Verse 18
18. Here is wisdom… understanding The here means, in the true solution of this problem. The man who tries must bring his intellect to it; and the man who succeeds has brought here a true wisdom; a wisdom which not only involves a good many questions of history and literature, but is pregnant with very important conclusions.
Number of the beast That is, of his name. To understand this, we must know that the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans used not our now numerical Arabic figures in arithmetic, but the letters of their alphabets. The first ten letters in Hebrew and Greek stood for our figures from 1 to 10. Then the next ten designated the tens, repeated to a hundred; the rest designated thousands. By a little ingenuity both a number and a name might then be found in a certain arrangement of letters. This not only furnished room for play of fancy among Christians, but among cabalists a pretence of deep meanings. Thus the Greek Jesus, Jesous: J=10, e=8, s=200, o=70, u=400, s=200=888; quite an antithesis to 666.
Number of a man A number which a man would use, and therefore calculable by a man. See note on Revelation 21:17.
Six hundred threescore and six When a problem of this kind is proposed and recorded for centuries, it might be expected that a great number of names would, in the course of centuries, be produced as the solution. We might at first imagine, too, that a plenty of fitting names would be furnished, and so the problem be really swamped. Numerous names have indeed been furnished, but scarce one meeting the obvious conditions. Puerile as a problem based on the position of letters and numerals may at first seem, the present problem includes elements and conditions tasking the most vigorous wisdom. The only name that seems to meet all the conditions, is one of the oldest, adduced by Irenaeus, the grand-pupil of St.
John himself, Lateinos, Latinus, Latin. Some conditions of the problem may be as follows:
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