To the left is a screen capture of my weblog stats. Today, I met a goal that I’d had for a while: I wanted my "Average (hits) per day" to be 888 or more.
Unfortunately, despite its many excellent qualities, Typepad (my blog host) has really dinky stats that are much inferior to what other providers have. They’ve promised to improve these, but haven’t yet.
One of the problems is that "Average per day" isn’t your recent average (what you typically get on a given day recently) but an average based on all the time that has elapsed since you started the blog on Typepad. This means that those early days, when nobody was linking to you and you were first starting to build traffic, will forever pull down your "Average per day."
Thus you can see that I’m really getting a lot more than 888 hits per day. Above, for example, it says that I got 2980 hits "Today." But therein lies another problem: As Typepad reckons it "Today" is not the past twenty-four hours, it’s the period beginning yesterday at midnight, which means that "Today" is always 24-48 hours long, depending on what time of day you check. As you approach midnight, "Today" really includes the hits of two days.
I took this screen shot early in the day (when traffic is slowest), so I guess I got about 2700-2800 hits yesterday (including everything, such as people clicking into comment boxes), though one can never be sure, given the way this software works.
But why am I happy that the average is now 888? Because’s that’s the numerical value of the name of Jesus in Greek. Here’s how that works: In Greek "Jesus" is iEsous, and
Iota = 10
Eta = 8
Sigma = 200
Omicron = 70
Upsilon = 400
Sigma = 200TOTAL = 888
SEE THE GREEK LETTER-TO-NUMBER EQUIVALENCES.
The reason that the Greeks (like Latin-, Hebrew-, and Aramaic-speakers) had numerical values for letters is that they didn’t have separate number symbols, so the letters did double duty. That’s why VIII is 8 in Roman numerals. In Latin, only a few letters have numerical values (I, V, X, L, C, D, M), so letters like B or R mean nothing. Originally Greek only used some of its letters for numbers, but by Jesus’ day they used all of them. This reduced the number of letters you had to use to write a number, so in Greek VIII was just the letter eta.
If you look at the table of Greek letter-to-number equivalences, you’ll note that the system has three letters you may never have heard of: digamma, qoppa, and sampi. These are letters that dropped out of the Greek alphabet. Digamma sounded like a w, qoppa like a back-of-the-mouth q (harder and darker than the k sound, like qoph in Hebrew, qop in Aramaic, or qaaf in Arabic). Sampi sounded like an extended s or like a ks combination.
If these letters hadn’t dropped out then, since sampi was the last letter, Jesus would be "Alpha and Sampi" instead of "Alpha and Omega" (or, as he is in Arabic translations of the New Testament, "Alif u-Hamza").
Since your show from this week dealt with number games (66 books in Protestant Canon, 7 number of perfection), what do you think of 888?? 8 is a symbolic number in Christianity since it represents the new creation. And 888, I suppose, would be the perfection of the new creation, and who could be more perfect than the Incarnational-God? 🙂
All this brings to 666, the number of the beast. I’ve read somewhere this backtranslates to Nero, though intentionally without determinism. Is there a known spelling of Nero that makes the connection in Latin or ancient Greek?
There is. I’ll blog on it tomorrow.
Actually, it’s not Latin or Greek but Hebrew and Aramaic.
Adventists say 666 is calculated from the title of the Pope.
You may now play “888” in the Lotto… 🙂
Regards Ben, I’ve never understood why some Christians find future predictions in the Bible, a library that warns against fortune telling. Then again, it warns against astrology, but allows the Magi to follow the star. Maybe someone can recommend a good reference resolving all this for me.
I find Revelations predicting a future pope (which one?) as the antichrist simply unbelieveable. Dealing with a “clear and present danger” makes more sense, particularly with regard to stealth.
Regards Ben, I’ve never understood why some Christians find detailed future predictions in the Bible, a library that warns against fortune telling. Then again, it warns against astrology, but allows the Magi to follow the star. Maybe someone can recommend a good reference resolving all this for me.
I find Revelations predicting a future pope (which one?) as the antichrist simply unbelieveable. Dealing with a “clear and present danger” makes more sense, particularly with regard to stealth, with lessons to be learned for the future.
888 is the number of Jesus
here is some Food for thought
a slice of Pi(e)
888 in Base 17 is 314 in base 10
Base 17 is the first Base to use a G so . . .
4637 is the number G0D that a Zero in the middle
Leap year Christmas falls on the 360th day of the year – that a Zero – go figure!!!
Pi has always been asociated with the circule (sp)
now you know why or Y that being said Bye or L8er
Greg
I was looking for this video slots at http://www.streetslots.com but I could not find it
Numerical values of all 30 Greek letters (sometimes values are parallel)
Alpha 1
Beta 2
Gamma 3
Delta 4
Epsilon 5
Wau 6
Stigma 6 (numerically wau=stigma)
Zeta 7
Eta 8
Theta 9
Iota 10
Kappa 20
Lambda 30
Mi 40
Ni 50
Xi 60
Omicron 70
Pi 80
San 90
Sho 90
Qoppa 90 (numerically san=sho=qoppa)
Rho 100
Sigma 200
Tau 300
Upsilon 400
Phi 500
Chi 600
Psi 700
Omega 800
Sampi 900