Very few things in 20th and 21st
century America have fostered as much superstitious nonsense as the overflowing
abundance of completely clueless, utterly ignorant ideas about the meaning
of the “mark of the beast” mentioned in The
Revelation of John the Divine.
Almost all of the misconception and its concommitant idiocy derives from
a profoundly zero knowledge of Judaism at all and less-than-zero of any real information
about the religion of “Jews” and the real Palestine of the first century.
I have placed the
word “Jews” in parentheses because, as I have explained elsewhere, it meant something entirely different in the first centuries BCE/CE than it does in the twenty-first century.
Tefillin
The King James Version of the Bible calls these
“phylacteries”. Observant Judean (the
only meaning of “Jew” in the first century), Idumean, and Galilean males in
first century wore tefillin as part of their daily dress, as opposed to the
custom today in which Orthodox (and some other varieties of Judaism) tie them
on for morning and evening private prayer.
They were worn on the forehead and on the left wrist (now the left upper
arm).
The practice came out of the Pharisee camp. It is based on verses in the Book of Deuteronomy which still form its
core passage, Deut. 6:4-9: “Hear,
O Israel: Yahuweh our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy might. And these words,
which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach
them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in
thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and
when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon
thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of
thy house, and on thy gates.”
The sentence in bold provides the reason for the Pharisees’
interpretation of the passage as a mitzvoth, or duty. While some of their followers almost
certainly adhered to the practice, as a whole, the Sadducees, Bene Sedeq
(forerunners of today’s Karaites), Essenes, Hellenists, and other sects did
not. Neither, of course, did the
Samaritans. Of those mentioned, the
Karaites are all that remain (well, except the 750 Samaritans) and still do not
wear tefillin ever, because they interpret the passage to be metaphorical.
The original passage so worn was merely the first verse,
“Hear, O Israel: Yahuweh our God is one Lord”. Not so much to worry about wearing around
balled up in a scroll inside a tiny pouch.
Then it expanded to include the whole passage above, then to include
three more passages, so that pouch grew into a box, then into a large box, too
bulky for daily casual wear.
So, wearing this passage, “Hear, O Israel: Yahuweh our
God is one Lord”, was for those afore-mentioned first century residents of
Palestine a way of writing the “Name of the Lord” (Yahuweh) on their forehead
and their hands, or wrists. One of
these, and probably a 20th or 21st century Jew, would
understand the passage about the followers of “the beast” writing his/its name
on their foreheads and hands immediately.
The Name of “the Beast”: 666
Superstitious fear about this number, 666, became so
widespread in the latter half of the 20th century that it now has
its own psychological diagnosis: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.
From whence the number 666 in Revelation? For it to be
used in the allegory that is the work in question, which is not a prophecy but
an apocalypse, one of hundreds written at the time, such symbolism would have
to be readily understood by its target audience, else it would be like
addressing a letter to Americans in general in ancient Hebrew, or in any other
language not American English, for that matter.
In the First Book of
Kings, the amount of the fictitious Solomon’s annual revenue is given as
follows (1 Kings 10:14): “Now the
weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and
six talents of gold”. By the first
century, the number “666” had to come to symbolize wealth, especially excessive
wealth at the expense of others.
Capitalist government and society have written 666 on the
foreheads and left hands of every citizen of the country. We Americans love our 666, or $$$ if you
would rather. The great 666/$$$ is what
makes our nation go around, at least at the levels of the top. Keepers and diviners of the 666/$$$ of the
finance bourgeoisie are its prophets.
Not only our President and Congress but even our Courts and
often even prelates and clerics hold up the 666/$$$ to be praised and adored,
indirectly sometimes but often blatantly.
“There is no god but 666/$$$, and Wall Street is its
prophet”. We symbolically wear virtual
tefillin with the line “Love 666/$$$ our
God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength" as bracelets on our
wrists and frontlets on our foreheads every day. The great war of the tribulation is over; we
are all servants of the great 666, whose lawgiver is Ayn Rand, that philosopher
so beloved by so many of the white supremacist-Christian chauvinist-misogynist
Tea Party, wearing a White Jesus mask.
Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the Temple
grounds. American government and society
has not only invited them back in but enthroned them as gods in the Holy of
Holies in the form of corporations now deemed “persons” by all four branches
(legislative, executive, judicial, and corporate) of the de facto American
polity. If a corporation were actually a
person, that person would be a psychopath.
There’s no treatment for psychopathy, therefore capitalism cannot be
“reformed”. It is like an old wineskin
that needs to be discarded.
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