In numerology, the number 666 is widely accepted as demonic. Is this truth or myth? What do the scriptures say?
Revelation 13:6 [KJV]: "Here is wisdom. 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."
The vision of Daniel (553 BC)
We preliminary recap Daniel's dream of the four beasts. These four beasts are essential to cracking the riddle.
Daniel 7:1 [KJV]: "In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters."
Nabonidus was the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, reigning from 556-539 BC. Belshazzar ruled Babylon with royal authority from the third to the eleventh year of Nabonidus (see The Last King of Babylon). Hence, Daniel had the vision in the year 553 BC.
Daniel 7:3-7 [KJV] (excerpts): "3 And four great beasts came up from the sea [of people], diverse one from another. 4 The first was like a lion ... 5 And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear ... 6 After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard ... 7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns."
The lion, the bear, and the leopard referred to, respectively, the Babylon Empire (ruling at that time over the Holy Land), the Medo-Persian Empire (that reigned after the Babylon) and the Ancient Greek Empire (that reigned after the Persian). The fourth beast represents the Roman Empire (see also Dan 2:36-41, Dan 10:20).
Daniel 7:11-12 [KJV]: "11 I beheld then because of the voice of the great words which the horn spake: I beheld even till the beast [of Rome] was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame. 12 As concerning the rest of the beasts [lion-bear-leopard], they had their dominion taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time."
Hence, the remaining beasts have been operating in the spiritual domain without a physical empire.
Considering that the late Babylonian Empire included most of modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon and Israel, the bigger Medo-Persian empire under Darius the Great stretched from present-day Libya to Pakistan and from Black Sea/Aral Sea to parts of modern Egypt and, the even bigger Ancient Greek Empire stretched from modern-day Greece to part of India, it can be readily seen that all the geographic locations of the beasts correspond to the Muslim world. Note that only Islam has been ruling without a physical empire in all of those countries at some point in time.
The Revelation by John (1st centuray AD)
Revelation 13:1-2 [KJV]: "1 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea [of people], having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy [saying that God has no son]. 2 And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority."
Clearly, the tripartite lion-bear-leopard beast revealed to John and the lion, the bear, and the leopard that saw Daniel are the same.
To solve the remaining part of the riddle, we need to consider that
the Revelation was written in (Ancient) Greek comprising 27 letters;
the Greek system of numbering letters of the alphabet is called
(isopsephy). Each single digit, each tens and each hundreds is assigned a separate letter, an ancient practice of adding up the number values of the letters in a word to form a single number. The sum of the values in a word yields a characteristic number such as 666;
for the beast in the book of Daniel, Mohammed (gr. Μοαμέτις) is the founder of Islam. There are many alternate spellings, though.
Hence, we need to compute the Greek isopsephia value of Μοαμέτις. Following this approach, we have
40 (M) + 70 (ο) + 1 (α) + 40 (μ) + 5 (έ) + 300 (τ) + 10 (ι) + 200 (ς) = 666 (gr. χξς, and the solution to the riddle in Revelation 13:6 [KJV] is given by: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast [Islam]: for it is the number of a man [Mohammed]; and his [Greek isopsephia] number is 666.