthropos is commonly used in the NT, and we will see that it cannot mean “a man”. The form of the word used in this passage is ἀνθρώπου, which we find in Mark 2:28 So then, the Son of man (ἀνθρώπου)is Lord of the Sabbath also. There is no “a” nor is there any reason to believe that one is implied, as the noun has an article and therefore the meaning of the word is to include all human beings not a specific person. This is NOT the number of a man, it is the number of man!

Haytou

The Greek word translated “is”, is Strong’s g848 αὑτοῦ haytou: self (in some oblique case or reflexively, relation):—her (own), (of) him(-self), his (own), of it, thee, their (own), them(-selves), they. Based on the gender and case, the correct translation is “of itself”.

Arithmos

The Greek word translated “number” three times in this verse is Strong’s g706 ἀριθμός arithmos: a number (as reckoned up):–number. From Thayer’s Greek Lexicon: a) a fixed and definite number, b)an indefinite number, equivalent to a multitude. We see that a synonym for arithmos in English is number. However, not for all definitions of the English word number, only the one that means to “count to” or “reckon up”. The English word numeral, for example, is not a synonym for arithmos even though it is a synonym for number.

In the first instance the form of arithmos is ἀριθμὸν. Another example in scripture of this form of the noun being used is John 6:10 And Jesus said, Make the men sit down. Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, the number about five thousand.

The remaining two instances have the form ἀριθμός. We find ἀριθμός also in Acts 6:7 And the Word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly… And also in Acts 11:21 And the hand of the Lord was with them; and a great number believed, and turned unto the Lord. Let’s look at one more in Revelation 20:8 And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. In all of the examples of the use of arithmos in the NT that are given in blueletterbible.org, the word is synonymous with how many, never numeral.

Here is an example of how phrases can change meaning over time. Let’s say you, your spouse, and three children live at 313 Elm Street. If I asked you, “What is the number of your house?” You would answer, “three-thirteen.” Your answer would be correct in the twenty-first century. However, if that question was asked in bible times, the answer would have been, “five”. Do you see why? The “number of your house” used to mean, “How many people are in your family.”

Let’s look at some examples of the places where the word ἀριθμός is used in the OT LXX Greek:

• Numbers 1:18 And they assembled all the congregation together on the first day of the second month, and they declared their pedigrees after their families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of the names, from twenty years old and upward, by their polls. The phrase “number of the names” does not mean some gematria calculation adding up the values of the letters in each name. It means “how many people are in your family”.
• Genesis 41:49 And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea, very much, until he left numbering; for it was without number. This verse is not saying that the corn didn’t have a phone number, I know they have ears and all… but no. The word number is referring to how many of them he gathered.
• Exodus 12:4 And if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbour next unto his house take it according to the number of souls; every man according to his eating shall make your count for the lamb. YHWH isn’t telling Moses to figure out some gematria nonsense regarding the letters of the names of the souls in the families. He is saying to share the lamb according to how many people live in the house.
• Exodus 23:26 There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulfil. This phrase is clearly referring to how many days they will be living in the land.
• Leviticus 25:15 According to the number of years after the jubilee thou shalt buy of thy neighbour, and according unto the number of years of the fruits he shall sell unto thee. The “number of years” is not a reference to what year it is, as in AD 2022 (which is a number and a year). It means how many years after the jubilee year and for how many years the land had been planted.

We could go on and on with these examples, but you likely get the point! The phrase number of indicates counting something; it means how many there are of something. It is NOT some secret mysterious gematria code, UPC label, energy drink brand, or number on the side of some building owned by a Jewish family in New York.

We are not saying that the word number is an incorrect translation of arithmos: it is not incorrect. What we are saying is that number has other meanings than the one that is synonymous with arithmos, and because of that, people read Revelation 13:18 and understand the context of the verse with a definition of number that is not synonymous with arithmos. We hope that is clear. Let’s substitute the phrase how many for number in the earlier NT examples and you will see that it doesn’t change the meaning of the verses.

• And Jesus said, Make the men sit down. Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, how many of them were there was about five thousand.
• And the Word of God increased; and how many disciples there were multiplied in Jerusalem greatly.
• And the hand of the Lord was with them; and many believed, and turned unto the Lord.
• And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: how many there were was as the sand of the sea.

Therefore, using everything we’ve learned, Revelation 13:18 would be better understood in modern English:

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χξϛ

The next aspect of this passage that we need to tackle is the last three Greek letters: χξϛ. All of the English translations that we have seen render this as either “six hundred and sixty-six” or “666”. Some surviving Greek manuscripts have the number written out and some have the numerals. One question that comes to mind is: which way did John write it? We can’t know with absolute certainty, but we can use discernment to come to a logical assumption.

Every other number in the scripture is written out with words, even the very large numbers like two thousand three hundred, and one thousand two hundred and sixty. There could have been grammatical rules specifying under what circumstances it was acceptable to use numerals in a letter or manuscript, but maybe not. Either way, though, using numerals is unique to this one verse. We believe that John wrote three symbols in his letter, and the scribes altered them to match the Greek numerals to be in line with their understanding of what it was meant to represent, and some wrote the numbers out instead to match the rest of scripture.

The leaders of the church in the second century believed that Rome was the scarlet beast of Revelation, and that Caesar Nero was the Anti-Messiah. They believed that he would one day be resurrected from the dead and lead Rome against Yeshua in the final battle of Armageddon. They transliterated “Nero Caesar” into Hebrew letters and then added up the numerical value of each letter (gematria) and got six hundred and sixty-six. If you transliterated it into Latin instead, you would get six hundred and sixteen; which explains why some surviving manuscripts have the Greek numerals for 616 instead. The scribes were not intentionally misrepresenting what John wrote, they really believed the Anti-Messiah was Nero. This does, however, show that it is at least possible that one of the symbols John actually wrote may not have been a Greek letter at all, but the scribes copied them as they understood them to be, just as they did with the “616”.

Let’s talk about what χξϛ represents. Take a moment and read this verse again, saying the Greek numerals as “six hundred and sixty-six”.

You can see that if they represent six hundred and sixty-six, John would have been saying that there will be only six hundred and sixty-six people following the beast, and in fact only six hundred and sixty-six people remaining in all of mankind! Not only does that seem highly improbable, but for John’s readership this would not require wisdom to figure out as it is literally exactly what his words would have been. So, what if those three symbols mean something different? We can see from the verse that John is telling us that all of mankind is following the beast, this means that those three symbols must be something that represents all the people remaining on the earth at this time. We’ll look at each symbol separately and see what we can uncover.

χ

The chi is the symbol used to represent anima mundi or world soul. Plato described and named the anima mundi in his book Timaeus:

So what does that mean? Plato is saying that the universe has a soul and is a living being that includes all other souls in creation. If you are thinking that this sounds a lot like the brahman of eastern religions, you are correct! It sounds very much like the brahman. In fact, this is very much like several world religions, including Gnosticism, Hinduism, Brahmanism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, and other eastern religions and their western off-shoots. This idea usually involves man becoming more like god through “enlightenment” to the point of one day becoming god. We believe there is a good chance that this is the religious belief that the Anti-Messiah himself will follow in the end days. The one described in Daniel:

Daniel 11:36-39 And the king shall do according to his will. And he shall exalt and magnify himself above every god; he shall even speak marvelous things against the God of gods, and shall prosper until the fury is fulfilled. For that which is decreed shall be done. He shall not regard the god of his fathers nor the desire of women, nor love any god. For he shall magnify himself above all. But in his place he shall honor the god of forces; and he shall honor a god whom his fathers did not know, with gold and silver, and with precious stones, and desirable things. And he shall act in the strongholds of the fortresses with a foreign god, whom he shall acknowledge. He shall multiply in glory; and he shall cause them to rule over many, and shall divide the land for a price.

This school of thought was part of the Stoics, a group of 3rd century BC philosophers. They believed the anima mundi is the only vital force in the universe. It also became an important part of Neoplatonic cosmology and often included a close relationship with the demiurge and the seven planets. Then, later European philosophers such as: Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg W.F. Hegel began including the world soul in their writings.

Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), which has infiltrated the vast majority of Judaism today, has a similar belief in an all-encompassing supernal wisdom that transcends, orders, and vitalizes all of creation. This sublime wisdom can only be understood by a righteous man. Said righteous man could then attain cosmic consciousness which would empower him to remove all division and conflict within creation. This is the Jewish Moshiach (messiah), who the Jews are desperately waiting to have manifest.

Other concepts that include the belief in this world soul are: gaia hypothesis, panpsychism, plastic principle, pneuma (in Hellenistic philosophy), microcosm-macrocosm analogy, spiritual ecology, the over-soul, and unus mundus (in Jungian psychology). The idea has permeated much of modern society and has even infiltrated the church through the brainwashing of the media and Hollywood.

We said that this anima mundi was given the letter χ (chi) as its symbol. We find this information in two ancient manuscripts, first in Plato’s Timaeus and then in a book by Sir Thomas Brown, who is referencing Plato.

There is much more that can be said about the anima mundi and the many ways it has influenced the world over the last two millennia, but that’s a rabbit hole for you to go down on your own.

For the purpose of this study, we see that the χ represents the people on the earth who adhere to religions and philosophies that believe in a universal soul or consciousness that all of creation has come from and will one day rejoin. This covers a large part of the population and includes: Eastern religions and philosophies, Native nature worshipers, Jewish and Christian Kabbalahs, Freemasons, Illuminati, Jesuits, New Age, and anyone connected with “the Age of Enlightenment”.

ξ

We mentioned earlier how the letters had been copied incorrectly in some manuscripts by writing χΙϛ (616), because the church believed the letters represented Caesar Nero. We don’t believe that John drew the iota or the ksi, but rather a different symbol altogether. We know that at least one scribe wrote the iota instead of the ksi because they were making the gematria work for Latin instead of Hebrew, it isn’t that big of a stretch to consider that earliest scribes could have flipped the symbol John actually wrote to make it be the Greek letter Ksi, if that is what they believed it was supposed to represent.

Let’s look at the Arabic word, Allah, for a moment. The image on the right shows a common way that it can be found on art, decals, clothing, and in the Quran. Each of the Arabic letters are numbered so that we can identify them.

ϛ

The most recent value and name assigned to this letter was between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. It was a ligature of the sigma and the tau and they called it stigma. It made the sound “st”, and in Greek numerals it still represents the number six today. It is interesting that stigma was also a Greek word meaning: a mark, dot, puncture, or generally, sign. We use this word in English as well and it holds basically the same meaning. An example of its use is: “she was hesitant to tell her friends about her depression because she felt there was a stigma attached to it.” We do find it an interesting coincidence that a thousand years after John wrote the book of Revelation, the meaning of this letter became: a mark or a sign.

However, the ϛ had a different value in the early pre-classical Greek “alphabet”, which was unrelated to the ligature stigma. It was a form of the letter digamma or waw, which developed from the Hebrew letter that is also called the waw. In both Hebrew and Greek it holds the numerical value of six.

Bible scholars view the number six as a symbol for man and the number seven as a symbol for YHWH. Seven signifies completion and perfection as YHWH rested on the seventh day after six days of creating. The number six represents man’s imperfection, sin, and weakness.

YHWH said that He cannot abide with man forever, and that man would have one hundred and twenty years, this meant one hundred and twenty jubilee cycles which is six thousand years. So, man will have dominion for six millennia, but for the seventh millennium, Yeshua will reign and the world will have peace.

We believe that John used the Greek waw here to symbolize those who worship man as: 1) a god, 2) a representative of God on earth who holds god-like power and authority to change God’s times and laws (Roman Catholics), and 3) the absence of God that would make man the highest power on earth (atheists).

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When we pull together all that we have learned about the meaning and connotation of the Greek words in this passage, along with the new understanding of what χξϛ could represent, we can accurately write Revelation 13:18 as:

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Yeshua Messiah will soon be back for His bride. The forty years in the desert are almost complete. You can be a part of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, but don’t wait. Like the five wise virgins, we must be waiting with our Lamps filled with oil, lest He catch us unprepared and the door closes without us. Here are two video teachings you may find valuable: The Lost Sheep and What is the Gospel.

May you be blessed by this study. Shalom.