... as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:  And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the Number of his name.  Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

For centuries following the death of the apostles in the New Testament people have speculated on what the "number of the beast" meant, the beast being the anti-Christ. One key may be in the way the ancients wrote their numbers. While it may seem bizarre to us to assign a number to something or someone, for the ancients it was not uncommon.  The symbols that the Greeks, Romans, and Jews used to write numbers were all letters of their alphabet . Furthermore while they used different letters to represent their numbers, their number systems did not have place values the way that ours does today. For instance, if I saw the Greek letter that stood for 20 next to the letter that stood for 3 it would be interpreted as twenty-three whether or not the 20 was first or the 3 was first.  Similarly, I could write twenty-three as by writing the symbols for 20 and 3 next to each other or by writing the symbols for 10 and 13 next to each other or  by writing any other group of symbols whose sum was twenty-three. So, the order of the symbols did not necessarily matter, at least for the Greeks and Jews, and the symbols used didn't particularly matter, what mattered was the sum of the symbols. Their numbers were very much like exchanging coins. When you use metal coins, each coin has a different value, when you place money on the counter it doesn't matter what coin you put on the counter first, or exactly which types of coins you use, as long as the sum of the values of the coins is the right amount.

The nature of their numbering systems and symbols led to a couple of interesting things. First, any word could be thought of as a number.  The meaning of a group of letters as a number as opposed to a word was understood primarily by the context and occasionally by the way it was written, all caps for example. Second, numbers and unrelated words came to be closely associated sometimes lending particular connotations to various numbers. For example, someone might write in ancient graffiti that their love is twenty-three or the number of their love is twenty-three, signifying that the letters in name of their lover has a sum value of 23. People also led people to indulge in numerology, various names may be associated with the same numeric value; so, if the value of your name is say 9 then I might categorize you with other 9's and give you a sort of horoscope. But, of course I hear that 9's are very skeptical about that sort of thing.

This leads us back to the passage in question. It is generally accepted that John wrote the book from the isle of Patmos where he was placed in exile with others considered to be undesirable by the state. From this he writes his cryptic message to the "7 churches in Asia". His letters or communications were possibly censured and read by officials before passing to their intended recipients. So, who or what does the number 666 refer to, and how might it be interpreted by his audience? Well, contemporary to John was the Roman emperor Nero who is considered by many historians to be the first to officially persecute Christians as a state policy. Nero is sometimes credited with the execution of Peter and Paul and for the introduction of the killing of Christians in the arena for sport. Men like Nero made the adherence to Christianity nearly synonymous with martyrdom. His official title in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, was Caesar Nero. The numeric value of Caesar Nero is 666. Not only is the view of Nero as an anti-Christ plausible, but in some early translations of the New Testament the number of the beast is not 666, but 616 which number happens to be the value of Caesar Nero written in Hebrew. There are many other interpretations, many being rather complex, of the so-called number of the beast, but I think this seems to be the most straight forward and obvious. I think that another part of this passage further strengthens this interpretation, "...no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name..."  During Nero's reign coins with Nero's image and likeness became part official Roman coinage. Interestingly, one of the churches to whom the book was specifically addressed was that of Smyrna. The city of Smyrna contained a temple to the Goddess of Rome and was among the first anciently to embrace emperor worship. Ancient Christian historians tell us that the bishop of that city was burned at the stake for refusing to deny Christ.

You may notice that in many passages of the Bible that the word thousand thousand or thousands of thousands appears instead of the word million or millions. This is because anciently large numbers were typically written by multiplying by 1000. So, the Greeks for example might write 5 thousand as the number 5 with a line over it to signify 5 times 1000; the Romans and Hebrews had a similar practice. Myriads were also sometimes used. A myriad is 10,000. The Greeks would write a number over a capital M for myriad to signify 10,000's. The word "score" means 20.