But why are we informed that the destroying power is called “Abaddon in Hebrew, and Apollyon in Greek, ” and not told what it would be called in Latin, or any other tongue? The answer is, because it was commissioned primarily and chiefly against the countries to which the Hebrew and Greek belonged.
“The locusts,” says Solomon, “have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands.” As we must not set scripture against scripture, these opposite sayings concerning locusts must be interpreted so as to harmonize. The apocalyptic locusts who had a king are not literal locusts, as some ignorantly affirm who deny the symbolic character of the apocalypse. John records the truth of the locusts he saw in vision; and Solomon writes the truth concerning literal locusts.
The locusts were to torment the men of the catholic apostasy in church and state “five months” — ver. 5; they were also to “injure” them for “five months”—ver. 10. This is, of course, symbolic time. The fitness of things requires that the time allotted for symbolic action should be expressed symbolically and analogically.
In this the thing covered is put for the covering.
This indicated their ferocity. Nothing could successfully resist them in their ravening upon the prey. The Star styled his first vizier, Ali, the Lion of God. “Who,” says Mohammed, “will be my Vizier and Lieutenant?” “O prophet,” replied Ali, “I am the man. Whoever rises against thee, I will dash out his teeth, tear out his eyes, break his legs, rip up his belly.
Another resemblance of the locusts was that “they had faces as faces of men.” This distinguished them from the Goths and other kindred barbarian hordes; the faces of these being noticed by Jerome, who was contemporary with their earliest invasions, as having faces shaven and smooth, like women’s faces. The beard was not always worn by the Romans. From Nero to Hadrian, the imperatorial custom was to have the beard shaven; from Hadrian to Constantine, unshaven; afterwards (with the exception of Julian), down to Phocas, shaven. But the locusts did not shave.
The use of this tormenting Saracen fire constituted the resemblance of the Arabs to scorpion-tailed locusts. Besides this, they had other remarkable “resemblances” in their equipment for war.
The bite or sting of the scorpion is generally fatal. Hence, the power of the locusts was a fatal power. They had scorpion-like tails, and in these tails was some of their power for destruction. But scorpion-like tails and stings were only symbolical of something analogous thereto. In Gibbon, I find the following solution of the mystery. “A Roman knight,” says he, “who despised the swords and lances of the Saracens, relates his own fears at the sight and sound of the mischievous engines that discharged a torrent of the Saracen fire.
“Locusts,” says Daubuz, “begin to appear in spring, about a month after the equinox, and are only seen at most during five months. They are wont to arise in such vast companies, that they form a kind of cloud which eclipses the sun and darkens the sky; and make so great a noise with their wings as that, according to some, the sound thereof may be heard at six miles distant. Wherever they fall they make a most terrible havoc of all the fruits of the earth; and therefore the people, when they see them flying, are in the greatest consternation.
The sun is here the symbol of the same imperial majesty as that which was darkened in its third by the judgments of the fourth trumpet. The darkened third had recovered its light in the process of re-annexing Italy and Africa to the Byzantine, Greek, or Constantinopolitan, empire in the reign of Justinian. The “deadly wound” the Sixth Head had received, had been “healed;” and its affairs restored to order in Italy by the Pragmatic Sanction, A.D. 554. The sun now shining forth, “the third of the day and of the night,” then recovered their brightness.