Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

13:18
A brief digression here will serve to place this point in
its larger symbolic framework, for – in contrast to the
multiplied sixes of Nebuchadnezzar’s image – the names
of Daniel and his three friends who refused to worship
the idol add up to 888 in Hebrew. 27 This is also the
number of Jesus in Greek. 28 The Fall of man occurred
on the seventh day of creation (man’s first full day of
life); Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, spent the seventh
day in the grave, to pay for Adam’s sin. His
Resurrection took place on the eighth day, which
becomes the replacement Sabbath for the New
Creation. 29 Austin Farrer comments: “Jesus rose on the
third day, being the eighth of that week: he is the
Resurrection and the Life. For eight signifying
resurrection, see 1 Peter 3:20-21, and 2 Peter 2:5. But
the third day on which Jesus rose is third from that
sixth day (Friday) on which Anti-christ had his
apparent triumph; so if Christ has a name valuing 888,
Antichrist should have a name valuing 666.” 30
Farrer expands on this point: “Why should Antichrist
be so emphatically six? The whole arrangement of the
Apocalypse explains this. The divine work with which
it deals is a work of judgment: it is judgment which has
the sixfold pattern of the working-days, and always on
the sixth day there is the culmination of judgment. 31
On the sixth day of the week, and at the sixth hour,
says St. John [John 19:13-22; Rev. 13:16-14:1], the
kingdoms of Christ and Antichrist looked one another
in the face in Pilate’s court, and the adherents of the
false prophet (Caiphas) firmly wrote on their foreheads
the mark of the Beast, when they said, ‘We have no
king but Caesar.’ Presently they saw the Lamb uplifted
with his true Name over his head, ‘King of the Jews’:
and for all they could do, they could not get it erased:
‘What I have written,’ said Pilate, ‘I have written.’
Christ’s Friday victory is the supreme manifestation
also of Antichrist .” 32
There is an interesting mathematical property of the
number 666, which would not have escaped St. John’s
readers: 666 is the triangular of the square of 6. That is,
the square of 6 (6 x 6) is 36. The triangular of 36 is 666.
Triangulation is a method of computation that was
popular in the ancient world, and very familiar to
people in the first century, but it has been largely
forgotten in our day. It works like this:
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★★
★★★
★★★★
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These diagrams, both of which have six units on each
side, show that 36 is the square of 6, while 21 is the
triangular of 6. If we extend the triangle one more line,
we would get the triangular of seven (28); another line
would give us the triangular of eight (36). Extending it
all the way up to 36 lines results in the number 666. 33
The number of the Beast, therefore, is a full
“exposition” of the number of Man.
But there is more. If we were to strip off the outer edge
of fifteen stars in the triangle above, we would be left
with a “triangle within a triangle,” made up of six stars;
one could therefore say that the triangular 21 is the
“filling in,” or fulfillment, of 15 (the number of units in
the outer triangle, or periphery).
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26. In Hebrew (as in most ancient languages), the alphabet served double duty:
each letter was also a numeral. Thus any given word or group of words had a
numerical value, which could be computed simply by adding up the
numerals. The language-system of the West avoids this by using the Roman
alphabet for its letters and the Arabic alphabet for its numerals. It is thus
difficult and artificial for us to imagine going back and forth between the
letter-use and numeral-use of the characters in our language, but for the
ancients it was quite natural. In all probability, they did not need to engage
in any great mental shifts back and forth, but simply saw and comprehended
both aspects at once.
27. See Ernest L. Martin, The Original Bible Restored (Pasadena, CA: Foundation
for Biblical Research, 1984), p. 110. In his vision of the great image which
represented the heathen empires leading up to Christ’s kingdom,
Nebuchadnezzar was the “head of gold” (Dan. 2:37-38); Martin has pointed
out that 666 years after Nebuchadnezzar inaugurated his reign (604 B.c.),
Israel’s last sabbatical cycle began (Autumn, A.D. 63), which ended in the
destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the Autumn of 70.
28. IHSOUS (I = 10 + H = 8 +S = 200 + O =70 + U = 400 + S = 200) = 888.
29. See James B. Jordan, The Law of the Covenant: An Exposition of Exodus 21-23
(Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1984), p. 164.
30. Austin Farrer, The Revelation of St. John the Divine (London: Oxford
University press, 1964), p. 156; Farrer is, of course, referring to the Beast by
the common (but technically inaccurate) term Antichrist, which is really the
designation given by St. John to apostates from the Christian faith.
31. Cf. Gen. 1:31; Rev. 6:12-17; 9:13-21.
32. Farrer, A Rebirth of Images, p. 259.
33. Incidentally, the easy way to figure out the triangular of any number is to
multiply it by the next higher number, then divide by two; thus
36 x 37 = 666
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