Four Horsemen

Text and Content

The passage appears in Revelation 6:1-8. Before the heavenly throne, the Lamb opens the seals of the scroll one by one, and each time one of the four living creatures cries out, "Come." A horseman then appears. This scene opens the judgment visions that continue through the seven seals, trumpets, and bowls.

• White horse: Its rider holds a bow, is given a crown, and goes forth "conquering, and to conquer" (6:2).
• Red horse: Its rider is given a great sword and the power to take peace from the earth, so that people kill one another (6:4).
• Black horse: Its rider holds "a pair of balances in his hand." A voice is heard saying, "A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine" (6:5-6).
• Pale horse: Its rider is named Death, and Hades (rendered "Hell" in the KJV; the realm of the dead) follows him. They are given power over the fourth part of the earth "to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth" (6:8).

Background

A vision of horses of various colors sent by God to go to and fro through the earth first appears in Zechariah 1:8-11 and 6:1-8. Revelation is understood to draw on this Old Testament imagery. The denarius (rendered "penny" in the KJV) was equivalent to a laborer's daily wage at the time (Matthew 20:2). The scene of the third horse is therefore read as depicting exorbitant prices and famine, in which a day's earnings buy barely a day's worth of grain. The Greek word for the color of the fourth horse, chlōros, means yellowish green or pale.

Interpretation and Debate

Interpreters generally agree that the second through fourth horsemen represent war, famine, and death. The first horseman, on the white horse, is the subject of widely differing interpretations.

• Christ or the advance of the gospel: This view points out that the rider on the white horse in Revelation 19:11 is Christ.
• A false christ or the Antichrist: This view points out that the horses that follow all bring calamity. It is common in dispensationalist interpretation.
• A symbol of wars of conquest: Some scholars hold that the bow recalls the peoples of mounted archers who threatened Rome at the time.

The period to which the vision as a whole refers also varies according to one's method of interpreting Revelation. Preterism sees it as describing events of the first-century Roman period. Historicism sees it as fulfilled successively over the course of church history. Futurism sees it as the tribulation of the end times, while idealism reads it as a symbol of calamities that recur in every age. Of these, the view that it describes end-time tribulation is bound up with positions on eschatology and the millennium. The passage is also read alongside the Synoptic passage in which Jesus calls wars, famines, and earthquakes "the beginning of sorrows" (Matthew 24:6-8).

In popular culture, the four riders are commonly called "Conquest, War, Famine, and Pestilence" or "War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death." The text itself names only the fourth, "Death"; the other names come from interpretation. The scene has also become widely known through works of Western art such as Albrecht Dürer's woodcut. Many denominations urge caution toward interpretations that directly equate the calamities in the text with specific current events in order to calculate dates.