What Does Revelation 6:12 Mean?
And I see when he opens the sixth seal, and a great shaking comes, and the sun becomes black as sackcloth of hair, and the whole moon becomes as blood.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;THE KEY
The seal opens into a world where even the lights that order its days lose their familiar form.
THE MEANING
You see the ground lose its steadiness, while the sun darkens and the moon takes on the color of blood. The signs that usually make the world feel ordered change too, carrying the rupture from beneath your feet to the sky above.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that the world’s visible order is unshakable dissolves here: the ground and the lights above it all change.
THE ROOT
σεισμός
seismós
GROWS FROM
σει- (sei-), the σείω (seíō) word family
Shake; move to and fro
“great shaking” in this verse is seismós. Greek names the earthquake as a shaking, σεισμός (seismós), in the family of σείω (seíō), “to shake.” The verb returns in the next verse when a tree is shaken and stars fall like fruit, carrying the upheaval from earth into heaven.
ALSO GROWS
seíō: To shake or move to and fro
σείω
The next verse uses this verb for the fig tree shaken by wind, carrying the same shaking into the image of falling stars.
seismós: A shaking; an earthquake
σεισμός
This is the noun translated “earthquake”; the word family makes shaking itself the center of the image.
αἷμα
haima
GROWS FROM
αἱματ- (haimat-), the αἷμα (haima) word family
Blood
The verse makes an explicit comparison: the moon becomes “as blood.” The αἷμα (haima) family also names bloodshed and blood flow, carrying blood’s imagery of shedding and flow into the sky.
ALSO GROWS
haimatekchysía: Shedding or pouring out of blood
αἱματεκχυσία
This compound appears in Hebrews 9:22; it carries the image of blood being shed beneath the moon’s blood-colored appearance.
haimorrhoéō: To flow with blood
αἱμορροέω
A form of this compound describes the flow of blood in Matthew 9:20, placing the same word family in a bodily image.
THE PATTERN
In visions of rupture, the shaken earth and darkened lights show upheaval reaching from the ground into the heavens.
Before them the earth trembles, the heavens quake, the sun and the moon go dark, and the stars gather in their brightness.For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will go dark as it comes out, and the moon will not make its light shine.Immediately after the pressure of those days, the sun is darkened, and the moon does not give its glow, and the stars fall from the heavens, and the strength of the heavens is shaken.THE THREAD
And the stars of heaven fall to the earth, as a fig tree throws its green figs, shaken by a great wind.The Greek verb σείω (seíō, “to shake”) underlies both this verse’s σεισμός (seismós, “earthquake”) and the tree “shaken” in the next verse. The image carries the shaking from earth into the heavens: stars fall as fruit when their tree is shaken.
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