glenn morton wrote:
>
> At 04:01 PM 1/2/00 -0500, George Murphy wrote:
> > I heartily agree that the vast majority of numerology is nonsense but
> >it's clear that the author of Revelation was using 666 to refer to something.
> >In fact the practice of "gemetria" - adding up the numerical values of
> letters
> >in a name to get a value for that name - was fairly common in the 1st
> century.
> >(There is a graffiti at Pompeii, "I love a girl whose name is 545.")
> > The number of the beast in Rev.13:18 is generlly given as 666, though there
> >is some manuscript evidence for 616. The alphabet to be used is Greek or
> Hebrew.
> >With the latter, nrn qsr, "Nero Caesar", gives 666 while omission of the
> final n for
> >nr qsr gives 616. Another possibility _if_ 616 is the correct reading is
> the Greek
> >kaisar theos, "Caesar [is] God."
>
> Wait a minute. I still don't see how nrn qsr gives 666. There aren't that
> many letters.
>
> English has more letters than Latin, Greek or Hebrew. If every letter of
> Nero's name was Z then that is 26 x 10 (Nero Caesar) = 260. Adding Drusus
> to his name you getn 26 *16=416. I can't see how adding the numeric values
> gets me there! For this mentally challenged person can you spell this out?
> The math doesn't add up.
Hebrew & Greek letters were used regularly for numerical notation. The
Hebrew values are
aleph = 1, beth = 2, ... teth = 9
yodh = 10, kaph = 20, .... cadhe = 90
qoph = 100 ... taw = 400
The consonantal form of Neron Caesar is nun-resh-waw-nun qoph-samekh-resh (properly
written right to left) with numerical value 50 + 200 + 50 + 6 + 100 + 60 + 200 = 666.
If you leave off the second nun you get 616.
(I made a mistake in the earlier post & left out the waw, with numerical value
6, which gives the o of neron - it is a consonant but can play the role of a long o or
u.)
Greek has a similar scheme but you have to include the obsolete letter digamma
(F).
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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