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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - Revelation 9:9 - 9:9
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Breastplates
The breast of the locust resembles the plates of a horse's armor.
Sound of their wings
Olivier, a French writer, says: “It in difficult to express the effect produced on us by the sight of the whole atmosphere filled on all sides and to a great height by an innumerable quantity of these insects, whose flight was slow and uniform, and whose noise resembled that of rain.” For a graphic description of their numbers and ravages, see Thomson, “Land and Book, Central Palestine and Phoenicia,” 295-302.
Of chariots of many horses
That is, of many-horsed chariots. The Rev., by the insertion of a comma, apparently takes the two clauses as parallel: the sound of chariots, (the sound) of many horses.
Tails like unto scorpions
The comparison with the insect as it exists in nature fails here, though Smith's “Bible Dictionary” gives a picture of a species of locust, the Acridium Lineola, a species commonly sold for food in the markets of Bagdad, which has a sting in the tail.
Stings (κέντρα)
Originally any sharp point. A goad. See on pricks, Act 26:14. Plato uses it of the peg of a top (“Republic,” 436). Herodotus of an instrument of torture. Democedes, the Crotoniat physician, having denied his knowledge of medicine to Darius, Darius bade his attendants “bring the scourges and pricking-irons (κέντρα) (3, 30) Sophocles of the buckle-tongues with which Oedipus put out his eyes.
“Woe, woe, and woe again!
How through me darts the throb these clasps (κέντρων) have caused.”
“Oedipus Tyrannas,” 1318.
Of the spur of a cock, the quill of a porcupine, and the stings of insects.
For the A.V., there were stings in their tails, read as Rev., and stings; and in their tails is their power to hurt.