Who are the four horsemen of the Apocalypse?

Where they appear

The book of Revelation was written by a man named John on the island of Patmos, around AD 95. In chapter 4 he sees a door opened in heaven and a throne of light and color. The one on the throne holds a scroll “sealed shut with seven seals,” and no one is worthy to open it, until a Lamb appears, standing “as though it had been slain.” In the book, the Lamb is Christ. As he breaks each of the first four seals, one of four living creatures calls out “Come!”, and a rider gallops out.

The four riders

• White horse. “He who sat on it had a bow. A crown was given to him, and he came out conquering, and to conquer” (Revelation 6:2). Some scholars hear Parthian horse archers, Rome’s great eastern fear. Some early readers took him instead for the gospel itself, riding out to conquer.
• Red horse. Its rider is given power “to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another,” and “a great sword” (6:4). War.
• Black horse. Its rider holds a balance for weighing food, and a voice cries out prices (6:5–6). Famine.
• Pale horse. The last rider has a name.

And behold, a pale horse, and the name of he who sat on it was Death. Hades followed with him.

The Greek word for pale, chlōros, is the color of a corpse, a sickly yellow-green. Together the four are given authority over a fourth of the earth, “to kill with the sword, with famine, with death, and by the wild animals of the earth.”

Famine at market prices

The black rider’s cry is one of the most down-to-earth lines in the book: “A choenix of wheat for a denarius, and three choenix of barley for a denarius! Don’t damage the oil and the wine!” A choenix was about a liter of grain, one day’s bread for one person. A denarius was a laborer’s daily wage. A whole day’s work for one day’s wheat: famine prices, perhaps ten times the usual. Revelation’s first readers would have known exactly what that meant.

How the picture took hold

Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of 1498 fixed the image for five centuries: four riders trampling everything in a single charge. In the text they ride out one at a time. Today “the four horsemen of the apocalypse” means any set of four disasters, from economics to marriage counseling.

As for what they mean, readers divide. Some see predictions of the end of time. Many historians read them as the familiar terrors of John’s own world, conquest, war, famine and plague, set inside a vision that ends, a few chapters later, with “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1). Herald tells it the way the text does, with the history around it.