Lol, I can’t stop hearing that in Rodney Dangerfield’s voice. Can’t get no respect…
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I would have gone with Iron Maiden myself.
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6 times 6 times 6 = 216. Ivory soap 99 44/100ths % pure.
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In chapter 19 of “The White Goddess”, Robert Graves digs into the question of the Number of the Beast at length, and concludes that it stands for Nero and also, optionally, for Domitian, one of Nero’s successors. Graves’s reasoning is a bit roundabout, involving substantial doses of poetic inspiration (at one point, he leaps from D C L X V I (600 + 60 + 6) to the Latin phrase “DOMITIUS CAESAR LEGATOS XTI VIOLENTER INTERFECIT” (‘Domitius Caesar violently killed the envoys of Christ’, ‘Domitius’ being the original family name of Nero). He also ties it to TRVJN (666 in Hebrew numerology) which was supposedly a cipher used for Nero in Hebrew texts.
Graves frequently has to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. But his claim that 666 referred not to some future bad guy but rather to a living or recently-dead person who would have been well known to John’s readers, and who could be readily identified from the clues in the text by anyone familiar with gematria (“Let him that hath understanding count the Number of the Beast: for it is the number of a man …”) seems plausible enough.
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No doubt. His interpretation makes more sense to me.
But the whole embrace of 666 as a symbol of evil continues on into the present, none the less, like many literalist interpretations of the bible. It’s probably much more accurate to read the bible as a historical text of a particular people and to read it religiously as a series of moral allegories than it is read it as a literal set of prophecies for the future.
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That fits with how biblical scholars approach the Book of Revelation.
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I like the acoustic version from the Spun soundtrack. I have always been a fan of the original too.
Or do we look at 666 as the result of a zinger against the Roman authorities? In Jewish numerology, 7 was the number of perfection. Six being 1 shy of seven was the number equivalent of imperfection. 666 then said that no matter how often the Romans tried, they would always wind up one short of perfection, time after time after time. Seems to apply to Donald, the boastful beast, too.
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Mate, don’t be bringing your logic and common sense into a discussion about religion.
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Is this you?:
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…or read Lionel Fenn?
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I did and I will keep doing so, no matter how much I’m dismissed on this topic. 
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In the movie Pi, the mystical number that Max is searching for has 216 digits. 216 = 6 * 6 * 6
I always thought that was a nice little touch.
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