Locusts from the Abyss

The Locusts from the Abyss are a supernatural host unleashed at the fifth trumpet in Revelation’s sequence of judgments. Their emergence combines a striking, battle-like appearance with tightly defined limits: they target only people without God’s seal, cannot kill those they torment, and are given power for five months. The book’s commentary reads this episode as a period of God’s wrath whose stated duration challenges claims that this phase must be very brief.

Emergence and Setting

The episode begins when the fifth angel sounds the trumpet. A star falls from heaven to earth, and the key to the Abyss is given to it. After the star opens the Abyss, smoke rises from it like smoke from a great furnace, darkening the sun and the air. The Locusts from the Abyss emerge from that smoke. The sequence makes their appearance part of a larger release: the trumpet sounds, access to the pit is opened, the atmosphere is obscured, and the creatures come forth.

The source presents the Abyss as the place from which the host is released. In the book’s accompanying explanation, the bottomless pit is identified with hell, and the creatures are described as being commanded by a satanic being. Their origin and command distinguish them from an ordinary swarm of insects. The narrative does not describe them as acting independently of this release or of the authority placed over them; their appearance belongs to the trumpet judgment and its ordered sequence.

Form and Command

The creatures are described through a series of comparisons rather than reduced to one familiar shape. They are like horses prepared for battle, with something resembling golden crowns on their heads and faces like human faces. Their hair is compared to women’s hair, while their teeth are likened to lions’ teeth. The images combine human and animal features with signs of military readiness. The result is a host whose appearance is assembled from several recognizable forms, but whose identity remains that of the unusual beings emerging from the smoke.

Their equipment and movement extend the martial impression. They wear what appear to be iron breastplates, and the sound of their wings is compared to the sound of many horses and chariots running into battle. Each has a tail like a scorpion’s, with a sting in it; the text associates that sting with their capacity to hurt people for five months. The description thus links their power to a specific feature of their form, while the battle imagery conveys their collective force. It does not, however, make the host an army of human combatants: their authority and distinctive bodies mark them as creatures of the judgment.

They have a king over them, identified as the angel of the Abyss. The text gives this ruler two names: Abaddon in Hebrew and Apollyon in Greek. These names and titles place command within the same realm from which the Locusts from the Abyss emerge. The host is therefore presented not as an ungoverned swarm but as a force with a named ruler and a defined place in the unfolding judgment.

Limits and Effects

The judgment is selective. The creatures are expressly forbidden to harm the grass, any green thing, or any tree; their permitted targets are people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. The distinction sets a boundary between damage to vegetation and torment of people, and between those marked by God’s seal and those exposed to the creatures. Their power is frightening within the narrative, but it is not unlimited: the command specifies both whom they may affect and what they may not do.

They are also forbidden to kill. Instead, their victims are tormented for five months, and the torment is compared to the effect of a scorpion’s sting. The text describes the extremity of this suffering through its consequence: people seek death and desire to die, yet death eludes them. The episode makes the restriction on killing part of the judgment’s distinctive character. The creatures are permitted to inflict suffering, but the stated outcome is prolonged torment rather than death at their hands.

The five-month limit is repeated in the description of their power and in the account of the torment. That duration gives the episode a concrete measure within the book’s severe sequence of trumpet judgments. The accompanying commentary emphasizes this point in response to teachers who argue that saints will pass through God’s wrath and that this period of wrath will be very short. It points to the fifth trumpet’s five months as evidence that this particular judgment is not merely momentary. This commentary concerns the duration and interpretation of the judgment; the creature narrative itself specifies the targets, prohibition on killing, and period of torment.

Place in the Trumpet Sequence

The Locusts from the Abyss appear after the first four trumpet judgments and the warning that the remaining trumpet voices bring further woes to the inhabitants of the earth. The fifth trumpet is identified as the first of the final three woes: after the account of the creatures, the text declares that one woe has passed and two more are still to come. Their episode is therefore both a complete, bounded judgment and a threshold within a sequence that has not yet ended.

The book’s commentary calls the fifth trumpet wicked and stresses the creatures’ origin in the Abyss, their command by a satanic being, and the five-month duration of their torment. Its focus is not only on the host’s strange, composite appearance but on the limits placed on its action. In the narrative, the seal protects one group, vegetation is spared, killing is prohibited, and the torment has a set duration. Those restrictions do not soften the episode’s severity; they define the exact scope of a judgment that forms one of the three woes still sounding after the earlier trumpet judgments.