Q&A: Is it true that, in the Book of Revelation, Hebrew letters were used instead of Greek for the mark of the beast (666)?

Not so Beastly

This urban legend has been making the rounds for years in relation to the logo of a certain energy drink whose logo is three claw marks that supposedly look like the Hebrew letter vav, which also has the numerical value of 6—i.e., ‘666’

The problem is, vav is very length-specific: it goes down to the baseline, but no more. Since the middle claw mark is longer than the other two, it suggests that it is the end-of-word form of a different Hebrew letter (nun = n), whose numerical value is 50—so technically, the numbers are 6–50–6. Not so Beastly.

Last but not least, numerical values above 100 using Hebrew letters don’t work like decimal numbers. To write the number 666 with Hebrew letters, one would write תרס”ו (tav-resh-samekh-vav), which numerically is 400+200+60+6, and would be read phonetically Tarsu™—which doesn’t mean anything, but I’ve trademarked it, anyway, to sell to a company with a devilishly good drink.