The Number of the Beast

When I lived in San Luis Obispo, I came across a 'zine written by a young woman who sold them for a buck at the weekly street fair.  Like all intelligent young people, she was bored by her community and looking for something new; her publication was entitled "667 — The Town Next to Hell."

As of today, we've been married 666 days, which is as we all know, "the number of the beast" as foretold in the Book of Revelation.  Ominous?  Well, arithmetically, it isn't a very interesting number aside from repeating digits.  It's 2*3*3*37.  Although it is exactly three times Room 222, the hyper-earnest 1969-1974 ABC high school drama.  Probably lots of people thought that a Black high school history teacher was a sign of the end times...

    
But there's a new book by Princeton religious historian and former MacArthur Fellow Elaine Pagels that explains the Book of Revelation as a sort of large allegory for the tensions in the first century AD between those who believed that Christianity was a form of Judiasm, and those who believed that Gentiles should also be welcomed.  From the New Yorker review, the 666 "almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero."

So Happy Nero Day to us.