This note is interpretation, not translation. It reads the sixth seal (6:12–17) as the day of the LORD told in the prophets’ own words, and it asks the question the seal ends on: who is able to stand? The reading is that the book answers that question in the very next chapter, with the same verb.
What the seal is made of. Six verses, and nearly every line of them comes from the Hebrew scriptures. The sun black and the moon like blood is Joel 2:31, where it comes before the great and awesome day of the LORD. The stars falling and the sky rolled up like a scroll are Isaiah 34:4. A shaking of heaven and earth is Haggai 2:6; in Swete’s Greek the verb is seiō, the root of seismos, earthquake. The kings and the great ones going into caves and rocks are Isaiah 2:10, 19–21, and “fall on us and hide us” is Hosea 10:8. The kings are the ones Psalm 110:5 says are shattered on the day of his anger. And the question the seal closes on is asked of that day in Joel 2:11, Nahum 1:6 and Malachi 3:2. That is seven books of the Hebrew scriptures behind six verses. The note on Isaiah 2 (Into the Rock) goes into the hiding on its own; this one reads the seal as a whole.
The question the prophets ask.Who can stand before his indignation? Who can rise up in the heat of his anger? (Nahum 1:6). Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? (Malachi 3:2). The Hebrew verb is amad, to stand; the Greek of both is built on histēmi, and the verb in 6:17, tis dynatai stathēnai, is from the same verb. The prophets do not leave the question hanging. Joel gives the answer in the verse after the sun and moon: everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will escape, because on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who survive (2:32). Malachi follows it at once with a refiner who purifies the sons of Levi, so that they bring offerings in righteousness (3:3). And Psalm 24 asks it in the same verb and answers it: Who can go up the mountain of the LORD, and who can stand in his holy place? One with clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to what is empty (24:3–4).
Where the book answers. The next chapter opens with the same verb. Four messengers are standing (hestōtas) at the four corners of the earth, holding back the winds until the servants of God are sealed on their foreheads (7:1–3). Then the first people the book shows after the seal are a crowd no one could count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, hestōtes enōpion tou thronou kai enōpion tou Arniou, standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb (7:9), in white robes washed in the blood of the Lamb (7:14). The question at 6:17 is who is able to stand, and the first thing chapter 7 shows is people standing in the one place the seal said no one could. The one on the throne spreads His tent over them (7:15). The ones sealed are the ones Ezekiel 9:4 marks on the forehead, and at 14:1 they are on Mount Zion, the place Joel 2:32 names.
Red flag That chapter 7 is the book’s answer to the question at 6:17. The verb is the same and the two scenes follow each other, but no verse says that the one answers the other. The nearest texts are the prophets’ own: Joel 2:32 after Joel 2:31, Malachi 3:3 after 3:2, and Psalm 24:3–4, where the question and its answer stand together.
Where this stops. This note does not date the sixth seal, and it does not say whether the sky, the mountains and the stars are to be read as they stand or as figures; it only says where the words come from. It does not say who the kings and the great ones are beyond the book’s own list of seven (6:15). It does not count the dead: the quarter of the earth killed at 6:8 belongs to the fourth seal, the book says it once, and nothing in 6:12–17 gives a toll; the note on the fourth seal reads that verse against history. And it says nothing about the seventh seal, or the order of anything after it.