The abyss opens and hell comes to earth. This chapter unveils two of the most terrifying judgments in Revelation: demonic locusts that torment unbelievers for five months, and a massive army that kills a third of humanity. Despite these catastrophic plagues, the surviving inhabitants of earth refuse to repent of their idolatry and sins. The intensifying judgments reveal both God's justice and humanity's hardened rebellion.
Verse 1 opens the fifth trumpet with characteristically Johannine perfect-tense vision-grammar: eidon astera . . . peptōkota ("I saw a star having fallen"). The participle is perfect, not aorist — John sees not the moment of falling but the settled state after the fall. Most commentators take this star as a personal angelic being (cf. Isaiah 14:12, Luke 10:18, Revelation 12:9), and the next clause confirms this by giving the star a key. The passive edothē ("was given") will recur six times in this chapter, the trumpet sequence's hallmark verb. Demonic powers are never autonomous in Revelation; everything they do is permitted, bounded, and timed by a higher hand.
Verses 2-3 employ creation-reversal grammar. Where Genesis 1:3 says kai egeneto phōs ("and there was light"), here eskotōthē ho hēlios kai ho aēr ("the sun and the air were darkened"). The created order is not destroyed but inverted, and the locusts — themselves a parody of natural order — emerge from ek tou kapnou ("out of the smoke"), as if smoke can give birth. The Exodus 10 plague-typology is unmistakable: locusts in darkened air, judgment that distinguishes between marked and unmarked. But where Egypt's locusts ate vegetation, these are forbidden it (hina mē adikēsousin ton chorton) — they must hurt only humans without God's seal. The plague is moral, not agricultural.
Verses 4-6 contain four edothē + hina constructions, each one a divine constraint. The constraints are precise: spare vegetation, kill no one, torment for five months, and let the torment match a scorpion's sting. Five months happens to be the natural lifespan of locusts, but here it is sovereign decree, not biology. The horrifying climax of v. 6 — zētēsousin . . . ton thanaton kai ou mē heurēsousin auton . . . pheugei ho thanatos ap' autōn ("they will seek death and not find it; death flees from them") — uses the historical present pheugei against the future tenses surrounding it, as if the action is so vivid it breaks frame. The personification of death as a fugitive runs against Job 3:21 and Jeremiah 8:3, where death was sought and granted; here even the ancient mercy of mortality is withheld. Judgment intensifies precisely by withholding what humanity would normally consider mercy.
Verses 7-10 catalog the locusts in nine "like" comparisons (hōs repeated): like horses prepared for battle, like crowns of gold, like faces of men, like hair of women, like teeth of lions, like breastplates of iron, like the sound of chariots. The stacking of similes refuses any single image — these creatures are categorically hybrid, deliberately monstrous, drawn from Joel 1:6, 2:4-5 but intensified. The comparisons map onto familiar military imagery (horses, crowns, breastplates, chariot-sound) but defamiliarize each one. The result is a war-machine that is neither animal nor human nor angelic but something that violates natural categories — a fitting figure for demonic power, which always consists in distortion rather than creation.
Verse 11 names the king as ton angelon tēs abyssou ("the angel of the abyss") and gives the doubled name: Hebrew Abaddon, Greek Apollyon. The Hebrew name (אֲבַדּוֹן) means "destruction" (cf. Job 26:6, 28:22, 31:12); the Greek participle Ἀπολλύων means "destroying." The double-naming serves both audiences (Jewish and Greek readers in Asia Minor) and may also be a polemical pun on Apollo, the patron deity of Domitian. Domitian had himself acclaimed dominus et deus with strong Apolline connections; John's wordplay turns the imperial god into the king of the abyss.
Verse 12's hē ouai hē mia apēlthen ("the first woe has passed") uses the feminine article with the masculine-form interjection ouai, treating "woe" as a substantive in agreement with an implicit feminine noun (hēmera, "day," is the natural antecedent — "the first woe-day has passed"). The grammar is clunky by classical standards but reflects how Revelation imports prophetic Hebrew rhythm into Greek syntax. The verse closes the unit with the eagle's announcement from 8:13 still ringing: two more woes follow.
Even the demonic horde is on a leash — the four edothēs of this chapter quietly insist that nothing in the created order, including the powers of the abyss, escapes the throned permission of God.
Joel 1:6 reads כִּי־גוֹי עָלָה עַל־אַרְצִי עָצוּם וְאֵין מִסְפָּר שִׁנָּיו שִׁנֵּי אַרְיֵה וּמְתַלְּעוֹת לָבִיא לוֹ ("A nation has come up against my land, mighty and without number; its teeth are the teeth of a lion, and it has the fangs of a lioness"), and Joel 2:4-5 develops this into the locust-army's appearance "like horses, like war horses." Revelation 9:7-10 reproduces every detail: lion's teeth, war-horses, sound of chariots. John reads Joel's locust-plague as a typological foreshadowing of demonic warfare in the eschaton. The eighth Egyptian plague in Exodus 10:12-15 supplies the foundational typology — locusts come on the wind, darken the land, and devour everything. Revelation inverts the menu (vegetation forbidden, humans permitted) but preserves the structural logic: God's people are spared, His enemies are afflicted.
Job 26:6 — עָרוֹם שְׁאוֹל נֶגְדּוֹ וְאֵין כְּסוּת לָאֲבַדּוֹן ("Sheol is naked before Him, and Abaddon has no covering") — and Proverbs 15:11 personify Abaddon as a place. Revelation 9:11 takes the next step and personifies Abaddon as the angel of the abyss. Jeremiah 8:3 — וְנִבְחַר מָוֶת מֵחַיִּים ("Death will be chosen rather than life") — provides the substrate for v. 6's macabre reversal: when judgment intensifies, even death becomes a desired but withheld mercy.
"The seal of God" for tēn sphragida tou theou in v. 4 — LSB consistently translates sphragis as "seal," preserving the connection with the sealing of the 144,000 in chapter 7 and the counter-seal of the Beast in chapter 13.
"Authority" for exousia in v. 3 — LSB resists "power" as a translation here, because the Greek word emphasizes delegated, granted right rather than raw force. The locusts have no power on their own; what they have is given.
"Abaddon . . . Apollyon" retained as proper names with their etymological glosses preserved by transliteration — LSB doesn't translate either name to "Destruction" or "Destroyer" because the doubled-naming is itself the point: John provides both languages so that no reader can miss the title.
The sixth trumpet (vv. 13-14) opens with a voice ek tōn tessarōn keratōn tou thysiastēriou tou chrysou — from the four horns of the golden altar before God. This is the same altar from which the prayers of the saints rose in 8:3-5; the connection is theological, not coincidental. The horn of the altar in OT cult was the place where atoning blood was applied (Exodus 30:10) and where suppliants grasped for sanctuary (1 Kings 1:50). Here a voice from those horns commands the release of judgment. The prayers of the saints "How long, O Lord?" (6:10) are now being answered with controlled fury. Vengeance flows from the altar where mercy was sought.
Verse 14's command Lyson tous tessaras angelous tous dedemenous ("Release the four angels who are bound") uses the perfect passive participle dedemenous — they have been bound and remain in that state. The four angels at the Euphrates correspond to the four restraining angels at earth's corners in 7:1, but their function is opposite: those held back the winds; these have been held back themselves, awaiting release. The Euphrates was the eastern frontier of Rome and historically the source of every invading horde from Assyria onward; its symbolic charge is unmistakable. Verse 15's hoi hētoimasmenoi eis tēn hōran kai hēmeran kai mēna kai eniauton ("having been prepared for the hour and day and month and year") is one of the most precise temporal specifications in Revelation — four nested time-units, each accusative of duration or extent, signaling that this moment has been fixed in the divine calendar with absolute precision.
Verse 16's army-count dismyriades myriadōn ("two myriads of myriads") is hyperbolic-precise: 200 million, dwarfing every army that ever marched on the Euphrates plain. The construction is genitive-of-quantity, with the plural dismyriades ("two-myriads") modified by the partitive myriadōn ("of myriads"). John's ēkousa ton arithmon autōn ("I heard the number of them") parallels 7:4's ēkousa ton arithmon tōn esphragismenōn — both 144,000 and 200,000,000 are heard, not estimated. The contrast is deliberate: God's people are numbered exactly; the demonic army is numbered to the precise myriad.
Verses 17-19 catalog the riders' breastplates in three colors — pyrinous kai hyakinthinous kai theiōdeis (fiery, hyacinthine, sulfurous) — each anticipating one of the three plagues that issue from the horses' mouths in v. 18: pyr kai kapnos kai theion (fire, smoke, brimstone). The colors are the plagues; the riders embody what they emit. The historical present ekporeuetai ("proceeds") in v. 17, set among aorist and perfect verbs, makes the action vivid and ongoing. The horses' tails are described as ophesin homoiai ("like serpents") with heads — a hybrid creature that has aggression at both ends. The whole picture is grotesque and martial, blending Sinai theophany (Exodus 19:18: smoke ascending like the smoke of a furnace) with Sodom-judgment (Genesis 19:24: fire and brimstone) into a single eschatological tableau.
Verses 20-21 deliver the pastoral and theological climax. The hoi loipoi ("the rest") — those not killed by the plagues — refused to repent. The negation is fivefold: ou metenoēsan in v. 20 governing one negative hina mē proskynēsousin, then in v. 21 four oute clauses listing what they refused to repent of (murders, sorceries, sexual immorality, thefts). The list is the second tablet of the Decalogue in vice form (Exodus 20:13-15 plus Deuteronomy 18:10's prohibition of kashap, sorcery), revealing that human society after the sixth trumpet still violates the basic moral law. The hardness is theologically devastating: even after one-third of humanity has been killed, the survivors do not turn. Revelation refuses the easy assumption that judgment will eventually persuade. The book here teaches what Romans 1 teaches: when God hands over, the result is not repentance but escalation.
The chapter as a whole insists on a paradox the Apocalypse never resolves: God's judgment is unmistakably from God's hand (the voice from the altar's horns, the precise calendar, the specific permission), and yet it does not produce repentance in those who refuse it. The grammar of edothē across the chapter shows divine sovereignty; the grammar of ou metenoēsan at its end shows human intransigence. Both are true; both are held in tension; the next chapter will bring the third woe and the seventh trumpet to break that tension open.
One-third of mankind dies, two-thirds keep on bowing to gold and silver and stone — Revelation refuses the comforting myth that judgment alone produces repentance, and so makes the priority of preached gospel inescapable.
Exodus 30:10 prescribes that the high priest וְכִפֶּר אַהֲרֹן עַל־קַרְנֹתָיו ("shall make atonement on its horns") — the very horns from which the voice of judgment issues in v. 13. The altar of atonement is the altar of judgment because both serve the same throne. Genesis 15:18 makes the Euphrates the eastern boundary of the promised land (לְזַרְעֲךָ נָתַתִּי אֶת־הָאָרֶץ הַזֹּאת מִנְּהַר מִצְרַיִם עַד־הַנָּהָר הַגָּדֹל נְהַר־פְּרָת), so that "release at the great river Euphrates" (v. 14) signals invasion at the very edge of God's covenant geography. Genesis 19:24's וַיהוָה הִמְטִיר עַל־סְדֹם וְעַל־עֲמֹרָה גָּפְרִית וָאֵשׁ ("Yahweh rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire") supplies the fire-and-brimstone diction of v. 17. LSB renders Yahweh in Genesis, and the same elements — theion kai pyr in the LXX — appear in Revelation 9:17-18.
Psalm 115:4-7 — עֲצַבֵּיהֶם כֶּסֶף וְזָהָב מַעֲשֵׂה יְדֵי אָדָם . . . עֵינַיִם לָהֶם וְלֹא יִרְאוּ אָזְנַיִם לָהֶם וְלֹא יִשְׁמָעוּ ("Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands . . . they have eyes but do not see; they have ears but do not hear") — supplies the substrate of v. 20's ta eidōla ta chrysa . . . ha oute blepein dynantai oute akouein oute peripatein. John pulls the polemic of the Psalms forward into eschatological time: the same idols mocked by David are still being worshiped at the end. Deuteronomy 18:10-11's prohibition list (menaḥēš, mĕkaššēp) supplies the vocabulary of v. 21's pharmakōn — sorceries are not a private religious choice but a moral abomination on the same level as murder and theft.
"Did not repent" for ou metenoēsan in vv. 20-21 — LSB renders the aorist with definite past force, not "will not repent" or "would not repent." The decision is settled, the act completed; this is what they did, not what they will do.
"Sorceries" for pharmakōn in v. 21 — LSB resists the temptation to translate as "drug-use" or "magic" because pharmakeia in NT vice-lists denotes occult practice that uses substances, not substance abuse simpliciter. The same translation choice carries through to 21:8 and 22:15.
"Brimstone" for theion rather than the modern "sulfur" — LSB preserves the biblical-historical term that links Sodom (Genesis 19), the lake of fire (Revelation 19:20, 20:10), and the trumpet-judgment here. "Sulfur" is chemically equivalent but historically deracinated; "brimstone" keeps the canonical thread visible.