The Fourth Seal (Part 1)
The Green Horse and its rider
Audio Version!
And when he opened the fourth seal, I heard a sound from the fourth living creature saying, “Come.” And I looked, and behold, a horse—a green one—and the one sitting, above him was a name for him: Death, and Hades was following with him, and it was granted to them authority over the quarter of the earth to kill with sword and with famine and with death and by the beasts of the earth. Revelation 6:7–8
Logic is an interesting word and from it we get the well-used word logical. There are many types of logic, but all depend on a mental framework. When I lived in the Philippines years ago, I witnessed a cultural logic that made sense to Filipinos, but not to me. If I had been raised there, I’m sure that much more would have made sense, and my American logic would not have.
With the Bible, there is a logic also—a divine logic that threads though its words from beginning to end. To impose an outside secular logic to the Bible is to misunderstand it from the outset—the words of Scripture need to be spiritually discerned. Besides a secular logic, imposing a theological system can also distort the message of the Bible. With Dispensationalism, the Bible gets shoehorned into a logical framework, but one that depends on a particular construction of divine history. The same can be said for other theological systems.
With Revelation, I have (prayerfully) attempted to follow the given logic that John introduced in the first chapter with a focus on the gospel message and symbols/metaphors that were introduced in John’s vision of Jesus—what I call the Gospel of the Exalted Jesus.
So far, as I have followed this gospel logic, the questions and difficulties have melted away verse by verse. I trust this will continue to happen!
I do not want to impose a system, but to allow the logic of Revelation itself to unfold.
I say this because the fourth seal may seem impossible to square with my (logical) approach—Death and Hades, and killing with swords, famine, death, and wild beasts appear farfetched with respect to Jesus as the rider on this horse (as I have argued for the other three).
It’s not that I must see Jesus—almost no one else does.
But I do think that to see Jesus is right.
Oecumenius was close but still did not do this—for him the rider, maybe Jesus but not specified, was at war with the demons and spiritual evil.
The closest previous interpreter as far as I can tell was the early 17th century Spanish Jesuit, Father Luis de Alcazar, in his Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi, a massive 1000+ page Latin commentary that used the symbolic approach to Revelation.
Alcazar saw right though the haze to the heart of the gospel in these two verses.
He intuitively detected metaphors and tied the images to the rest of Scripture.
He definitely went against the grain.
Almost all interpreters have seen this seal and the horse as the endpoint of the progression of war (red horse) and famine (black horse)—now death and a pale horse, whether during the Jewish War, later in the Roman Empire, in the future “Great Tribulation,” or generally through history in war-time.
But Alcazar saw Death as connected to salvation!
Or as I put it, SALVATION is DEATH.
Those who die in this seal are Christians.
In Part 1 of this post, I’ll discuss Revelation 6:7 and the first half of 6:8.
(continued)
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And when he opened the fourth seal I heard a sound from the fourth living creature saying, “Come.” Revelation 6:7
This verse is virtually identical with 6:1, 6:3, and 6:5 except for a small detail.
In verse 1, John heard “like a sound of thunder,” and in vv. 3 and 5, he heard the creatures directly, but in this verse he heard “a sound from the fourth living creature”—the eagle—“saying ‘Come.’”
Not thunder, not direct speech, but the call of an eagle.
Later in Revelation, an eagle cried with a great sound, “Woe, woe, woe” which sounds like the eagle’s cry (Greek ouai, ouai, ouai).
Oecumenius interpreted “Come” as a call for the wrath of God on evil, and that is a perceptive option—in certain circumstances the eagle was perceived as a harbinger of disaster.
Yet overall, the eagle was a very positive symbol in the Mediterranean world of divine omnipotence.
The early church connected the eagle with the Gospel of John.
So I am going to stick with the notion (as with the other three calls to come) that the eagle called for Jesus to come once again.
This time Jesus came on a green horse.
And I looked, and behold, a horse—a green one …
But wait, wasn’t this a pale horse?
Most of the popular translations follow the KJV in translating the Greek term chlōros as “pale,” which followed the Coverdale, Great Bible, and Bishop’s Bible, which followed the Latin Vulgate translation pallidus “pale.”
In fact 25 English translations do so.
Another 13 translate clōros as “pale green,” and several include the word “sickly,” “ashen” or “grey.”
Only two modern translations, the Jubilee Bible 2000 and the New Matthew Bible, translate clōros as “green” (we get the terms “chlorophyll” and “chlorine” from this word).
The New Matthew Bible, though, is an update of the 1537 Matthew Bible, a combined effort of William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, and John Rogers.
Here is that 1537 translation:
“And I loked, and beholde a grene horse, and his name that sate on him was Death, and Hell folowed after him, and power was geuen vnto him ouer the fourth parte of the erth, to kyll with swerde, and with honger, and with pestilence, and with wylde beastes of the erth.”
They definitely used the Greek text and not the Latin Vulgate.
Can chlōros mean “pale”? In certain contexts yes.
I expect Jerome, translator of the Latin Vulgate, took the rider, named Death, and surmised that chlōros could not mean green-green, but the color of a sick person, which in some medical texts used chlōros.
But nowhere else in the Bible did Jerome ever translate chlōros as pallidus, OT or NT, but as viridis—green!
Oecumenius saw it as the green of bile, though bile is not pale, but actually green.
John himself used chlōros for green in the other two instances in Revelation: the green grass of 8:7 and every green thing of 9:4. The one use in Mark means green, and so are all fifteen uses in the Greek Old Testament (and other Jewish and early Christian writings).
This would be the only time “pale” is used in early translations for chlōros.
What would the original hearers hear?
Green!
It remains to determine the significance of this difference.
—and the one sitting, above him was a name for him: Death
For the first three horses (Revelation 6:2, 4, 5), the one sitting “on it” was the same—Greek ep’ auton (ep’ is the abbreviated form of epi).
6:2 And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and the one sitting on it …
6:4 And out came another horse, a red one, and the one sitting on it …
6:5 And I looked, and behold, a black horse, and the one sitting on it …
But for some reason, in the fourth seal, John changed “on it” to “above” (Greek epanō) or “above him” (Greek epanō auton).*
All of the translations treat epanō as though it were ep’ “upon” not epanō “above.”
And in an ordinary situation this would be a perfectly normal way to translate it.
But not here because John made an intentional change to indicate something different!!
Ep’ and epanō can be synonyms, but not normally, and this situation highlights them as distinct, not the same.
Ep’ is normally “on” and epanō is normally “above.”
Most of the translations have something like “the rider’s name was Death.”
But the way John has put it, the name Death is applied to, but separate from the rider, kind of like the placard above Jesus’s head on the cross, King of the Jews.
and the one sitting, above him was his name: death
In this case, the rider, Jesus (sitting on a green horse), was called death.
This picture is the same as the Lamb standing as slain.
Here is the logic I see: Life (represented by green) and death are joined together. Jesus who died rode the green horse of life (BTW, I am answering the significance of the color green).
But there was way more going on.
(cont.)
… and Hades was following with him.
The KJV and many others translate Hades as “hell,” but in doing so the translations bring up a host of negative associations that need to be set aside.
Greek Hades was the equivalent of Hebrew Sheol (the term “hell” actually comes from German and Norse mythology).
Hades was not a place of fiery punishment, but the place of the dead, a place of shadowy existence beyond this life.
Neither was it the lake of fire.
So now we have Death and Hades in this verse.
Where have we seen this combination before?
Oh yeah, in Revelation 1.
What did Jesus say to John in Revelation 1:17b–18?
“Do not fear, I am the first and the last and the one who lives and was dead and behold I am alive forever and ever and I hold the keys of Death and of Hades.”
The interpretation of the fourth horse flows from what Jesus had already told John!
Jesus became dead and joined the dead in Hades, and in the resurrection of Jesus—the one who overcame death—he provided release for those imprisoned there.
Death was the name given to Jesus as a result of the cross, but it did not stay that way!
Understanding this imagery will be the key to unlocking the second half of verse 8.
So to summarize thus far:
Jesus rode the white horse of the Incarnation and proclamation of the Kingdom of God.
Jesus rode the red horse of sacrifice in which he replaced the world’s “peace” with the peace of God.
Jesus rode the black horse of death and paid the price for our salvation.
Jesus rode the green horse of resurrection, defeated death and unlocked Hades.
In part 2 of the Fourth Seal we’ll take up the equally difficult second half of verse 8. Stay tuned.
*The Greek manuscripts are divided on the presence or absence of auton.
This understanding makes sense!!!