A History of the End of the World

the world on the fact that angels descended from heaven and “corrupted themselves” by engaging in sexual intercourse with women “in all their uncleanness.”⁹² Josephus reports that at least one order of Essenes shunned marriage and childbearing, and archaeologists suggest that the apocalyptic community at Qumran was largely, if not entirely, celibate. And the idea of sex as a defilement is deeply rooted in certain passages of the Hebrew Bible, where sexual conduct between any man and woman renders both of them ritually impure: “If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen,” goes a passage in Leviticus, “both of them shall bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the evening.”⁹³

The same fussy attitude toward sex can be found in both Jewish and pagan tradition. A priest or a soldier need not be celibate, but he must refrain from sexual intercourse in advance of certain activities, including both the performing of rituals and the fighting of battles. The requirement of sexual abstinence before battle is one that the Maccabees embraced in their own war against assimilation and occupation, but a pious pagan soldier might do the same. John, too, appears to believe that Christian soldiers must prepare themselves for the final battle between God and Satan by avoiding all defiling conduct, including sex. But John’s stance toward sex, as toward everything else, is absolute and uincompromising.

Here is a clear example of John’s distinctive approach to the moral instruction of the Hebrew Bible. He seizes upon a biblical commandment, and then he proceeds to radicalize it. Sex is a “removable defilement” under biblical law—one who has been defiled by engaging in sex need only immerse oneself in a ritual bath to purify oneself—but John seems to argue that any sexual encounter between men and women ought to be avoided.⁹⁴ Since he is convinced that the end-times are approaching but he does not know exactly when they will arrive, John seems to recommend that men and women alike ought to stop sleeping with each other once and for all so they will be ritually pure when the end comes, whether that happens tomorrow or at some unknowable moment in the future.

So John sees sex as something dirty and defiling under all circumstances. The only truly exalted human beings in Revelation are virgins and martyrs, and all his enemies are whores and whoremongers. And he is both distrustful and disdainful of women in general: the only mortal woman whom John mentions by name, the rival prophet whom he calls Jezebel, is condemned as a seducer and a fornicator. All of the passages of Revelation that touch on encounters between men and women betray a deeply conflicted attitude toward sexuality, according to Adela Yarbro Collins, “involving perhaps hatred and fear of both women and one’s own body.”⁹⁵

Other readers of Revelation suspect that John may protest too much when it comes to the condemnation of sex. D. H. Lawrence, far better known for erotic novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover than for his biblical exegesis, points out that the greatest fornicator in all of Revelation, the Whore of Babylon, is a titillating figure, and perhaps intentionally so. “How they envy Babylon her splendour, envy, envy!” rails Lawrence in his own commentary on the book of Revelation. “The harlot sits magnificently with her golden cup of wine of sensual pleasure in her hand. How the apocalyptists would have loved to drink out of her cup! And since they couldn’t how they loved smashing it!”⁹⁶

Indeed, John betrays something dark and disturbing in his own sexual imagination at precisely the moment when he conjures up the famous seductress, richly draped in silk and jewels, and casts his mind’s eye on what she carries in her hand—“a golden cup full of the impurities of her fornication.”⁹⁷ In a book full of revelations great and small, it is highly revealing passage. When John invites us to imagine exactly what “abominations” and “impurities” are sloshing around in that golden cup, the man who wrote the book of Revelation is telling us everything we need to know about his own tortured attitude toward human sexuality.

John is plainly obsessed with purity in all things, including not only abstract notions of theology but also such thoroughly human concerns as sex, food, and money. And his obsessive personality may help us understand why the book of Revelation has always exerted such a powerful influence on readers with similar traits, ranging from religious zealots to the clinically insane. Indeed, as we shall see, John provides a proof text for code breakers and conspiracy theorists who, like John himself, are prone to see the Devil in the unlikeliest of guises.

Among the mysteries that John scatters through the text of Revelation, none has borne such strange fruit as “the number of the beast”—that is, the alphanumeric code that is meant to symbolize the name of the Roman emperor under whom John is living and working, the emperor whose name is chiseled on stone altars in the seven cities and stamped on coins of gold and silver that circulate throughout the empire. “Here is wisdom,” writes John in what may be the single most obsessively pondered passage in the whole of Revelation. “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”⁹⁸

One approach to penetrating the secret of the number 666 focuses on the contrast between the symbolic meaning of sixes and sevens in the book of Revelation. John, as we have seen, was obsessed with the number seven, a symbol of divine perfection that derives from the fact that God is shown in Genesis to complete the creation of the world in exactly seven days. If seven symbolizes divine perfection, as Bible commentators have long suggested, then six symbolizes human (rather than satanic) imperfection—and 666 “is the number of a man,” as John plainly states.

But the number 666 also means something else and something quite specific to the author of Revelation. John, as we have noted, is engaging in the ancient practice of numerology—that is, the extraction of supposedly secret meanings from the arrangement and manipulation of numbers, a commonplace in biblical and mystical writings. Here, John is suggesting that the number 666 is a cipher that contains the name of the human being whom he denounces as the “beast”: 666 is, quite literally, “the number of his name.” And John suggests that at least some of his readers and hearers have already cracked the code: “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast.”⁹⁹

In ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the letters of the alphabet were also given numerical values, and thus the letters could be used in the way that we use Arabic numerals today. The most familiar example—and the only one still common in the Western world today—is the use of Roman numerals to indicate a date; for example, this book was first published in 2006—that is, MMVI. To give a simple example of the alphanumeric code that the author of Revelation is using, suppose that “A” can also be used to indicate “1,” “B” to indicate “2,” “C” to indicate “3,” and so on. Thus, the common English word “cab” could be encoded in the number “6,” which is the total of the numerical value of each of its letters.

So when John refers to the “number of the beast,” he means the numerical value of the letters of a name as it is written in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. The name, it is commonly assumed, belongs to a Roman emperor. The traditional solution to the puzzle that John has planted in Revelation is that 666 is the numerical value of the letters that spell out the name of the first Roman emperor to persecute the Christians, Caesar Nero (37 C.E.–68 C.E.). But, as we have noted, the earliest commentators on Revelation insist that the text first appeared during the reign of Domitian (51 C.E.–96 C.E.) in the last decade of the first century, nearly thirty years after Nero had taken his own life. For that reason, most scholars agree that any reference to Nero in the number of the Beast is a backward glance into recent history rather than a prophecy of things to come.

No single line of text in Revelation, however, has prompted more conjecture and dissension than “the name of the beast.” Some early manuscripts of Revelation give the number of the Beast as 616 rather than 666, for example, and a few scholars propose that 616 encodes the name of Gaius or Caligula rather than Nero. Then, too, the numerical value of a word depends on the vagaries of its spelling, and the various imperial names and titles are formulated and spelled differently in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Thus, for example, the numerical value of Nero’s name and title in Hebrew can be either 616 or 666, depending on how they are spelled, and that may explain why both numbers appear in the ancient manuscripts of Revelation.

John himself vastly complicates the problem by introducing an eerie but deeply enigmatic prophecy about the Beast that begins with the Great Whore of Babylon riding around on a red beast with “seven heads and ten horns.”¹⁰⁰ Like the Hebrew prophets who were his role models, John is quick to assure his readers that the whore, the beast, the heads, and the horns are all purely allegorical: “Why marvel?” says his angelic guide. “I will tell you the mystery of the woman, and of the beast with seven heads and ten horns that carries her.” The seven heads, for example, are revealed to symbolize “seven kings, five of whom have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come, and when he comes he must remain only a little while.”¹⁰¹

The enterprise of identifying the seven Roman emperors who are symbolized by the seven heads is yet another cottage industry among the interpreters of Revelation, both amateur and professional, ancient and modern.