Revelation 9:10,11 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

They had tails like unto scorpions They are thrice compared to scorpions, namely, Revelation 9:3; Revelation 9:5, as well as in this verse. But whether these tails and stings, as of scorpions, were designed to express that these Saracens should spread the poison of error and delusion where they came, or only to signify the great pain and uneasiness their invasion should occasion, seems doubtful. Bishop Newton, however, interprets the metaphor in the former sense, as intended to signify, that wherever they carried their arms, there also they should distil the venom of a false religion. And their power was to hurt men five months “One difficulty,” says Bishop Newton, “and the greatest of all, remains yet to be explained; and that is the period of five months assigned to these locusts, which being twice mentioned, merits the more particular consideration. They tormented men five months, Revelation 9:5; and again here, their power was to hurt men five months. It is said, without doubt, in conformity to the type; for locusts are observed to live about five months; that is, from April to September. Scorpions, too, as Bochart asserts, are noxious for no longer a term, the cold rendering them torpid and inactive. But of these locusts it is said, not that their duration or existence was only for five months, but their power of hurting and tormenting men continued five months. Now, these months may either be months commonly so taken; or prophetic months, consisting each of thirty days, as St. John reckons them, and so making one hundred and fifty years, at the rate of each day for a year; or the number being repeated twice, the sums may be thought to be doubled, and five months and five months, in prophetic computation, will amount to three hundred years. If these months be taken for common months, then, as the natural locusts live and do hurt only in the five summer months, so the Saracens, in the five summer months too, made their excursions, and retreated again in the winter. It appears that this was their usual practice, and particularly when they first besieged Constantinople in the time of Constantine Pogonatus. For from the month of April to September, they pertinaciously continued the siege, and then, despairing of success, departed to Cyzicum, where they wintered, and in spring again renewed the war: and this course they held for seven years, as the Greek annals tell us. If these months be taken for prophetic months, or one hundred and fifty years, it was within that space of time that the Saracens made their principal conquests. Their empire might subsist much longer, but their power of hurting and tormenting men was exerted chiefly within that period. Read the history of the Saracens, and you will find that their greatest exploits were performed, their greatest conquests were made, between the year 612, when Mohammed first opened the bottomless pit, and began publicly to teach and propagate his imposture, and the year 762, when the Calif Almansor built Bagdad, to fix there the seat of his empire, and called it the city of peace. Syria, Persia, India, and the greatest part of Asia; Egypt, and the greatest part of Africa; Spain, and some parts of Europe, were all subdued in the intermediate time. But when the califs, who before had removed from place to place, fixed their habitation at Bagdad, then the Saracens ceased from their incursions and ravages, like locusts, and became a settled nation; then they made no more such rapid and amazing conquests as before, but only engaged in common and ordinary wars, like other nations; then their power and glory began to decline, and their empire by little and little to moulder away; then they had no longer, like the prophetic locusts, one king over them; Spain having revolted in the year 736, and set up another calif in opposition to the reigning house of Abbas. If these months be taken doubly, or for three hundred years, then, according to Sir Isaac Newton, ‘the whole time that the califs of the Saracens reigned with a temporal dominion at Damascus and Bagdad together, was three hundred years; namely, from the year 637 to the year 936 inclusive; when their mighty empire was broken and divided into several principalities or kingdoms. So that, let these five months be taken in any possible construction, the event will still answer, and the prophecy will still be fulfilled; though the second method of interpretation and application appears much more probable than either the first or the third. And they had a king over them By this is signified that the same person should exercise temporal as well as spiritual sovereignty over them; and the califs were their emperors, as well as the heads of their religion. The king is the same as the star or angel of the bottomless pit, whose name is Abaddon in Hebrew, and Apollyon in Greek; that is, the destroyer. Mede imagines that this is some allusion to the name of Obodas, the common name of the kings of that part of Arabia from whence Mohammed came, as Pharaoh was the common name of the kings of Egypt, and Cesar of the emperors of Rome; and such allusions are not unusual in the style of Scripture. However that be, the name agrees perfectly well with Mohammed, and the califs his successors, who were the authors of all those horrid wars and desolations, and openly taught and professed their religion was to be propagated and established by the sword.