The Third Seal
The Black Horse and its rider
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And when he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” And I looked, and behold, a black horse, and the one sitting on it having a balancing scale in his hand. And I heard as a voice in the middle of the four living creatures, “a measure of wheat for a denarius and three measures of barley for a denarius and the olive oil and the wine do not harm.”
As a kid going to church every Sunday (and Sunday night and Wednesday) I heard all the (G-Rated) Bible stories over and again in Sunday School and other places. About sixth grade I began reading the Bible for myself—the actual R-rated stories—and my eyes have since grown wider and wider (Judges especially).
One of the greatest books of story telling is Daniel, and sure enough I was fascinated by Daniel, his three friends, and the various pickles they were involved in.
One of them that came to mind while studying the third seal was “the handwriting on the wall.”
Daniel interpreted those mysterious words MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN to Belshazzar, the Babylonian prince, as the prediction of his demise.
The second term, TEKEL—a shekel weight— Daniel interpreted as “you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
What balance?
That of God.
Scales and the Standards of God
Scales and balances don’t appear often in the Old Testament, but enough to know that honesty in business dealing was important: “Do not steal;” “Do not bear false witness.”
Obviously in our world of greed and desire, nothing has changed with respect to the warped world that constantly rebels against the standards of the Ten Commandments.
In the third seal of Revelation 6:5–6, those standards appear in the image of scales (aka balances), but take an interesting turn in the light of God’s grace.
Once again, in my view the rider on the white horse and the red horse was Jesus, and now I argue the same for the black horse.
As with the red horse, modern commentaries and most of the ancient ones see the black horse as sinister and the scales, wheat, barley, oil and wine as signs of famine brought on by the war of the second seal. The main differences between them are when the famine took/takes/will take place, whether during the Jewish War, later in the Roman Empire, in the future “Great Tribulation,” or generally through history in war-time.
But one commentator, David Aune, sees a stunning anomaly: “However, since balance scales are useful only for determining weight, and the focus in v 6 is the exorbitant cost of grain by volume, there appears to be a basic inconsistency present … the presence of the scales is not illuminated by what follows.”
That anomaly suggests there is something else going on!
Once again I am going to assess this seal as Jesus revealing something about himself—and I think that anomaly will solve itself.
The Third Seal and the Human-faced Creature
And when he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.”
In this vision, the Lamb opened the third seal, like the rest of them, and again John heard a creature say, “Come.”
This was the human-faced creature.
Unlike the (victorious) Lion of the first seal and the (sacrificial) ox of the second seal, which both relate fairly easily to the horse and rider of each, the human-faced creature is a bit more difficult to interpret.
My gut is to link this creature to the humanity of Jesus.
Jesus as Incarnate God was the true specimen of humanity, the second Adam unmarred by the fall.
As such Jesus was the perfect standard by which we all are compared—and by which we all fail apart from the grace of God.
(continued)
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Weights
And I looked, and behold, a black horse, and the one sitting on it having a balancing scale in his hand.
The balancing scale (Greek zygos—the same word as yoke) was used in commerce to correctly ascertain the weight of a product, just like our scales today, though ours are electronic and rely on someone to certify their validity.
Ancient scales relied on certified standard weights. Volumes were determined by standard sized containers like today.
Ezekiel 45:10-12 exemplified this principle:
“You shall have just balances, a just ephah, and a just bath. The ephah and the bath shall be of the same measure, the bath containing one tenth of a homer, and the ephah one tenth of a homer; the homer shall be the standard measure. The shekel shall be twenty gerahs; twenty shekels plus twenty-five shekels plus fifteen shekels shall be your mina” (ESV).ᵀ
The rider on the black horse epitomized the weighing of humanity in the cosmic scales of God, whose justice was perfect.*
Throughout the Bible, there is a thread of “no preference.”
God does not see a face, He only sees the heart of a person.
There is no color or status with God, only the living soul that He created and must stand before Him to account for his or her thoughts and actions in this life.
The objective standard is found in the Torah, specifically the Ten Commandments (prohibitions), the Shema (You shall love the Lord your God …) and the command to love your neighbor (positive commands).
The balance in the hand of the rider represented the weighing of thoughts and deeds against the cosmic principles God revealed in those commandments—they were already laws or principles of life and death before Moses, but God’s words to Moses made them explicit (see Romans 5/Galatians 3–4).
The entire Old Testament is “testament” to the inability of humans in their fallen state to do any truly good work apart from self-interest—even the heroes of faith Abraham, Moses, David failed miserably.
Only faith in God could bring about that possibility of living within the framework for life that God imbedded into his creation, and those heroes did just that because they looked to God even in their weakness.
Enter Jesus.
He who held the balance on the black horse held the perfect weight on one side (the Law) and was the perfect weight on the other side.
Jesus’s life was the full expression of perfect, faithful humanity and his death equalized the scale for the rest of humanity—and effective for all those of faith who accepted the price he paid.
The black horse symbolized that death (as the red horse symbolized Jesus’s sacrifice).
And measures
And I heard as a voice in the middle of the four living creatures, “a measure of wheat for a denarius and three measures of barley for a denarius …
The voice in the middle of the four creatures—as Oecumenius plainly saw—came from the One on the throne, God.
The words of God were simply an expression of the gospel: Jesus paid our debt and went beyond to bring healing to our lives and into fellowship with God and one another.
Once again, we need not leave the Bible to understand this verse!
Appeals to famine may make sense from the outside perspective of disaster, politics and war—the price listed for wheat and barley was extraordinarily inflated—but internally to the Bible there is gospel symbolism of the work of Christ on the cross.
The words from the throne were eternal words, not fleeting ones.
Wheat and barley and olive oil and wine were staples of everyday existence and they were used for the Jewish temple rituals and in Jewish festivals. Grain and oil and wine were mentioned together 64 times in the Old Testament (and even more with wheat, barley and bread)! They were promised blessings from God (Deuteronomy 7:13; Jeremiah 31:12; Joel 2:19), and curses in their absence. They were to be tithed. The Promised Land was “a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey” (Deuteronomy 8:8).
But in Jesus’s parables, wheat, or generically grain, referred to people (the harvest of the seed on good soil, the wheat among the weeds that was harvested and separated—even the fruit of the vine in John 15). Jesus told his disciples “the fields are white unto harvest” which would have included wheat and barley but referred to people (John 4:31-34). In his telling of the feeding of the 5000, John remarked that the five loaves were of barley and that Jesus gathered up 12 baskets of remains from the barley loaves “so that nothing would be lost” (John 6:12–13)—symbolic of people.
In John 12, Jesus told his disciples when some Gentiles arrived, “Unless a grain of wheat falling to the ground dies, it remains alone [i.e. a single grain seed], but if it dies it will bear much fruit [i.e. heads of grain].”
In this vision, the price of barley and wheat in Revelation 6:6 are highly inflated—precious commodities costing way more than normal.
If this grain is symbolic of people, who is it that pays the price?
Jesus.
We have something of the same going on in the Parable of the Good Samaritan—the Samaritan paid the innkeeper two denarii for his care. That Good Samaritan—Jesus—paid the price for the battered man’s salvation. Here in Revelation 6 he paid the necessary price for a harvest of souls (two denarii!).
The fourth century writer Tyconius wrote in this vein on 6:5:
“But also he teaches that the price of the wheat and barley is one [and the same]. For if there are small and great people, although one surpasses another in sanctity through merit, both have been redeemed by one perfect price. Although gifts of grace differ, nevertheless the price is at the same level as the merit; whether great and small, or bishops and people, he shows that the body is one.”
Later in Revelation 14:14-15, the Son of Man reaped that same harvest of souls in another picture of salvation.
We are those both bought and reaped.
(cont.)
… and the oil and the wine do not harm.”
Once again the prevailing view is that in times of famine, oil and wine were so precious as to not even be for sale (except perhaps for the rich). Some see olive oil and wine as stand-ins (aka metonymies) for olive groves and vineyards, but I don’t see how with other perfectly acceptable terms for each (ἐλαιών and ἀμπελών).
But the Old and New Testaments have plenty of olive oil and wine to process with respect to this phrase. Oil—Hebrew shemen, used 196 times—was used for cooking, for light, for cosmetics, for lubrication. In the temple, oil was everywhere: it lit the lamps and was used to make the bread of the Presence; it was mixed with flour for grain offerings; it was used to anoint the tabernacle, priests (along with blood) and kings (and as an everyday anointing for feet and hair).
In Zechariah 4, two olive trees provided a continuous flow of oil to the bowl that supplied the menorah lamps. In 1 Maccabees a miraculous flow of oil kept the menorah lit, celebrated during Hanukkah. (Also remember Elisha and the widow).
In Jesus’s parable of the ten virgins, olive oil was the fuel to light the entrance lamp to the wedding feast. Oil was mentioned over and over in the New Testament for anointing as a healing agent.
The Good Samaritan used oil and wine to dress the half-dead man’s wounds.
Wine is all over the place in the Old Testament as normal drink, but also in the Temple rituals as a drink offering.
In the New Testament, wine is associated with Jesus—certainly his first miracle, but primarily at the last supper: this fruit of the vine is the new covenant in my blood.
The blood Jesus shed was symbolized by wine pressed from grapes.
Oil and wine were mentioned together numerous times in the Old Testament (Genesis 28:18; 35:14; Exodus 29:40, etc). In Psalm 23 David sings, “you anoint my head with oil, my cup runneth over.” Wine and oil (often with grain) represent abundance, and their absence disaster.
So our question is what does the voice from the throne mean by “the oil and the wine do not harm”?
Once again grammar makes a difference.
Unlike wheat and barley just mentioned (or a bow, or a crown, or a great sword—and sword, famine, and death in the fourth seal) which are unspecified in Greek, oil and wine both have an article: the oil and the wine.
This oil and wine is specified—particular oil and particular wine set apart for a particular purpose.
Another way of putting the phrase is “Nothing is to happen to this oil and this wine because it is meant for something.”
This visionary oil and wine once again is metaphorical—the image points beyond to something else.
I detect several possibilities, though I am still not fully confident.
First, the oil and wine could pick up on the healing balm of oil and wine in the Good Samaritan and connect with the price paid to the innkeeper and repeated here. Jesus heals (oil), sacrifices (wine as blood), and purchases us (the denarii).**
But once again I ask, why the specificity?
Another possibility is to see the oil and wine as set aside for the marriage supper of the Lamb.
A great feast is ahead for those bought by the Lamb.
The oil and the wine could be set aside for that purpose—but never mentioned again.
Finally, and related to the salvific vein of all three seals so far (and this is the one I am most drawn to) the oil and the wine might just relate to the Eucharist—the Last Supper.
The grain may refer to people, but also can refer to flour, which mixed with oil and baked creates bread—the body of Christ.
The wine is self-explanatory as the blood of Christ.***
Both were metaphors at the last supper, and they function the same way here.
Jesus Christ was the perfect fulfillment of God’s desire for humanity and he willingly paid the price via his body and blood poured out on the cross for us.
The scales were balanced and we are the beneficiaries and celebrate together as his body.
Altogether this Third Seal is once again about gospel. Every seal bring a different viewpoint to the gospel message, but together show us that the life and death of Jesus were “good news.”
ᵀEphah: Roughly 22 liter dry measure; Bath: 22 liter liquid measure; Homer 220 liters dry or liquid; Shekel: 11-12 grams of metal; Gerah 1/20 shekel weight; Minah: weight of 60 shekels
*Oecumenius comes close to this idea: “The balance therefore is the symbol of the righteous judgment of the Lord on our behalf, so that we may also say boldly to him, “You effected judgment and justice for me,” so that we gentiles may know that we are human beings, and that we may not be like beasts dragged along “with bit and bridle”? and led astray by the destructive tyrants.”
**Andrew of Caesarea: “The command do not harm wine and oil means not to disregard the healing through returning to Christ, which healed the one who has “fallen among robbers,” in order that those who through longsuffering were about to renew the fight would not be carried off by death.”
***Tyconius: “In the wine and oil he spoke of the unction and blood of the Lord.”
Observations on the Greek Text of Revelation
I only have one observation, which I mentioned in the main post and will continue to be of importance.
John is very intentional with the article (“the” Greek ho) throughout Revelation in its absence or presence.
When present it either specifies—as the oil and the wine—or it points back to a previously mentioned person or concept (the third seal; the third living creature). There are other uses also, but never as indefinite.