The black horse of the third seal (Revelation 6:5-6) is famine, the long-term hunger of protracted undernourishment that follows the wars of the red horse and flows from human oppression, corruption, and greed. Verse 8 confirms the rider has power to kill with hunger, and Jesus names this seal as famine in the Olivet Prophecy. Black is not the color of sin but of darkness and foreboding. Israel used it for the mournful, sickly look of those enduring scarcity as a judgment from God (Lamentations 5:10; Joel 2:6). The rider's scales, from the Greek zugón, "yoke," recall both the rationing of bread by weight in famine (Leviticus 26:26; Ezekiel 4:10, 16) and the fraudulent scales of oppressors (Hosea 12:7; Micah 6:11-12). They also recall God's own weighing of men's deeds and motives. The voice from the midst of the four living creatures is God's, and He announces disaster prices: a quart of wheat, a day's food for one man, costs a full day's wage. Barley is cheaper, but a family cannot live on a quart. Oil and wine, staples that add necessary nutrition, are left untouched yet out of the average man's reach, because all his money goes to bread. Ordinary people merely scrape by, as Genesis 3:17-19 foretold. The living creature that introduces this seal has a man's face, a reminder that famine is largely man's own doing, through war, tyranny, and even poor land use. Obeying God's law brings abundance, while disobedience brings the curses of Deuteronomy 28.

The black horse of Revelation 6:5-6 is the third seal and represents scarcity and famine. Its rider holds a pair of scales to measure and carefully dole out food, and a voice declares, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not harm the oil and the wine." A denarius was a working man's daily wage, so food prices run up to ten times normal. Grain, new wine, and oil were the basic staples of life (Deuteronomy 7:13; Hosea 2:8), so their scarcity signals a time when necessities are sold at greatly inflated prices. The black horse is one of the Four Horsemen, which are symbolic of four threads of human suffering running through the centuries and intensifying in the last days. They parallel Jesus' Olivet Prophecy in Matthew 24:5-12, where famines are named among the "beginning of sorrows." The black horse belongs to the first four seals, which are opened before the Great Tribulation. It therefore does not mark the immediate end. Famine has existed throughout history, and the twentieth century's man-made famines, caused by sins such as greed, hatred, stealing, and lying, show it growing in magnitude today. Those who repent, overcome sin, and obey God need not fear famine, for God promises to sustain them and they can "laugh at famine" (Job 5:22).

The black horse of the third seal (Revelation 6:5-6) pictures famine stalking the land, as Matthew 24:7 and Luke 21:11 indicate. Biblically, black signifies mourning and ill health from scarcity, since Jeremiah 14:2, Lamentations 5:10, and Nahum 2:10 describe faces and skin turned black by want. It is also a sign of God's judgment for sin (Zephaniah 1:15; Joel 2:2). The rider's pair of scales adds an economic element and likely points to rationing food in scarcity. A denarius is a laborer's daily wage, and a quart of grain is a person's daily requirement, so the horseman portrays hunger and suffering in which the powers that be tightly control staple foods at highly inflated prices. The command "do not harm the oil and the wine" comes from God, who sets the famine prices of grain. Oil and wine are secondary foods that supplement the diet but cannot sustain life alone, and they remain plentiful. This means either that God limits the severity of famines, since the end is not yet and these are the beginning of sorrows, or, more likely, that famines are uneven: some foods scarce while others abound, and some people and regions hit hard while others hardly suffer. That unevenness suggests human involvement, fitting the human-driven deception and war of the first two seals. Famine is largely caused by political corruption, war, and economics rather than by lack of food, and it reminds humanity that when man governs without God's guidance, catastrophe follows. The fragile global economy calls for prudence, as Proverbs 27:12 counsels.

The black horse of the Third Seal in Revelation 6 is God's prophecy of widespread famine. Reports of reduced warm-water volume in the Gulf Stream, whether caused by the BP oil disaster or not, point toward this fulfillment. A Russian summer of record heat cut grain production, and a warning of Russia's coldest winter in 1000 years rests on the loss of the warm air that normally buffers Russia from Arctic cold. At the same time, poor rainfall patterns and desertification are reducing American food production. When two of the world's largest food producers are disrupted together, the price of exported grain will soar beyond the reach of the poorest nations, and forecasters expect starvation to become rampant beginning in 2011. This is the situation the black horse foretells, and it ties the prophecy directly to present life. The accuracy of these weather reports cannot be settled with certainty, since information gathered and spread instantly is hard to verify, and even the best sources are imperfect because accuracy depends on time to check.