Abstract

AbstractThe mysterious number in Revelation 13:18 acts as a riddle for interpreters to solve in a book that is filled with ambiguities. The desire to solve the riddle was true for ancient readers of Revelation no less than for modern ones. This article illustrates how the interpretations of both modern and ancient readers have hermeneutical assumptions that undergird them and that too often go unstated. After briefly highlighting modern hermeneutical assumptions in both popular and scholarly work on the number, the article turns to ancient readers in order to examine interpretations set in different contexts from that of a twenty-first-century interpreter. This choice enables critical distance to be obtained to better appreciate the role of assumptions. Working chronologically through interpretations of the number from the second through fifth centuries, this article illustrates that, even amidst the stunning variety of interpretive options, ancient interpreters share assumptions that remain unstated. Each interpreter takes the method for solving the riddle, the question of whether it can be solved, and the background against which solutions should be sought as givens. The conclusion of the article places modern scholarship in dialogue with these ancient assumptions and urges contemporary scholarship toward increasingly self-conscious methodological reflection.