Revelation 6:8

Pale. The color of fear and death. With the pale horse the times of distress reach a fearful climax (see on vs. 2, 4, 5).

Hell. Gr. hadēs, “the abode of the dead” (see on Matt. 11:23). Death and hell are here personified and represented, the one as a rider on the horse, and the other as following along.

Fourth part of the earth. Probably signifying a wide area of the earth.

Sword. Gr. rhomphaia (see on ch. 1:16). The series—sword, hunger, death (or pestilence; see below on “death”), and beasts—may be thought of as portraying the progressive deterioration of civilization that follows warfare. The ravages of the sword, killing men and destroying crops, produce hunger; hunger, resulting in the breakdown of health, brings pestilence; and when pestilence has taken its toll, human society is so weakened that it cannot protect itself against the inroads of wild beasts.

When applied to a particular period of Christian history, the fourth horseman seems to portray a situation especially characteristic of the period from about 538 to 1517, the beginning of the Reformation (cf. pp. 753, 754; see on ch. 2:18).

Death. The phrase “to kill … with death” seems hardly to make good sense. This difficulty probably is resolved best by understanding the word translated “death,” thanatos, here, as meaning “pestilence.” The LXX repeatedly translates the Hebrew word deber, “pestilence,” by thanatos (see Lev. 26:25; Jer. 21:6; Eze. 5:12). John, to whom Semitic thought was more natural than Greek, apparently follows the LXX usage here rather than a strictly Greek definition of the word.