Revelation 6:8

Fourth seal of fourfold DEATH, Revelation 6:7-8.

8. A pale horse Literally, a green horse; or, as Alford, “when used of flesh implies that greenish pallor which we know as livid; the colour of the corpse in incipient decay, or of the complexion extremely pale through disease.” Death, as riding the horse, was, of course, beheld as a personal being. Hell, hades, is supposed by Stuart to be personified here as well as in Revelation 20:14. It certainly is personified in 1 Corinthians 15:55. But that it is in either case so fully personified as to be shaped into form and figure we doubt. We rather conceive hades, here, to be a shadowy vague, a moving nebulous region, a ghostly receptacle for the souls of men slain by death, and for that purpose following in his track.

Fourth part A limitation divine in its origin, (as indicated by given in previous clause,) yet expressed by the creational fourth as being wrought through creational or secondary causations. Notes on Revelation 9:5; Revelation 9:15.

To kill with The creational four.

Hunger Unlike the third symbol, this is deadly famine.

With death Grotius says, “By the term death, here, according to a Hebraism, we are to understand pestilence. For so death is taken in Jeremiah 9:21; Jeremiah 18:21. So, in the Son of Sirach we read, ( Sir 39:29 ,) ‘pestilence and death,’ where death undoubtedly signifies pestilence. The Syriac, also, as well here as on Luke, renders the Greek word for pestilence by the Hebrew death; and the Septuagint, as well as the Chaldaic and Latin, translate the Hebrew for pestilence by death.” In Ezekiel 14:21, God says, “I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence.”

In conclusion, upon the four creational symbols we may note, that while there is nothing chronological, yet the last three are the ordinary sequents of the first; that is, from conquest result carnage, scarcity, and the fourfold destructions above mentioned.