Bowman

Allen Kerkeslager argues in a 1993 JBL article that the bowman riding on the white horse is a false Messiah (Revelation 6:2). 

He looks Messianic, what with his white horse. But the bow is the clue. Kerkeslager connects the bow to Psalm 11:2, 78:57 and other Old Testament texts where the bow is the weapon of the wicked, and then suggests that the bow indicates that the first horseman is Apollo, who would have been a familiar figure to Jews as well as to Greeks of the first century.

Apollo is a counterfeit messiah in that he is a false sun god and also in the fact that he inspires false prophecy. The first horseman is thus part of “a polemic against the message of false prophets and the values of pagan society” (119).

The fact that few recognize Apollo in the first horseman shows “the success of the author’s literary device” (121). He includes “mythological” figures in the fourth seal – Hades and Death – and this should be a clue that the rest of the seals also unveil mythological beings. Readers are supposed to catch the counterfeit, and the fact that they haven’t is testimony to the subtlety of the writer. Readers haven’t paid enough attention to the bow.

This is far from convincing. A signal that no one catches is hardly a felicitous literary device. Besides, the bow is not a consistently negative weapon. Yahweh has a bow – we know that early on, since He hangs it up in the sky after the flood, and because he takes it off the shelf at various times to shoot lightning-arrows at His enemies. Jonathan had a bow, and David’s lament for Jonathan is the “song of the bow.” 

Classics can help with biblical interpretation. It can also distract.

(Allen Kerkeslager, “Apollo, Greco-Roman Prophecy, and the Rider on the White Horse in Rev 6:2,” JBL 112 [1993] 116-21.)