Revelationchapter 6
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Speaks with:Zechariah 6×4Revelation 6×3Revelation 4×3Revelation 1×2Joel 2×2Isaiah 2×2
Summary
Chapter summary
The Lamb opens six seals and the tribulation begins. A living creature calls 'Come,' and the four horsemen ride, Zechariah's colored horses behind them: a white horse whose rider has a bow and a crown; a red horse whose rider takes peace from the earth; a black horse whose rider holds a balance while a voice prices wheat and says, 'the oil and the wine hurt thou not'; and a pale horse: 'his name was Death; and Hades followed with him.' The fifth seal opens under the altar, where the souls slain for the word of God cry, 'How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood?' The sixth shakes creation, and kings and bondmen alike hide from 'the wrath of the Lamb… and who is able to stand?'
Context
Apocalyptic · John — Revelation overview
- A. 1–8 Four Horsemen Ride at the Lamb's Command
- B. 9–11 Souls Under the Altar: How Long, O Master?
- C. 12–17 The Sky Rolls Back: Hide Us From the Lamb
The outline
A.Four Horsemen Ride at the Lamb's Commandvv. 1 to 8
Read vv. 1 to 8 →B.Souls Under the Altar: How Long, O Master?vv. 9 to 11
Read vv. 9 to 11 →C.The Sky Rolls Back: Hide Us From the Lambvv. 12 to 17
Read vv. 12 to 17 →
The world behind this chapter
Revelation 6The history
The four horsemen ride out of a world the first readers knew by experience. Conquest, war, famine, and death were not abstractions in the first century; they were the recurring furniture of life in the empire.
The rider on the white horse carries a bow, and the bow was the signature weapon of Parthia — the enemy across the Euphrates that Rome could bloody but never hold, and whose mounted archers had destroyed Crassus's army at Carrhae in 53 BC. A conqueror on a white horse with a bow had a face in the eastern imagination.
The third seal is the sharpest economic detail in the book. A measure of wheat for a denarius, three of barley for a denarius — a denarius was about a day's wage for a laborer, and a day's wage buying roughly a day's grain for one person means a working man could no longer feed a family. Then: "see thou hurt not the oil and the wine." The luxuries are untouched while bread prices break households. Anyone who had lived through a grain shortage in a provincial city knew exactly what that looked like.
The fifth seal shows souls under the altar — those killed for the word of God — asking how long. Under an altar is where the blood of a sacrifice was poured out. They are told to rest a little longer.
The sixth seal is cosmic collapse in the language the prophets used: sun black as sackcloth, moon like blood, stars falling, mountains and islands moved. And the powerful hide in caves, asking rocks to fall on them to hide them from the face of the one on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.
What it meant to them
The crucial thing for the first hearers is who starts it. Every one of these riders goes out because the Lamb opens a seal and a living creature says "Come." The chaos they lived under was not loose. It was permitted, measured, and limited.
The martyrs' question — how long? — was their question, asked out loud in the text with no rebuke, and answered with a white robe and a wait. That is not a tidy answer. It was an honest one, and it told them their deaths were counted.
Sources cited
- Colin Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting
- Tacitus, Annals (public domain)
- Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Revelation 6. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
Connections from this chapter
v. 1 · Part of a repeating series
Seal-heptad and bowl-heptad, outer members of the four numbered sevens (churches; seals; trumpets; bowls); situates the churches panel in the book's counted architecture.
Revelation 16:1→Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, “Go, pour out on the earth the seven bowls of God’s wrath.”
Bauckham 1993
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.