Famine

Famine

Matthew 24:7b; Mark 13:8b; Luke 21:11; Revelation 6:5-6

Christ said that there would be great famines in the time leading up to His return (Matt. 24:7b; Mark

13:8b; Luke 21:11; see Rev. 6:5-6).

The famine was caused by the siege of Jerusalem in fulfillment of the curse in the Torah (Lev. 26:20, 29),

just as in the days of the Babylonian siege (Lam. 5:10).

There are multiple passages in Josephus, who was an eyewitness at the time, confirming the intensity of

the famines that occurred, some even recorded in the Scriptures (Acts 7:11; 11:28); with the severest

case climaxing during the final siege of Jerusalem, when people resorted to eating refuse before

descending into cannibalism.1 Josephus, uses similar wording to John when describing what he saw. He

wrote that, “Many secretly bartered their possessions for a single measure of wheat if they happened to

be rich, barley if they were poor” (Wars of the Jews, 5.10:2). In one instance, an entire talent of gold was

given for a measure of wheat (Wars of the Jews, 5.13:571).

In addition, John of Giscala (Gush Halav) entered Jerusalem after fighting broke out in the region of

Galilee and aroused the people to go to war. He helped the zealots seize control of Jerusalem and

attempted to set himself up as the leader (Wars of the Jews, 2.21). He took the sacred oil and wine

stored in the temple that was to be used for pouring on the burnt offerings and gave it to his adherents,

who used it to get drunk (Wars of the Jews, 5.13:6). It is fitting that the literal translation says, “and the

oil and the wine you might not do unjustly (or unright)” (6:6). The ”not” could be an emphatic double

negative, as how it often occurs in the Greek, which would mean that they would use the oil and the

wine unjustly.

Josephus describes that the famine became so severe that people began to search the sewers for stale

cattle dung to eat. The streets were riddled with bodies of the dead and dying. When the numbers

became too great to burry, they threw the bodies over the city wall into the ravines. Mannoeus, son of

Lazarus, took refuge with Titus and said that from the fourteenth of the month of Xanthicus when the

Romans encamped around the city, until the new moon of Panemus, 115,880 corpses were brought

outside the gates. Others within the city said that as many as 600,000 were thrown through the gates

(Josephus, Wars of the Jews 5:12:3 5:13:7).

Josephus mentions a woman who ate her own child (Josephus, Wars of the Jews 6.3.4).

Sulpitious Severus echoes Josephus:

Moreover, they ventured on eating all things of the most abominable nature, and did not

even abstain from human bodies, except those which putrefaction had already laid hold

of and thus excluded from use as food. Sulpitious Severus, The Sacred History 2.30

1

David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition on the Book of Revelation (Horn Lake, MS: Dominion Press,

2006), 190

“A Quart of Wheat for a Denarius”: Famine in the Gospels and the Apocalypse

1) Setting the Question

The Synoptic Gospels speak with a single, sober voice about the convulsions that would accompany the downfall of Jerusalem and the close of an age. Among the birth-pangs our Lord names famine: “There will be famines” (Matt 24:7; Mark 13:8; Luke 21:11). John’s Apocalypse develops that prediction with a vivid tableau: a rider holding scales, and a voice setting the price of grain—“a quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius”—together with a cryptic restraint: “and do not harm the oil and the wine” (Rev 6:5–6). In what follows, I expand your notes into a compact scholarly essay that ties together (1) the Gospel predictions, (2) the symbolic economy of Revelation’s third seal, and (3) first-century historical testimony—especially Josephus—about the temple’s last days. Along the way, I situate the famine motif in the covenantal Scripture background, and I summarize leading interpretive options for the oil-and-wine clause, concluding with brief theological and pastoral reflections.

2) Reading the Third Seal: Scale, Measure, Wage

When the Lamb opens the third seal (Rev 6:5–6), John sees a rider with a pair of scales (ζυγός). In the ancient world, scales evoke rationing and scarcity—bread “by weight” because food is short (cf. Lev 26:26; Ezek 4:16–17). The heavenly voice then specifies prices: a χοῖνιξ (roughly a quart/liter) of wheat for a denarius, or three χοίνικες of cheaper barley for the same wage. In Roman Palestine a denarius was the ordinary day wage for a laborer (cf. Matt 20:2). At those prices, an entire day’s pay buys food enough for one person (wheat) or at best a small household (barley). This is not absolute starvation so much as subsistence-level inflation during siege or systemic shortage—precisely the sort of constrained abundance implied by scales and rationing.

The final imperative—“do not harm (μὴ ἀδικήσῃς) the oil and the wine”—is grammatically a prohibition using μή with the aorist subjunctive, a standard Koine way to forbid even the onset of an action (“do not so much as begin to harm”). Syntactically, the clause stands under the same heavenly voice that fixes prices; semantically, it limits the ravages of the famine or identifies protected categories within it (on readings of this phrase see §7 below).

3) Covenant Curses Behind the Vision

Revelation’s famine symbol is canonically thick. The Mosaic covenant had warned Israel that disloyalty would bring sieges and shortages: “When I break your supply of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in a single oven and shall dole out your bread by weight; and you shall eat and not be satisfied” (Lev 26:26). The curses include the extremity of cannibalism under siege (Lev 26:29; Deut 28:53–57), a horror Jerusalem had tasted in the Babylonian crisis (Lam 4:10; 5:10) and would taste again in the Roman war. Revelation’s scales, weighed grain, and inflated prices are not arbitrary apocalyptic props; they are covenantal courtroom exhibits.

4) Famines in the First-Century Mediterranean World

Even before the Jewish war, the Mediterranean saw significant shortages. In Acts, the prophet Agabus predicts “a great famine over all the (Roman) world,” which Luke dates to the reign of Claudius (AD 41–54; Acts 11:28). Roman writers confirm the era’s scarcity. Suetonius reports that Claudius “took many precautions to ensure a continuous corn-supply” during a season of dearth, including building granaries, dredging harbors, and securing shipments, because “there was a scarcity of grain,” and he feared popular unrest. York University

Josephus adds a Judean perspective: during Claudius’s time, a famine struck Judaea so severely that Queen Helena of Adiabene purchased grain in Egypt and figs in Cyprus to relieve Jerusalem. (The episode appears in Antiquities 20; for Roman corroboration of the wider scarcity see again Suetonius.) The point is not to collapse Revelation exclusively into Claudian events, but to recognize that the “economy of shortage” John dramatizes was a lived reality in the decades bracketing the Jewish revolt.

5) The Siege of Jerusalem (AD 70): Josephus as Eyewitness

When we reach the 60s and 70s, the famine motif sharpens into the very contours Revelation paints. Josephus’s Jewish War records conditions in the city under Titus.

Rationing and desperate barter. In the thick of the siege Josephus writes: “Many…bartered their possessions for a single measure—wheat if they were rich, barley if they were poor.” The detail strikingly echoes the Apocalypse’s paired wheat-and-barley pricing; it also mirrors covenant curses about bread by measure. The Greek word he uses for a “measure” is of the same family as John’s χοῖνιξ.

Encirclement, deforestation, and the famine’s crescendo. In obedience to Luke 19:43’s ominous prophecy (“your enemies will…surround you”), Titus completed a circumvallation: “a wall was carried round the city, encompassing it, and…trees in the neighborhood were cut down,” both to build siege works and to strip the district. The result was catastrophic: “the valleys around the city were filled with corpses,” and “the whole city was choked with corpses.” The wall starved Jerusalem, the deforestation strangled its fuel and foraging, and the famine raged. Penelope

Cannibalism. Josephus tells the horrific story of a woman—Mary of Bethezuba—who, maddened by hunger, killed and ate her child. Later authors preserve Whiston’s translation of the episode; it remains the starkest fulfillment of the covenant curses and Lamentations’ bitter lament.

These data—rationing by weight/measure, inflated grain prices with barley as a cheaper staple, encirclement, deforestation, and famine culminating in cannibalism—are exactly the matrix in which the Gospels’ warnings and Revelation’s third seal would have been heard by first-century audiences.

6) “A Quart of Wheat for a Denarius”: Socio-Economic Force

Two further observations on the pricing formula sharpen its force.

1. Subsistence economics. A denarius as a day-wage (Matt 20:2) buying only a quart of wheat means a worker can keep one adult alive but cannot sustain a household (hence the barley option). That is precisely how famine presses: not to zero food, but to prices that force hard choices and barter of goods for staples (Josephus’s testimony).
2. Rationing and scale imagery. The scale signals weighed distributions. Both Leviticus 26:26 and Ezekiel 4:16–17 use “bread by weight” as a famine trope. Revelation’s scale fits that biblical dossier and the historical facts on the ground under siege.

7) “Do Not Harm the Oil and the Wine”: What Does It Mean?

Interpreters have offered several non-exclusive readings of the prohibition:

• Restraint/limited judgment. The famine is severe (grain prices) but not total; God sets boundaries (“thus far, no farther”), preserving at least some agricultural products. In this reading, the clause tempers the third seal, in line with the early judgments’ partial character.
• Class disparity. Oil and wine were staples but also markers of comparative wealth. On this reading, the poor suffer most (grain inflated), while elites retain access to oil/wine—an irony consistent with Josephus’s portrait of faction leaders feasting and plundering while the populace starves.
• Tree-crop nuance. In agronomy, olives and grapes grow on trees/vines; cereal grains are annuals. Some have suggested the command reflects conditions in which grain supplies (dependent on secure sowing/harvest cycles) collapse, but the standing tree-crops initially persist. Yet Josephus’s report that the Romans leveled surrounding trees to construct siege works shows how even this buffer vanishes as war advances. Penelope
• Cultic profanation. Josephus records that in the chaos, zealot leaders seized sacred oil and wine set aside for offerings, using them for revelry. Even if we bracket that specific episode for lack of a primary-text link here, the idea that oil/wine belong to God explains the prohibition as a protection of what is consecrated—food, yes, but also worship. (For the famine’s sacrilege-ridden atmosphere, see Josephus’s general narrative of the factions.)

These can be blended: the voice both limits the judgment and indicts elites who, for a time, spare their luxuries while the poor weigh grain.

8) From the Olivet Discourse to the Seals: Literary Parallels

Your note rightly set famine (the third seal) into the six-seal sequence that parallels Jesus’ own order in the Olivet Discourse. False messiahs → war → famine → pestilence/death → martyrdom → great shaking. The parallelism is not only thematic but structural, and it cues readers to hear the Apocalypse as an inspired “commentary” on Jesus’ sermon. In that light, it is striking how the historical record between AD 30 and 70—escalating unrest, imperial scarcity, local and regional famines, and a terminal siege—organizes itself along the Discourse’s contour.

9) Corroboration from Pagan and Christian Writers

Beyond Josephus, we glimpse the period’s character in Roman and ecclesial sources.

• Roman historians. Suetonius reports Claudius’s measures during scarcity (see §4 above). Tacitus (and others) chronicle the turbulence of the Julio-Claudian twilight and the Flavian rise—context for disrupted commerce that could aggravate supply lines even apart from siege. York University
• Later Christian summaries. Sulpicius Severus (late fourth century) recapitulates Josephus’s horrors, including the descent into “abominable” foods and even human bodies amid the famine. Although he is not a contemporary eyewitness, he is a noteworthy transmitter of the tradition and its moral diagnosis: judgment for a city’s unbelief. (Sulpicius’s account depends on Josephus; it aligns with the primary testimony already cited.)

10) A Note on Method: Preterist, Futurist, and “Already/Not-Yet”

Because Revelation has been read across frameworks, it is worth stating the interpretive posture adopted here. Nothing in the analysis above requires an exclusive preterist (all fulfilled) or futurist (all future) stance. It is enough to say that the first century provides a historically concrete, covenantally adequate referent for the famine imagery—one that first readers could recognize—while also allowing the vision to stand as a trans-historical pattern: whenever human pride tramples God’s covenant, economic fragility, predation, and profanation return. Thus the text both interprets Jerusalem’s end and “reads” our own times.

11) Theological Reflections

1. God’s sovereignty and measured judgments. The voice that sets prices can also bound the harm. Even judgment is governed.
2. Covenant accountability. The famine in Scripture is not mere meteorology; it is moral meteorology. When worship is corrupted and justice perverted, economic life withers.
3. Solidarity with the poor. The grain prices expose who suffers first and most. The church’s diaconal imagination—think of Helena’s famine relief—belongs within apocalyptic wisdom.
4. Worship under pressure. Oil and wine point to altar and table. In scarcity, the people of God learn that man does not live by bread alone; yet, paradoxically, that very confession demands concrete works of mercy.

12) Pastoral Application (Brief)

• Discernment: Refuse to sanctify exploitation as “market forces.” Revelation trains us to see famine as a spiritual crisis.
• Steadfastness: Endure economically lean seasons without despairing of the Lamb’s governance.
• Mercy: Organize practical relief that witnesses to the kingdom’s abundance in the face of scarcity.
• Hope: The third seal is not the last word. The sealed servants (Rev 7) and the Shepherd-Lamb (Rev 7:17) meet famine with living water.

Sources cited

• Josephus, The Jewish War 5.14 (on barter for a “single measure—wheat if rich, barley if poor”), English trans. and Greek at Lexundria.
• Josephus, The Jewish War 6.1 (on Titus’s circumvallation, deforestation, famine conditions, and bodies filling valleys), Univ. of Chicago Penelope site. Penelope
• Josephus, The Jewish War 6.3.4 (the story of Mary of Bethezuba and cannibalism), Whiston trans., online text.
• Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars: Divus Claudius 18 (measures in time of grain scarcity), accessible summary and quotation. York University

These historical witnesses illustrate how the New Testament’s famine predictions were heard and, in many respects, realized in the first century, while also informing faithful reading and practice in our own.