nts the Roman Empire and a final single imperial opponent, the head with the deadly wound that "once was and now is not and is still to come"(17:8). Second it is almost unanimously admitted that this fatally wounded and soon - to - be - revived head is Nero, conceived of for the first time in surviving literature as returning from the dead. Just as the Lamb who opened the sealed scroll was singing "standing (that is, risen) as though it had been slain" (5:6), so his apocalyptic opponent, the Beast from the Abyss, will also arise from death, that is, from the Abyssos. The contrast between the two animal images for Christ and Antichrist - Nero is made with stunning symbolic precision. The dead Nero symbolized as the head of the Beast will ascend alive into the world from the abyss to war against the saints and to destroy Rome, as the legends had long predicted. The identification of the slain and revived head with Nero also helps explain mysterious number of the Beast (13:18) that is 666. Since the second century, many interpretations 666 have been offered. Students of apocalypticism have been uncertain whether to take the number as an example of general number symbolism (according to which we might say that 666 is total imperfection just as 888 would be complete perfection), or of gematria, this special number symbolism popular in antiquity that calculated names according to the numbers signified by the letters. In addition, some have opted for gematria based on Hebrew letters, others on Greek. The simplest and most likely solution is that 666 is a gematria for the Hebrew nrwn qsr, that is, "Nero Emperor." One final aspect of the depiction of the Antichrist as the Beast in Revelation needs to be noted. The mythological background of the picture of the two Beasts is apparently Jewish speculation about Leviathan and Behemoth. Both of these monsters appear in the Hebrew Bible as forms of the cosmic opposition to God. The two Beast...
