The pale horse (fourth seal)--6:7-8. The color of pale was the symbol of death. This seal is specifically called a death procession, but was not a martyr scene. It signifies death by the destructive forces of the sword (war); of hunger (famine); of death (pestilence or disease); and of wild beasts (devoured or ravished). By the sword--as the instrument employed by the rider of the pale horse to accomplish his work of destruction--he is represented as having power to kill. It symbolized the weapon of war waged against Jerusalem. Hunger is the blight of famine, and is descriptive of the mass starvation that prevailed during the siege of Jerusalem. Pestilence is the terror of death by ravishing disease, which also prevailed in the destruction and siege of Jerusalem. The beasts of this symbol do not refer to wild animals, as usually considered, but to cannibalism, as men turned beasts to ravish and devour each other and even to eat the flesh of their children. It occurred during the siege of Jerusalem, according to Jesus in Matthew 24:6-8 and according to the eye witness accounts of Josephus and Pliny. It is declared that death and hell followed the rider of the pale horse. The word is hades, and refers to the domain of death, the realm of the departed, the unseen world of disembodied spirits, the subterranean abode of the dead. There are important distinctions in the uses of hell in the old English text. To translate Gehenna and Hades in the same word hell has had the effect of obliterating the difference between the place of eternal torment and the temporary abode of the dead. Since the descent of Christ into Hades, as described by the psalmist David, in Psalms 16:10 and by the apostle Peter in Acts 2:29, no one prepared for the eventuality of death need fear entrance into this realm nor the passage through it. He who “ was dead and is alive,” holds “ the keys of death and hades,” and from that fear he delivers us. (Hebrews 2:14) The rider of the pale horse was death, and hades was his companion--it followed with him. They were joined together as associates in the dark and ghastly mission of grim Reapers, in the role assigned to them in these seals. To Death and Hades was given power over fourth part of earth: To the rider Death, and his colleague Hades, this power was given by the four creatures; it was the authority to kill by the means named--war, famine, pestilence and ravishment over the fourth part of the earth. The earth is the place of the nations in the vision; and this assignment is made by the fourth beast in the fourth seal, to the fourth rider, of the fourth horse, and his division of work was a fourth part in this pageant of devastation. Elsewhere in the scenes are found the expressions third part and tenth part, apparently intended as proportionate figures of the vast destruction, but without geographical or mathematical significance. The scene of the four horses and riders is a panorama of the war on Jerusalem in a fourfold set of events, an extension of twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew. They represent one set of events, not separate figures for separated periods or ages of the world, such as war in one age, famine in another century, carnage in another generation, and with a final fantastic millennium in the end of the world. It is a combined series fulfilled in one period as foretold by Jesus in Matthew 24:34. The conquest of the victorious rider of the white horse through the bow could not be accomplished without the war on Jerusalem. The red horse of war could not perform without the black horse of famine, or without the pale horse of death in immediate pursuit. To separate the seals by centuries of time is to destroy the entire imagery. The records of Mat 24:1-51, Mark 13:1-37, and Luke 21:1-38, concerning Jerusalem, are counterparts of the seals of Revelation. The works of Josephus on the Palestinian wars give historical fulfillment in the account of the bloody war of the Jews and the siege of Jerusalem. The historical parallels in the history of the Roman empire by Edward Gibbon is a virtual commentary on the book Revelation, in the portion covering the period of the Roman war against Jerusalem. Truly, these things must have shortly come to pass, and verily was the time at hand.