What Does Revelation 6:15 Mean?
And the kings of the earth, and the great ones, and the chief captains, and the rich, and the strong, and every servant and every free one hide themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains.
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 the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;THE KEY
When the world is unveiled, the whole ladder of status collapses into one shared impulse: hide.
THE MEANING
The verse gathers rulers, the wealthy, the powerful, the enslaved, and the free into one condition: hiding. No rank gives a separate refuge; all reach for caves and mountain rock, narrowing their world to concealment. It exposes how power and freedom can give way to the same wish to vanish.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that rank, wealth, or independence can make a person exempt from what is being revealed.
THE ROOT
ἔκρυψαν ἑαυτούς
ekrypsan heautous
GROWS FROM
κρύπτω
hide, conceal
The Greek verb is paired with a reflexive pronoun: they hide themselves. After naming every public rank, the verse turns them all toward the same private act; related forms name what is hidden or concealed away, so the caves enact the root without resolving the exposure.
ALSO GROWS
kryptos: hidden, secret
κρυπτός
This form names the hidden state the people seek by entering the caves.
apokryptō: conceal, hide away
ἀποκρύπτω
This related verb makes the attempt to put something out of sight explicit, echoing the crowd’s flight into concealment.
THE PATTERN
When exposure overwhelms, people ask the landscape itself to become their hiding place.
And they shall enter the caves of the rock, and the hollows of the dust, from the dread of the LORD and from the splendor of his majesty, when he rises to make the earth tremble.Also the high places of Aven, the falling short of Israel, shall be laid waste. The thorn and the thistle shall climb up on their altars, and they shall say to the mountains, "Cover us," and to the hills, "Fall on us."Then they will begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills, Cover us.THE THREAD
For there is nothing hidden that will not be brought to light, nor has anything become hidden away, but that it come into the open.Both verses use the Greek root κρύπτω (kryptō, “hide or conceal”): Revelation shows people reaching for concealment, while Mark says what is hidden will be made manifest. The shared root makes the cave a response to exposure, not a final refuge.
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