Pestilences · Luke 21:11
Pestilence — the Meaning, and the Watch
An old word for epidemic disease, a sign in Luke 21 — and a live feed of the outbreaks the world is watching now.
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“And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.”
What does pestilence mean?
Pestilence is an old English word for a deadly, fast-spreading epidemic disease — plague in the broad sense. It translates the Hebrew deber, a recurring judgment-word in the prophets (sword, famine, and pestilence form a standing triad in Jeremiah and Ezekiel), and the Greek loimos in Luke 21:11, where Jesus lists "pestilences" among the signs preceding the end of the age. In modern terms: epidemics and pandemics — cholera, plague, influenza, COVID-19 — are what the word covers.
The King James Version's "pestilences" in Luke 21:11 sits beside earthquakes and famines as part of the same birth-pains pattern: real, observable, distributed afflictions that mark the age without dating its end.
How this watch reads the data
Disease events are the hardest watch category to see clearly — outbreaks smolder, get renamed, and disappear from headlines long before they disappear from the world. The World Now's monitoring database tracks health events — outbreaks, case clusters, epidemic responses — as discrete monitored events with countries and timestamps. The feed on this page is that stream, and the counters update as events open and resolve. It is not a diagnosis engine; it is a watch: what is being tracked, where, and since when.
Watch reports · Pestilences
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On the prophecy-news wire
Headlines the watching world is discussing — discovery only; our reports are written from verified data.
- WHO Chief warns that Ebola outbreak on track to be deadliest everendtimeheadlines · 2026-08-14
Questions people ask
What does pestilence mean?
A deadly epidemic disease — plague in the broad sense. The word translates the Hebrew deber and the Greek loimos, and in modern usage covers fast-spreading, lethal infectious disease: epidemics and pandemics.
What is pestilence in the Bible?
In the Old Testament, pestilence appears alongside sword and famine as one of the standing judgment triad (Jeremiah 21:7, Ezekiel 14:21). In the New Testament, Jesus lists "pestilences" among the signs of the age in Luke 21:11, beside earthquakes and famines.
What does Luke 21:11 mean?
Luke 21:11 is part of Jesus' answer about the signs before the end: great earthquakes in diverse places, famines, pestilences, and fearful sights from heaven. Like Matthew 24, the passage frames these as things the watching generations will see — with the command to watch, not to calculate.
Is pestilence the same as a pandemic?
Essentially yes, at the severe end: a pandemic is a worldwide epidemic, and pestilence is the older word for deadly epidemic disease. Historical pestilences include the Black Death, cholera waves, the 1918 influenza, and — in our own era — COVID-19.