Biblion Bible Commentary
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Locusts Like Horses for War
Revelation 9:7-12
7 The shapes of the locusts were like horses prepared for war. On their heads were something like golden crowns, and their faces were like people’s faces. · WEB
The swarm is described in eight likenesses that refuse to resolve, its king is the Destroyer by name, and the first woe closes with two to come.
The shapes of the locusts were like horses prepared for war. On their heads were something like golden crowns, and their faces were like people's faces.
The description proceeds by likeness — like... like... as — eight comparisons in four verses, and the refusal to resolve is the portrait: horses, crowns as if gold, human faces, women's hair, lions' teeth, iron breastplates, wings roaring like chariot-charges Joel 2:4–5, scorpion tails. Every feature borrows a category and betrays it — humanity's face on a predator's mouth, the crown's dignity counterfeit, allure and armor and sting in one body. Joel's locust-army supplied the palette Joel 2:4; the fifth trumpet's swarm outruns it into nightmare: the brood of the abyss wears fragments of everything God made, assembled wrong — which is what the demonic is: creation's borrowed goods, bent.
The hybrid horde's coherence is only in its command: they have over them as king the angel of the abyss. His name in Hebrew is "Abaddon", but in Greek, he has the name "Apollyon" Revelation 9:11.
The swarm has a king — unlike true locusts, which Scripture notes have none Proverbs 30:27 — and his name is given bilingually so no reader in either world misses it: Destruction, Destroyer. Abaddon is the deep's own name in the older Scriptures, paired with death and the grave Job 26:6 Proverbs 15:11. The fifth trumpet unveils the government of the darkness it releases: the smoke, the sting, and the anguish have an administration, and its whole platform is in its name. Over against the Lamb whose name means salvation stands the angel whose name means unmaking — the book's war reduced to two names.
And the era's torment, for all its darkness, remains what the trumpet-series is: bounded warning. Five months, no killing, no touching the sealed Revelation 9:4–5 — the Destroyer himself on a permission slip, reigning only over the unsealed and only for a season.
The first woe is past. Behold, there are still two woes coming after this Revelation 9:12.
The eagle's triple cry Revelation 8:13 is being counted off. The bookkeeping sentence is itself part of the message: the woes are numbered, sequenced, and finite — history's darkest stretches, in this book, come with a tally running, and the tally belongs to heaven.
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