Third Seal – Rider on the Black Horse (verses 5-6)

5 When He opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a black horse! And its rider had a pair of scales in his hand. 6 And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine!”

The color “black” portrays “grief and mourning.” In it is no light. Blackness describes the cheerless sky clothed in sackcloth when Jehovah stretches forth His hand in rebuke. That’s how Isaiah described it, Isaiah 50, and verse 3 [“I clothe the heavens with blackness, And I make sackcloth their covering.”]. The land was in desolation, and the earth mourns and the heavens are made black, according to Jeremiah, Jeremiah 4, verse 28 [“For this shall the earth mourn, And the heavens above be black, Because I have spoken. I have purposed and will not relent, Nor will I turn back from it.”]. And in the midst of the drought, the depressed people expressed their grief by sitting in black, Jeremiah 4, and verse 8 [“For this, clothe yourself with sackcloth, Lament and wail. For the fierce anger of the LORD Has not turned back from us.”] In the judgment that is described when we get to the fifth seal, the sun became black as sackcloth, Revelation 6, verse 12 [“I looked when He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood.”]

As we think about the relationship of what John saw here and how this image of blackness, of darkness, is related to grief and mourning, we can see, then, that the black horse symbolizes grief and woe, which was the lot of persecuted saints who followed the Lord, who preached the Gospel, who accepted the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So, there is the spiritual warfare; there are casualties; there is the grief and the mourning which will be a reality, as well.

The rider has scales in his hand. What’s this information here that speaks about the wheat and the barely, and the oil and the wine? There would be for those who were followers of the Lord, for those who were “in the Way,” a scarcity of food and a complete lack of luxury. Wheat and barley were staples of the diet in that day. A denarius [the plural is “denarii”; a small silver coin of ancient Rome; a gold coin of the Roman Empire equivalent to 25 denarii] (some translations use “shilling” or other denominations of money)…a denarius was a day’s wage for a laborer. A common laborer in that day was paid on a daily basis. Their daily pay was a denarius. Well, if a denarius bought one measure of wheat and three of barley, then things would be very scarce because, what of the family of the laborer? That amount that is stated there in verse 6, regardless of the measure, whether it’s a quart or whatever, that is a day’s wage for a day’s food for one laborer.

Well, what about the rest of the laborer’s family? What about the wife, the children? Things would be very scarce. Why was that the case? Was it because there was some great famine which was taking place in that day? Not necessarily. The implication is that because of who they were, because of what they believed, because of what they practiced, because they would not bow the knee to Caesar, because they would not “give in” to the demands that were placed upon them, then the saints would not be people who were looked upon with favor and they would suffer, even to the point of not having enough food to eat.

There are a couple of different points of view concerning the statement about not hurting the oil and the wine One view is that oil and wine, while they were common and they were part of the diet, even of the common man, the suggestion is that those items might, for the Christian, become luxury items. They were more expensive. They were harder to obtain and they would, perhaps, not have been as easily available.

There is another view. I thought this was interesting when I read it. Let me share it with you. This is from Brother W. B. West’s book [Revelation Through First Century Glasses]. I’ll just read the entire paragraph: “A measure of wheat for a denarius, or a penny, represented the pay for a complete day’s work by a man. Three measures of barley, in as much as barley was less expensive than wheat, indicated the same. ‘…hurt not the oil and wine.’ The oil and the wine in the Empire of Rome were very lucrative products. (Now, this is a little different view of this. jkp) We have an actual document stating that Domician, the contemporary Emperor, issued a decree to trim the vineyards in the provinces and destroy some of them, but he preserved the vineyards in Italy. So goes forth this decree, ‘don’t hurt the oil and the wine.’ ”

So, in the provinces and so on, they trimmed the vineyards; but in Rome, they kept them growing and “don’t hurt the oil and wine.” Interesting, I thought.