Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride out of a single chapter, Revelation 6, in the New Testament. The scene opens with a scroll in God's right hand, sealed with seven seals. The Lamb of God, also called the Lion of Judah, opens the first four of them. Each opening summons a being, and each being sends forth a rider on a horse of a different colour.

  The book is attributed to John of Patmos and is generally dated to about AD 95. Christianity typically reads the riders as harbingers of the Last Judgment, setting a divine end-time upon the world. Yet the text itself gives a name to only one of them. Every other label has come from later readers.

  So who is the first rider with the bow, a hero or a villain? Does this vision foretell the end of the world, or does it paint the Roman world that John knew? And what did one famous woodcut change about the way the riders are pictured?

  15856

• 2. The White Rider

  ›

  A bow and a crown are all the first rider carries, yet readers have argued over him for centuries. The Greek words are tóxon for the bow and stéphanos for a victor's crown. Later commentary often calls him Conquest, or Zelus, and some suggest he may evoke the Antichrist.

  One broad tradition sees Christ on the white horse. The Gospel of Mark hints that the spread of the gospel may come before the apocalypse and foretell it. White also tends to stand for righteousness in the Bible, and Christ is shown as a conqueror in other passages. On this view, the Antichrist does not appear until the sixth seal is opened. World history since the founding of Christianity unfolds as the horses up to that point.

  A variation names the Holy Spirit instead. The Spirit came upon the Apostles at Pentecost, after Jesus departed Earth. The Lion's triumphant arrival in Heaven, shown in Revelation 5, would then be followed by the sending of the Spirit and the advance of the gospel.

  In 1866, C. F. Zimpel defended the idea that the first horseman was the Antichrist, and more precisely Napoleon Bonaparte. The view later found champions in the United States, including R. F. Franklin in 1898 and W. C. Stevens in 1928. It remains popular in evangelical circles. Pastor Billy Graham took the horseman to be the Antichrist, or false prophets in general.

  Edward Bishop Elliott read the white horse as the Roman Empire at its best. In his account, the colour signified triumph, prosperity and health in the Roman political body. It covered the 80 or 90 years after John's banishment to Patmos, under Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the two Antonines, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Those five crowned emperors, he held, were the agents of a golden age of prosperity, union and good government unstained with civil blood.

  Trajan, described as a Roman Alexander, added Dacia, Armenia, Mesopotamia and other provinces during the first 20 years of that period. The Parthian war ended in triumph. The Marcomannic Wars later brought a succession of victories under the second Antonine, driving German barbarians back into their forests.

  Preterist scholars take a different path, arguing that Revelation speaks only of events in the first century. For them the bow points to the Parthians, who were known for mounted warriors and their skill with bow and arrow. Parthians were also particularly associated with white horses. Some scholars name Vologases I, a Parthian shah who clashed with Rome and won one significant battle in AD 62.

  Other commentaries make the white rider a symbol of war, perhaps exercised on moral grounds, hence the white colour. A newer reading calls him Pestilence and ties him to infectious disease. It appears at least as early as 1906 in a Jewish reference work, and it is common in popular culture. Its origin is unclear. Some translations speak of plague, as in the New International Version, or pestilence, as in the Revised Standard Version, in the passage after the fourth rider appears. The original Greek simply says death, thánatos.

  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez gave this reading an early literary form in his 1916 novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He described the rider as "bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad", with a brass quiver of poisoned arrows "containing the germs of all diseases". The novel was filmed in 1921 and again in 1962.

  110111215

• 3. The Red Rider

  ›

  Fire hides inside the Greek word for the second horse's colour. Purrhós comes from pyr, the word for fire, and some translations call the horse fiery red. Its rider carries a great sword, mákhaira, and is usually taken to be War, or Ares in the Greek form of the name. Red and sword together suggest blood about to be spilled.

  Heraldry gives the raised blade its meaning. A sword held upward, and especially crossed swords, signals war and the entering into battle, as on the coat of arms of Joan of Arc. This horseman brings civil war, in contrast to the war of conquest tied to the first rider. Other commentators think he may stand for the persecution of Christians.

  Commodus is the turning point in Elliott's Roman reading. He was the beloved son of Marcus Aurelius and came to the throne with no rival to remove and no enemies to punish. In Elliott's telling, he became the slave of attendants who gradually corrupted his mind. Peace left the Roman Earth, and insurrection crept through the Empire shortly into his reign.

  After the death of Commodus, Elliott says, a turbulent period of 92 years unfolded. In that time 32 emperors and 27 pretenders hurled each other from the throne through incessant civil warfare. Among the Romans, the sword was the natural badge of the military profession. Elliott saw in the great sword an undue authority used in an unnatural way. Soldiers no longer subject to the Senate turned the Empire into a system of pure military despotism.

  The preterist reading needs no centuries of emperors. Internecine conflict ran rampant in the Roman Empire during and just before the 1st century AD. The rider who takes peace from the Earth may simply reflect the civil strife of John's own day.

  124265859

• 4. The Black Rider

  ›

  One denarius, the daily pay of a soldier, buys a single choenix of wheat in the third rider's vision. A choenix is about 1.1 litres, enough for one person. The same coin would buy enough of the less nutritious barley for three. That puts the price of grain at roughly ten times normal, so a worker would struggle to feed a family. The Gospels mention the denarius repeatedly, including as a day's pay for seasonal labour in the grape harvest. Perhaps the vision means that near the Apocalypse the most necessary food will cost a whole day's wages, leaving nothing beyond bare subsistence.

  The rider carries a pair of scales, zugón in Greek, which suits the weighing of bread in a famine. He is typically drawn as an emaciated man and popularly understood as Famine, or Limos. Other authors see the Lord as a Law-Giver, holding the Scales of Justice.

  Only the black rider arrives with a voice. John hears a speaker, unidentified, from among the four living creatures. The voice announces the prices of wheat and barley and adds, "and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine".

  Several explanations compete for that command. Grain crops would have been more naturally susceptible to famine years or locust plagues than olive trees and grapevines, which root more deeply. The command might also point to luxuries staying plentiful for the wealthy while staples like bread run scarce. Such selective scarcity could come from injustice and the deliberate growing of luxury crops for the rich instead of grain. A third reading says the preserved oil and wine symbolize the Christian faithful, who use both in their sacraments.

  In AD 92, the Roman emperor Domitian tried to curb the excessive growth of grapevines and encourage grain cultivation. A major popular backlash followed, and the effort was abandoned. Some scholars hear an allusion to that episode in the order to spare oil and wine.

  Elliott gave the scales a different meaning. In John's exile on Patmos, the balance was a common symbol of justice because it weighed grain for a set price. The order to spare oil and wine meant that scarcity would fall on necessities such as bread, not on superfluities that men can live without. He leaned on Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which blames excessive taxation, particularly under Emperor Caracalla. History remembers Caracalla as a cruel tyrant and among the worst of the Roman emperors.

  To feed the greed and lavish habits he had excited in the army, old and new taxes were levied on the provinces. The land tax, taxes for services, and heavy contributions of corn, wine, oil and meat were exacted for court, army and capital. Gibbon says Emperor Maximin made it worse, since he "attacked the public property at length". Every city had to buy corn for the multitudes and pay for the games. Temples were "stripped of their most valuable offerings of gold, silver and statues which were melted down and coined into money".

  215859140

• 5. The Pale Rider

  ›

  Death is the only rider the text itself names, as Thánatos in Greek and Mors in Latin. Unlike the other three, he carries no weapon or object. Hades follows him, and Latin calls that place Infernus, a clipping of a phrase meaning the lower place. The biblical Hades is not the same thing as the Greek god or his realm. It was influenced by both, and it works as a middle realm, similar to the Asphodel Meadows, between Heaven and Hell.

  Illustrations nonetheless arm him, often with a scythe or a sword. The other three horsemen are portrayed as human in appearance, and Death is the only one who does not appear to be.

  The colour of his horse is a puzzle. The Koine Greek word is khlōrós, and the Latin is pàllidus. Both can mean pale or green, including greenish-yellow. Translators often choose pale, though ashen, pale green and yellowish green are other possibilities. The Greek word is the root of chlorophyll and chlorine. Because ancient Greek medical writing uses it, several scholars suggest it describes the sickly pallor of a corpse. Some modern artists paint the horse distinctly green.

  The passage reads, "They were given authority over a quarter of the Earth, to kill with sword, famine and plague, and by means of the beasts of the Earth." It is generally taken to refer to Death and Hades. Some commentators apply it to all four horsemen.

  The death of Severus Alexander in AD 235 starts the clock for Elliott. Within about 15 years afterward, he says, an era began that marks every point of this terrible emblem. Gibbon calls the stretch from the great secular games under Emperor Philip to the death of Gallienus in AD 268 the 20 years of shame and misfortune. The ruined empire, he writes, approached the last and fatal moment of its dissolution. Military tyrants and barbarous invaders struck every province, the sword from within and without.

  Elliott follows the four judgments in turn. Famine came as the consequence of carnage and oppression, which demolished the present crop and the hope of future harvests. Disease followed from scanty and unwholesome food. The Plague of Cyprian raged from 250 to 265 in every province, city and almost every family. During part of that time, 5000 people died daily in Rome, and many towns that had escaped the barbarians were entirely depopulated.

  The Sassanid Persians remained uncowed in the East. In the following year, hosts of central Asian Alani spread over Pontus, Cappadocia, Cilicia and Galatia, marking their course with the flames of cities and villages. Wild beasts completed the list. Elliott calls it a well-known law of nature that they quickly occupy scenes of waste and depopulation. After the reign of Gallienus and another 20 or 30 years, their numbers in parts of the empire had grown into a crying evil.

  One apparent mismatch troubles the match. The text limits the devastation to a fourth of the Earth, but in the history of the period the pale horse's damage spread over all of it. Elliott points to Jerome's Latin Vulgate, which reads over the four parts of the Earth. That reading requires some quadripartition of the Empire. Separate from the central Italian fourth, three divisions arose in the West, the East and Illyricum, under Posthumus, Aureolus and Zenobia respectively. Diocletian later legitimized those divisions.

  Diocletian ended this long period of anarchy. Yet the succession of civil wars and invasions had left suffering, disorder and crime, and a moral lethargy from which the empire never recovered. Its condition resembled the one that followed the Black Death of the Middle Ages.

  213558593

• 6. Rival Readings

  ›

  For centuries before the Reformation, most commentaries on Revelation saw only one horseman, not four. That single rider, they held, was Christ himself, riding the four horses in succession. The sixth-century Greek exegete Oecumenius took this view, as did Berengaudus, a French Benedictine monk of Ferrières Abbey in the same period. So did some medieval illuminations. The idea persisted later in the work of Luis del Alcázar, a Spanish Jesuit, in 1612, and Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish Orientalist, in 1622. Jacques de Bordes, a French capuchin, followed in 1639, and the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg in 1766.

  Albrecht Dürer's woodcut changed the picture. Artwork that shows the horsemen as a group, such as his famous print, suggests that all four represent different aspects of the same tribulation.

  The prophetic reading looks forward instead. Some Christians interpret the horsemen as a prophecy of a future Tribulation, in which many on Earth will die from multiple catastrophes. The four are the first of a series of Seal judgments, which give humans a chance to repent before they die. A new, beautiful Earth is then created for the faithful.

  John Walvoord, a premillennialist, believed the seals will be opened during the Great Tribulation. In his scheme, the first horseman is the Antichrist, the second a global war and the third an economic collapse. The fourth is a die-off of one quarter of the world's population. A global dictatorship under the Antichrist and the remaining plagues come after.

  Elliott's historicist reading ties each seal to a dated change in the Roman world. The first seal concerned what would happen soon after John saw his visions on Patmos. The second, third and fourth followed in chronological sequence, each with its own commencing date. Their general subject is the decline and fall, after a prosperous era, of the Empire of Heathen Rome.

  Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints draw on Joseph Smith, who described the book as containing the hidden things of God's economy concerning this Earth during the seven thousand years of its temporal existence. Each seal therefore represents 1,000 years. Apostle Bruce R. McConkie taught of the first seal, "The most transcendent happenings involved Enoch and his ministry." He described Enoch as a general over the armies of the saints who "went forth conquering and to conquer".

  The red horse then covers roughly 3,000 BC to 2,000 BC, including the wickedness and violence that led to the Great Flood. The black horse covers the era of Joseph, son of Israel, who was sold into Egypt, and the famines of that time. The pale horse covers the thousand years leading to the birth of Jesus Christ. It includes both physical death from great warring empires and spiritual death through apostasy.

  145474858

• 7. Modern Decoders

  ›

  Colour became a code for some American Protestant Evangelical interpreters, who regularly see the horsemen speaking to contemporary events. Pastor Irvin Baxter Jr. of Endtime Ministries espoused one such scheme. Red often stands for Communism, and the white horse with its crown for Catholicism. Black has been used as a symbol of Capitalism, while green represents the rise of Islam.

  The angels of the four winds offer another match. Some equate the horsemen with them, and tradition links Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel with the four cardinal directions.

  Others compare the seals with the Olivet Discourse and its signs of the approaching end of the world. Those signs are likened to birth pains, which come more frequently and intensely as Christ's return nears. On this view the horsemen stand for the rise of false religions, false prophets and false messiahs. They also stand for more wars and rumours of wars, escalating natural disasters and famines, and growing persecution, martyrdom, betrayal and loss of faith.

  Anatoly Fomenko, a new chronologist, goes in a wholly different direction. He argues that Revelation is largely astrological in nature. In his reading, the four horsemen are the planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

  515314546

• 8. Older Echoes

  ›

  Zechariah mentions coloured horses twice, centuries before Revelation was written. The first passage has three colours: red, speckled or brown, and white. The second has four teams of horses pulling chariots, in red, black, white and finally dappled, or "grisled and bay". These second horses are called "the four spirits of heaven, going out from standing in the presence of the Lord of the whole world."

  They patrol the Earth and keep it peaceful. Some Christian interpretations assume that when the tribulation begins, that peace is taken away, so the patrolling horses turn to terrifying the places they guard.

  Ezekiel supplies the four living creatures. Revelation 4:6-8 describes them in terms similar to Ezekiel 1:5-12. In Revelation, each creature summons a horseman, whereas in Ezekiel they follow wherever the spirit leads, without turning.

  Ezekiel 14:21 adds a list. There the Lord enumerates his "four disastrous acts of judgment" against the idolatrous elders of Israel: sword, famine, wild beasts and pestilence. A symbolic interpretation of the Four Horsemen links the riders to those four judgments, which appear again in the commission given to the pale rider.

  545557156