Preserved on a wall in the ruins of Pompeii is a romantic confession: “I love her whose number is 545.” This ancient graffito is an example of a commonly used practice called gematria. In ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, letters were used for numbers, and fun could be had in giving numerical values to words and names. The letters of “Caesar Nero” (neron̄ kaisar), transliterated into Hebrew from Greek and their values added together, gives 666.10 Most interestingly, the alternative spelling in Greek (nerō kaisar) gives 616—precisely the variant we find in some manuscripts of Revelation 13:18.
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