Bible Commentaries
Revelation 9

Verses 1-21

(b) IX 1-21 A group of Two Trumpets—The literary and psychological inspiration of the strange imagery of the following passage is clear; but lack of space may make the attempted explanation seem overdogmatic. Briefly, John sees a host of evil spirits and a host of invading Parthians. He symbolizes the spirits by ’locusts’. But, having all that he proposes to say already in his mind, the imagery proper to each part infuses itself into the other: he equips the locusts with features suited to the Parthian cavalry, and the Parthian horsemen, with features proper to the diabolic locusts.

1. The Star that has already fallen from heaven (perfect tense: cf.Luke 18:18) is the Angel of the Abyss: in Hebrew, Abaddon; in Greek, Apolluon. Abaddon, ’Destruction’, meant Sheol (Hades), the pit into which souls sank, but it could be personified, as here (cf.Job 26:6; Job 28:22). The Pit is pictured as having a shaft up to the earth, with a padlocked lid. The Destroying Spirit receives its key (cf. 1:18; the Keys of Death and Hades; and 20.1).

2 ff. He unlocks it: a column of smoke arises whence issue evil spirits dense as a plague of locusts. But they are scorpion-locusts, able to sting with their tails (and are like battle-horses (7), making a noise like a cavalry charge (9); they wear gold crowns, have human faces and hair like women’s, and wear iron breastplates. They are not allowed to injure vegetation (as locusts do) but to hurt men (as scorpions do) yet not to kill them. This plague lasts five months. For plagues of locusts, see Exodus 10:12-15, but especially Joel 1:4, and ch 2 where a real plague of locusts is idealized as an invading army—in Apoc the invading army is symbolized as diabolic locusts. Locusts have often (apart from the whirr, indeed roar, of their onset) suggested a horse-like resemblance (German: ’Heupferd’. Italian: ’cavaletta’. An Arab saying is that they are, as to their head, like horses; their chest, like lions; their feet, like camels; their body, like snakes; their antennae, like virgins) but John’s locusts have tails ’ like scorpions’. Why? (a) Nearer-East art was full of composite figures— men-scorpions, men-horses, men-ants often having one or more scorpion-tails. A similar sort of figure represented the zodiac sign ’Sagittarius, ’the Archer’: the Greek Apollo was an archer whose arrows inflicted pestilence: the kind of image was, ’therefore, familiar in John’s environment. (b) But why does he here select, precisely, scorpions? We shall see this when we reach the 6th Trumpet—enough to say, now, that the Parthians were eminently horsemen, and archers, and able to shoot back over their shoulders, as scorpions strike with their tails back over their body. So the devil-locusts are seen also as devil-scorpions.

13 ff. A voice from one of the ’horns’ (i.e. at one of the corners) of the Altar bids the 4 angels who are ’bound’ by the Euphrates to be loosed so that the winds may destroy one third of mankind (i.e. of the civilized world). These are not ’bad’ angels, but simply in charge of winds and hitherto forbidden to let them blow. The Book of the Ethiopic Enoch (56:5) speaks of the Parthians as sent against the Holy Land and the Syriac version of 4 Esdras says: ’Let these 4 kings (cf. Daniel’s ’princes’?) be loosed, that are bound by the great river Euphrates, who shall destroy one third of mankind’. This alludes to the Parthians, invasion by whom was anxiously feared by the Roman Empire.

16. The Parthians are essentially horsemen —John hears that their forces are 200 millions. Here the material fact begins to take on features proper to the spiritual symbol, the locusts, just as they had taken on features proper to the Parthians.

17. These horsemen have breastplates the colouir of fire, hyacinth and brimstone, the horses have heads like lions snorting flame, smoke and sulphur; their tails were like serpents with heads—with these they do their harm. Thus the picture of the scorpions ’colours’ that of the cavalry just as the long-haired backward-shooting Parthian provided the scorpion-element in the description of locusts with antennae like floating female hair. The two visions shoot details back and forth into one another: the devils are ’Parthianized’, the Parthians become half Satanic. But both the details, and the method, so strange to us, would have seemed almost common-place to John’s contemporaries. Of course the Parthians stand but as symbol of all world-enduring onslaughts upon God’s elect: Satan keeps stirring up wicked men who become the very instruments of hell: indeed, the Parthians as such remain hardly a moment in the forefront of John’s consciousness.

20-21. Despite these woes, men do not repent of their idolatries—their sinful worship of whatsoever they prefer to God.