What Does the Horse Symbolize in the Bible? War, Trust and Christ

In the Bible the horse is mostly an animal of war, and Scripture uses it to ask whom we trust. A psalm puts it in one line: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7). In Revelation, horses carry God’s judgments and, at the last, Christ himself.

That is the thread to hold. God made the horse, and he describes its courage with something close to delight. Scripture can also be blunt about it: “Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding” (Psalm 32:9). Above all it was the pride of a king’s army, and so it becomes the test of every heart that wants to be safe. Psalm 33 says it plainly: “An horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver any by his great strength” (Psalm 33:17).

In the King James Version the words “horse” and “horses” appear 154 times, in 144 verses. “Horsemen” and “horseman” add 61 more, and “chariot” and “chariots”, which horses drew, appear 177 times. You may see a figure of “over 180” for horses; totals like that depend on which words and which translation are counted. Horses first appear in Egypt, where Joseph gave the starving people bread “in exchange for horses” (Genesis 47:17), and they run to the last battle of Revelation.

Scripture does not give horses a meaning in dreams, and it offers no dictionary of dream images. When two of Pharaoh’s servants asked Joseph about their dreams, he answered, “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Genesis 40:8). So we hold our dreams lightly and test what we think they say. “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1), and weigh every dream against God’s word, which is the wheat beside the chaff (Jeremiah 23:28).

The fullest portrait of a horse in the Bible comes from God himself, speaking to Job out of the whirlwind:

Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword.

Job 39:19–22

The horse “smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting” (Job 39:25). God is not ashamed of the creature. He is asking Job whether he could have made it.

For Israel, though, the war horse first appeared on the other side. “All the horses and chariots of Pharaoh, and his horsemen, and his army” chased them to the sea (Exodus 14:9), and the song Israel sang on the far shore praised the LORD who had overthrown them: “I will sing unto the LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:1). Miriam answered with the same words (Exodus 15:21). Egypt had the horses, and God had answered them without one.

The Law looked ahead to a day when Israel would have a king, and set him a limit: “he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses” (Deuteronomy 17:16). Horses meant chariots, chariots meant Egypt, and a king who trusted them would carry his people back toward the place God had brought them out of.

For a long time Israel fought on foot. Before one great battle God told Joshua, “thou shalt hough their horses, and burn their chariots with fire” (Joshua 11:6). To hough is to hamstring: the captured horses were lamed so they could never pull a chariot again. David did the same after a victory of his own, keeping only enough for a hundred chariots (2 Samuel 8:4).

How many horses did Solomon have?

Solomon broke the pattern. “He had a thousand and four hundred chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen,” and he bought horses out of Egypt, “a chariot… for six hundred shekels of silver, and an horse for an hundred and fifty,” and his merchants brought them out for the kings of the Hittites and of Syria as well (1 Kings 10:26–29). The stables are counted twice and differently. First Kings says “forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots” (1 Kings 4:26), while Second Chronicles says “four thousand stalls for horses and chariots” (2 Chronicles 9:25). The commentator Albert Barnes judged the larger number “probably a corruption”, a copying error, since four thousand fits fourteen hundred chariots and forty thousand does not.

Scripture does not say the horses ruined Solomon. It says his many wives “turned away his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:4). But the king who gathered what the Law told him not to gather is the same king whose heart drifted, and the horses stand in the record of his glory as a quiet warning.

When Judah was afraid of Assyria, its leaders went to Egypt looking for cavalry, and Isaiah answered them: “Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the LORD!” (Isaiah 31:1). And he gave the reason in one of the plainest lines in Scripture: “Now the Egyptians are men, and not God; and their horses flesh, and not spirit” (Isaiah 31:3).

The wisdom books say the same thing more quietly. “The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD” (Proverbs 21:31). The horse is not forbidden. We may saddle it and train it. We may not lean our whole weight on it. “He delighteth not in the strength of the horse,” says Psalm 147, and then tells us what he does delight in: “The LORD taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in those that hope in his mercy” (Psalm 147:10–11).

We all have our horses: a salary, savings, a strong friend, a good plan. None of them is wicked. Each one is flesh and not spirit, and Psalm 20 asks us to remember a name above all of them.

Scripture has its own cavalry, and it belongs to God. When Elijah was taken up, “there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11). Elisha cried after him, “My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof” (2 Kings 2:12). The prophet had been the nation’s real strength.

Later an army surrounded the city where Elisha was staying, and his servant saw only enemy horses and chariots. “Fear not,” Elisha said, “for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.” Then he prayed, “LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see,” and the young man saw “the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha” (2 Kings 6:16–17). The horses we fear are not the only horses on the mountain.

Zechariah saw “a man riding upon a red horse… and behind him were there red horses, speckled, and white” (Zechariah 1:8). The angel’s explanation is about their work, not their colours: “These are they whom the LORD hath sent to walk to and fro through the earth” (Zechariah 1:10). In a later vision four chariots come out between two mountains of brass, drawn by red, black, white, and grisled and bay horses, and the angel calls them “the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth” (Zechariah 6:1–5). The colours are not decoded in the text, and it is wiser not to decode them for it. What Zechariah is told is enough: nothing on earth goes unseen by God.

Zechariah also saw a king without a horse. “Behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass,” and in the next breath God says, “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem” (Zechariah 9:9–10). Matthew tells us this was fulfilled when Jesus rode into Jerusalem (Matthew 21:5). The King of peace came on the humble animal, as the page on what the donkey symbolizes explains.

As the Lamb opens the first four of the seven seals, four horses ride out, and John is told a little about each:

Horse	Its rider	What follows
White (6:2)	Has a bow and is given a crown	“Conquering, and to conquer”
Red (6:4)	Is given a great sword	Peace taken from the earth
Black (6:5–6)	Holds a pair of balances	A day’s pay for a day’s wheat
Pale (6:8)	Named Death, with Hell behind	Sword, hunger, death and beasts

The red rider is given power “to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another” (Revelation 6:4). The voice that speaks over the black horse names famine prices: “A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine” (Revelation 6:6). The measure was about a quart, roughly one person’s daily bread, and the penny was a labourer’s wage for a day, as in Jesus’ parable of the vineyard workers (Matthew 20:2). The pale horse is chloros in Greek, the colour of new grass or of a sick face. “His name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him,” and they were given power over a fourth part of the earth “to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth” (Revelation 6:8).

The white horse’s rider has been read in different ways since the early church. Irenaeus of Lyons, in a passage about Jacob, applied the words of verse 2 to the Lord: “He went forth conquering, that He should conquer.” Victorinus of Pettau, in his commentary on the Apocalypse, read the white horse as “the word of preaching with the Holy Spirit sent into the world.” Ellicott’s commentary records the view that the rider stands simply for conquest, then sets it aside and reads him as “the symbol of Christian victory.” Some dispensationalist and other evangelical interpreters see the opposite, a false Christ who imitates the true one. Arno Gaebelein’s Annotated Bible calls the rider “a great counterfeit leader” and “Satan’s man”, and others identify him with the Antichrist himself. The text itself says only what the table shows. Whatever the rider means, all four go out only when the Lamb opens the seal.

Three chapters later John sees stranger horses still, an army whose riders wear “breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone,” and whose horses have heads “as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone” (Revelation 9:17). John tells what he saw and leaves the details unexplained.

Here the text leaves no doubt. “I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war” (Revelation 19:11). His eyes are “as a flame of fire,” he is “clothed with a vesture dipped in blood,” and “his name is called The Word of God” (Revelation 19:12–13). The armies of heaven follow him “upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean,” and “on his vesture and on his thigh” is written “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:14, 16).

So the Bible’s long story of horses ends with a surprise. The animal that stood for every power we were told not to trust carries, at the last, the one we can trust completely. The Law told Israel’s kings not to gather horses. The King of kings comes on one, and “in righteousness he doth judge.”

The horse is still God’s creature, and Zechariah saw a day when even the bells on its harness would bear God’s name: “In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD” (Zechariah 14:20).

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