The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Explained

Four riders come out of the first four seals of Revelation 6, and the chapter is far shorter than its reputation. The whole passage runs to eight verses, and it names only one of the four.

Here is the short version. The text gives you a colour, an object and an effect for each rider, and a name for the last one only. Everything else, including the familiar labels Conquest, War and Famine, is inference. The famous headings are a summary written by readers, not a caption written by John, and the first rider is genuinely contested.

The setting

The riders are not a free-standing scene. In Revelation 5 a sealed scroll is presented, no one in creation is found worthy to open it, and the Lamb takes it. Chapter 6 is what happens when he begins.

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. Revelation 6:1

The "four beasts" here are the four living creatures of chapter 4, not the beast of chapter 13. Each of the first four seals is opened by the Lamb and announced by one of them. Whatever else the riders are, in the structure of the book they ride because the Lamb permits it, and every one of them receives what he has: a crown "was given", power "was given", authority "was given". The passive verbs are consistent and deliberate.

The white horse

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. Revelation 6:2

This is the disputed one, and it has been disputed since the second century. Both cases are worth stating properly, because the whole reading of the passage tips on it.

The case that the rider is Christ or the gospel. White in Revelation is consistently the colour of holiness and vindication: white robes, a white stone, a white throne. In Revelation 19:11 Christ himself rides out on a white horse. The verb here is nikaō, to conquer, the same verb used of Christ and of faithful believers throughout the book. Jesus said in Mark 13:10 that the gospel must first be published among all nations before the end, which gives a reason for a gospel-advance to lead the sequence. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, took the rider as Christ, and that reading has continued in Reformed and Catholic commentary since.

The case that the rider is conquest, war or a counterfeit. He carries a toxon, a bow, while Christ in Revelation 19 fights with a sword out of his mouth and carries no weapon in his hands. His crown is a stephanos, a victor's wreath, and it is given to him; the Christ of Revelation 19:12 wears many diadēmata, royal crowns, which nobody hands him. He is grouped with three riders who are plainly calamities, and a set of four usually means four of a kind. And a mounted archer had an obvious referent for John's first readers: the Parthians, east of the Euphrates, the one power Rome could not subdue, famous for cavalry archery and for white horses.

Neither case has ever driven the other from the field. Careful commentators on both sides concede the strength of the opposing argument, which is a fair sign that the text underdetermines the answer.

The red horse

And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. Revelation 6:4

The colour is pyrros, fiery red, from the word for fire. The rider does not bring an invading army; he takes peace away and people kill one another. That detail is worth pausing on. This is civil violence, neighbours turning on neighbours, rather than a foreign war.

The black horse

And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, 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. Revelation 6:5-6

Scales in the market are how you weigh out grain when there is not enough of it to sell by the sack. The measure is a choinix, roughly the daily grain ration for one adult. The penny is a dēnarion, a labourer's daily wage. So a full day's work buys one day's bread for one person, and nothing for anyone else in the household. Barley, the cheaper grain, goes three measures to the same coin.

Estimates of the normal rate put this at about eight times the ordinary price. Meanwhile the oil and the wine, the products of olive groves and vineyards, are not to be touched. Interpreters read that last line in two ways: as a limit on the judgement, or as an observation that scarcity falls on staples while luxuries carry on undisturbed.

The pale horse

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. Revelation 6:8

"Pale" translates chlōros, which is the ordinary Greek word for green. Revelation itself uses it for grass in 8:7 and for vegetation in 9:4, and it is the root behind the English chlorophyll. Applied to a horse or a face it means the yellowish-green pallor of the sick and the dying, the colour Greek medical writers used for a patient going the wrong way. English has no single word for it, which is why translators reach for "pale".

This is the only rider who is named, and the only one who arrives with a companion. "Hell" here is Hadēs, the realm of the dead, following behind to collect. Their four instruments, sword, hunger, death and wild beasts, are lifted almost directly from Ezekiel 14:21, where God speaks of "my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence". John is not inventing a new list; he is quoting an old one.

The reach is a fourth part of the earth. Limited, and stated as a limit.

How the four readings date them

The four labels below are about when prophecy is fulfilled. They are separate from premillennial, amillennial and postmillennial, which are about the thousand years of Revelation 20, and both choices are live at once.

Preterists point to the years around the Jewish war of AD 66 to 70: Roman campaigns, civil bloodshed in the year of four emperors, food shortages in besieged Jerusalem, and mass death. On this reading the seals describe a world John's readers could see out of the window.

Historicists assign the riders to stretches of history in order, a scheme worked out at length by writers from Joseph Mede in the seventeenth century onward. The white rider is commonly the Roman empire at its height, with the following seals tracing its decline.

Futurists place all four inside a still-future tribulation, and this is the reading in which the first rider is most often the Antichrist, arriving with a bloodless conquest and a peace that does not hold. It is the version behind most prophecy paperbacks and films.

Idealists take the riders as the permanent conditions of history under God's hand: conquest, war, scarcity and death, recurring in every century rather than queuing up once. On this reading the passage is not a schedule and was never meant to be read as one.

What the four have in common

Whatever their date, the riders are bounded on every reading. Each is given his authority, the fourth reaches a quarter of the earth and no further, and the whole sequence begins because the Lamb opens a seal.

Which of the four datings you find natural is not decided in chapter 6. It is decided by how you already read Revelation as a book, a question with three positions on the millennium and four on the timing of fulfilment, combining into twelve views that real churches and real scholars actually hold. Once you can see those twelve laid out together, the argument about a bow and a crown stops being a riddle and becomes a legible disagreement.