Revelation 6:8

χλωρός, pale or livid as a corpse. ἐπάνω αὐτοῦ, for the ordinary ἐπʼ αὐτόν, a grammatical variation which has no special significance. In this Dureresque vignette the spectre of Hades, bracketed here as elsewhere with Death, accompanies the latter to secure his booty of victims. So Nergal, the Babylonian Pluto, is not content with ruling the regions of the dead but appears as an active personification of violent destruction, especially pestilence and war, inflicting his wounds on large masses rather than on individuals (Jastrow, 66, 67). A similar duality of conception, local and personal, obtained in Semitic and Hellenic mythology (cf e.g., Revelation 9:11); only, Death is not here personified as an angel (with Jewish theology, cf. Eisenmenger's Eindecktes Jud. i. 854 f., 862 f.). As the chief partner in this grim league, he is given destructive power over a certain quarter of the earth (τὸ τέτ. colloquially); his agents are the usual apocalyptic scourges (cf. Ezekiel 14:21, Ps. Sol. 13:2 f., with Plut. Iside, 47 for the Iranian expectation of λοιμὸς καὶ λιμός as inflictions of Ahriman) against which the Jewish evening prayer was directed (“keep far from us the enemy, the pestilence, the sword, famine and affliction”). War, followed by famine which bred pestilence, was familiar in Palestine (Jos. Antiq. xv. 9) during the first century A.D. Indeed throughout the ancient world war and pestilence were closely associated, while wild beasts multiplied and preyed on human life, as the land was left untilled. In Test. Naphth. 8, etc., Beliar is the captain of wild beasts. Note that the prophet sees only the commissions, not the actual deeds, of these four dragoons: not until Revelation 6:12 f. does anything happen. The first four seals are simply arranged on the rabbinic principle (Sohar Gen. fol. 91), “quodcunque in terra est, id etiam in coelo est, et nulla res tarn exigua est in mundo quae non ab alia simili quae in coelo est dependeat”. The four plagues (a Babylonian idea) are adapted from Ezekiel 14:12 f. Contemporary disasters which may have lent vividness to the sketch are collected by Renan (pp. 323 f.).