Revelation9chapter 9

A locust swarm was a known catastrophe in the eastern Mediterranean. It arrived as a darkening of the sky, stripped every green thing, and left famine behind. Joel had already used a locust invasion as a picture of an army. So the fifth trumpet starts on familiar ground and then goes strange: these locusts do not eat plants, they torment people, and they come up out of a shaft of smoke.

Their king is named twice, in Hebrew and Greek — Abaddon and Apollyon, the Destroyer. Readers in Asia would catch the sound of Apollo, a god with a locust association whose name Domitian's court liked to invoke; the text does not press it, but the resonance was there.

The sixth trumpet releases four angels bound at the great river Euphrates. That river was the Roman empire's eastern boundary and everybody's nightmare line. Beyond it lay Parthia, whose cavalry had destroyed Roman armies, and Rome never securely held it. "An army from beyond the Euphrates" was the first-century equivalent of an air-raid siren.

The number given is two hundred million horsemen — larger than any army the ancient world could imagine, and clearly meant to be. The horses kill with fire and smoke and brimstone out of their mouths and with their tails.

The chapter's saddest line is its last. After all of this, the rest of mankind did not repent of their idols of gold and silver and brass and stone and wood, nor of their murders, sorceries, immorality, or thefts.