I read the explanation, understood it, and still don’t see any significance. You can assign any random number to any random Hebrew letter it doesn’t somehow make that number meaningful, magical or divine.
Back in the late 80s/early 90s when computers started making it into the homes of the average person, there was a thing going around where they assigned numbers to the letters in the word computer, did some stupid math, and came up with the number of the beast. Computers were the beast.
There’s also some bullshit about the W being the number 6 in Hebrew so that means www is the number of the beast and therefore the Internet is the beast.
Right now those same folks are worried that AI is the beast of revelation but I’m not plugged in enough to understand it at the moment.
They really think all numbers are magical and all the bad guys hide their secret codes in plain view so good people can decode them. They also think god is out here hiding secrets in plain view for them to decode.
I mentioned it higher up, but 666 comes from the latin pronouniation of Nero Ceasar, which translated into hebrew is 666. The slightly-earlier greek version used 616, because contemporary authors knew that Nero was in fact The Beast. The reason for the change is that, when speaking in greek, his name was pronounced “neron” ceasar… the original translators that put it into latin knew that and used the ‘Nero Ceasar’ for gematria. To maintain the meaning.
Other parallels include the neronic persecution of christians lasting 42 months (which is the length given for The Beast’s persecution,) the seven heads of the beast represent the 7 hills that Rome was built on, Ireneaus (bishop of lyons, author of 'Against Heresies) was alive around 130 to 202 ce and linked the beast to Nero; being much closer to the historical context, his understanding is illuminating. Similarly, Hyppolytus lived 170 to 235 ce, and was an early scholar of christian eschatology making the same connections.
Simply put, the author of revelation used the prophetic style to speak in a sort of culturally-coded language to relate what nero was and had been doing at a time when talking about it was very dangerous. In modern context, it would be like if someone used prophetic language to describe an “Orange Turd” who was a false prophet and persecuting said illegal imigrants. if it was laced with double-meanings that only illegal immigrants would know, then it would likely be overlooked.
basically the christains around the time of nero would have all recognized what the author was trying to say; cultural context is important, and it wasn’t about some future eschatology that could happen thousands of years in the future. it was about current (or recent,) events.
The modern christian eschatology is what happens when you divorce texts from the cultural context in which they were written.
Yeah, I never completely understood Kabbalah either. Do the Hebrew letters actually represent numbers or do they just assign random numbers to things? You can pretty much make any equation be anything you want if you’re the one defining every single variable.
Gematria has a table of assigned values but ciphers can also be used that change the values.
You can assign any random number to any random Hebrew letter
this is not strictly speaking true. hebrew uses a system where numbers are written using hebrew letters rather than arabic numerals. context in the writing would clue you in it was a number and not a word, but 1-9 would be represented by the first 9 letters in the alphabet, the tenth letter would be 10, the elevent was 20, etc.
this is just Gematria- a form of numerology that uses hebrew to do… fancy math.
It’s still very unconvincing, however, since you could do the same thing with with any sufficiently long text. Lord of the rings. Mobby dick. the script for twilight. or a password generator turning out pseudorandom alphanumeric strings.
but the numerical values are not arbitrary; even if the rest of it is bullshit.
Sometimes, though, Gematria was a way of speaking in code. For example. the Book of Revelation, and the mark of the beast. ‘Nero Cesar’, transliterated into hebrew adds up to 666. Interestingly, Revelation was first written in greek, and used the greek version of Nero- that is Neron Ceasar- which totals to 616. 666 comes from the latin translation, which the translator knew The Beast was nero.
why was the author of the Book of Revelation speaking in code? Because speaking openly about a fucking dictator who was persecuting your people was a great way to get offed, so the author used ‘prophetic’ literature to spread current news about what was happening. (For example, the beast’s reign of persucution lasted 42 months, which was how long nero’s campaign of persecution against christians lasted.)
Try telling them that. Haha
This is some crackhead shit.
Unfortunately, the person who posted this is 100% serious. In the last week they updated their profile picture to an AI generated picture of them in church. And also updated their workplace to “Nazarene Christian.”
Totally normal behavior.
Half-Life 3… Confirmed?
… huh?
- You can derive numerical values from words using a letter-number pairing like “A=1, B=2 (…)”. This kind of number-letter pairing is called “Gematria”.
- Adding the numerical values of the seven Hebrew words in the first verse of Genesis gives you a number
- Multiplying these seven values together instead and then adding up each group of three digits in the result gives you the same number as before
I think i just got dumber for reading that. And I didn’t even read all of it.
It is nice to see a fundamentalist nut job declaring that they understand basic math rather than calling for the death of trans people or some other violently insane shit.
