A Ruined Harvest Empties Field and Sanctuary

Joel means “the LORD is God”, the two halves of Elijah’s name in reverse order. His father Pethuel appears nowhere else, and unlike Hosea, Amos and Micah the book names no king, which is why its date has been placed anywhere from the ninth century to after the exile.

“Old men” can also mean the elders, the town’s officials, summoned again in verse 14. The question borrows the language of the eighth plague, locusts “which neither thy fathers, nor thy fathers’ fathers have seen” (Exodus 10:6). What Egypt suffered, Judah is now suffering.

Four generations are counted, the hearers and three after them. The command again echoes the locust plague of Exodus, given “that thou mayest tell in the ears of thy son, and of thy son’s son” (Exodus 10:2). A disaster in Egypt became a lesson retold; so will this one.

The four names mean roughly the shearer, the swarmer, the licker and the finisher. They may be four kinds of insect or four stages of the locust’s life. A palmerworm, in 1611, was a hairy caterpillar that wandered like a palmer, a pilgrim. The same four return in 2:25 in another order.

The first people roused are the drinkers, perhaps the only ones sure to notice at once. “New wine” is asis, sweet juice fresh from the press, the first yield of the vintage. “Cut off” is a word Joel will repeat for the temple offerings in verse 9 and the food in verse 16.

Calling locusts a “nation” fits Proverbs 30:25–27, where ants and locusts are counted as peoples, and the locusts go out “by bands” though they have no king. “Cheek teeth” are the jaw teeth of a lioness. The insect’s mouth is small, but the swarm eats like a pride.

“Barked” is a word for splintering or stripping: locusts eat the leaves, then gnaw the bark until the wood shows white. The vine and the fig tree together were the picture of settled peace, every man “under his vine and under his fig tree” (1 Kings 4:25; Micah 4:4).

A betulah was a young woman, often one betrothed. Betrothal was binding in Israel, so a girl whose betrothed died before the wedding was left mourning a husband she never lived with. Sackcloth was coarse goat’s hair, worn against the skin in grief.

“Meat offering” means grain offering; in 1611 meat meant food of any kind. The daily offering at the temple, morning and evening, required flour, oil and wine (Exodus 29:38–41). With the fields stripped, the ordinary daily worship at the altar has no supplies.

The Hebrew clauses are short and sound-matched: shuddad sadeh, “wasted is the field”. Grain, new wine and oil are the triad Deuteronomy 11:14 promised as the covenant’s blessing, and Hosea 2:8 names them as gifts Israel credited to Baal.

The Hebrew plays on two verbs that sound almost alike, to dry up and to be ashamed, and alternates them through verses 10–12. Barley was reaped in spring, around Passover, and wheat some weeks later, at Pentecost, so both named crops together mean the whole grain year is gone.

The list runs through the fruits of the good land of Deuteronomy 8:8. The palm is the date palm; the “apple” tree, tappuach, may be the apricot or the quince, since the true apple was little grown there. Joy is given the same drying verb as the trees.

Priests normally served in fine linen (Exodus 28:39); now they are told to lie all night in goat’s hair. Joel calls them ministers of “my God”, a personal note in the middle of a command. The offering is “withholden”, held back, not stolen.

“Sanctify” is qadesh, to set apart, the verb used for consecrating a feast. The “solemn assembly” is atsarah, the word for the closing gathering of a festival (Leviticus 23:36). Jehoshaphat called Judah to such a fast when an invasion threatened (2 Chronicles 20:3–4).

“Destruction from the Almighty” is a pun, shod mi-Shaddai, ruin from Shaddai, the old divine name. Isaiah 13:6 has the identical line. The day of the LORD appears here for the first time in the book, and it will dominate the next two chapters.

The festivals were commanded to be times of rejoicing, “thou shalt rejoice in thy feast” (Deuteronomy 16:14), and the harvest feasts rejoiced over exactly the crops now lost. The prophet speaks as one of the sufferers: before “our” eyes.

Several words in this verse occur nowhere else in the Bible, so the translation is partly reconstructed; the seed may be shrivelled rather than rotten, and the “clods” may be the farmers’ shovels. Broken-down barns are barns no one has bothered to repair, since there is nothing to put in them.

“Perplexed” is the verb for Israel “entangled in the land” before the Red Sea (Exodus 14:3), wandering without a way out. The verb for the sheep’s desolation can also mean to bear guilt, so even the flocks share the penalty of a land under judgment.

“Wilderness” here is not sand desert but open grazing land away from the towns. Fire is the heat of drought, and Joel will use fire again for the advancing swarm in 2:3. The prophet, who has called everyone else to cry, now cries himself.

“Cry” is the rare verb arag, to long for or pant, used in Psalm 42:1, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks”, and the “rivers of waters” are the same channels. The chapter closes on a line repeated from verse 19, a lament folding back on itself.