Revelation's Fourth Seal -- Death and Hell

Below is the 13th of multiple excerpts of commentary on the Book of Revelation from The Parousia, the late 19th-century masterpiece on the Second Coming by James Stuart Russell: 

"OPENING OF THE FOURTH SEAL [DEATH AND HELL] 

"Chap. vi. 7, 8. [chapter 6:7-8]---‘And when he [the Lamb] had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, Come. And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth (land [Greek: tes ges]), to kill with sword, and with famine, and with death, and by the beasts of the earth [land].' 

"The scene here is evidently the same [as that of the previous seals], only with all the horrors and miseries of the war intensified. The ghastly spectres of Death and Hades now follow in the train of famine and war. The ‘four sore [severe] judgments of God,’ which Ezekiel saw commissioned to destroy the land of Israel, ‘the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence [Ezekiel 14:21],’ are again let loose upon the land [of Israel], and by them the fourth part of its population is doomed to perish. Never was there such a glut of mortality as in the war which terminated in the siege and capture of Jerusalem [in A.D. 70]. The best commentary on this passage is to be found in the records of [1st-century Jewish Roman historian] Josephus, as the following description will show:---

"‘All egress being now intercepted, every hope of safety to the Jews was utterly cut off; and famine, with distended jaws, was devouring the people by houses and families. The roofs were filled with women and babes in the last stage; the streets with old men already dead. Children and youths, swollen up, huddled together like spectres in the market-places, and fell down wherever the pangs of death seized them. To inter their relations they who were themselves affected had not strength; and those still in health and vigour were deterred by the multitude of the dead and by the uncertainty that hung over themselves. For many expired while burying others, and many repaired to the cemeteries ere the fatal hour arrived.'"

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