Re: Exceptional Measures

From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Sun Jan 02 2000 - 19:31:26 EST

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    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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