Revelation 8:11

11. Name… wormwood Wormwood, (often associated with gall,) seems to have been either the trouble produced by an apostate, or an emblematic penalty for apostasy. So, in Deuteronomy 29:18, the apostate from Jehovah is a “root that beareth gall and wormwood,” producing on Israel the guilt and punishment of apostasy. In Jeremiah 23:15, God threatens against apostate prophets, “I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall.” And as Jeremiah, personating the apostasy and downfall of Israel, says, Lamentations 3:15, “He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood.” This explains that “root of bitterness,” of Hebrews 12:15, where the “root” is the apostate, and the “bitterness” the result of his apostasy. Says Wordsworth, “Wormwood is very bitter, and in certain cases produces convulsions, delirium, epilepsy, and death,” a fit emblem of the ruin of mind and body produced by the primal apostasy and by sin. The symbolism of our seer in this passage represents vividly how, by this means, those springs and streams which should, in the ideal, be the sources of delight, nourishment, health, and buoyant vitality, become a bitterness, a miasm, a death.