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Log in Sign Up. More Words At Play. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Oct. Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms. Time Traveler. Love words? Need even more definitions? Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs. This creature could perform miraculous things, would demand that everyone be "marked" with its name or number in order to buy and sell anything; and would also kill those who did not worship it.

So, who was this? Over the centuries, people have wondered whether this beast referred to someone who has come and gone, was yet to come or to no person in particular. The book of Revelation was written in Greek, the language of the Christian world in the first and second century C.

There were no numbers in Greek, at least not the numbers that we'd recognize today. Our so-called "Arabic numerals" — 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Instead, each letter of the Greek and Hebrew alphabet had a numeric value. For example:. For the Greek-speaking Christians reading Revelation, they would have been very comfortable reading letters as numbers.

That's how numbers were displayed in the market or in legal documents. They also would have been comfortable turning numbers back into letters thanks to a practice called isopsephy.

Isopsephy, in Greek, means "equal in numeric value," and was a popular way of playing with words in the first century. The trick was to add up the numeric value of one word and then find a second word or phrase that added up to the same number. Words that were numerically equal were thought to have a special connection.

One of the best-known first-century isopsephies was referenced by the Roman historian Seutonius. Archaeologists have even discovered ancient Roman graffiti that substituted numbers for names, says Thomas Wayment, a classics professor at Brigham Young University.

And hopefully everybody did their math correctly and could make the connections. Wayment and most other biblical scholars have no doubt that the author of Revelation intended to be an isopsephy solved by his first-century readers. Revelation is famously cryptic and was meant to be that way, even to its original audience. Wayment says that in apocalyptic writings, an angel or other heavenly messenger often reveals their meaning through coded speech. About the author. Joel Schorn Joel Schorn is an editor and writer in Chicago.

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