Joel 1: A ruined harvest empties field and sanctuary

The Book of Joel opens by making catastrophe a matter of memory before it becomes a matter of explanation. Elders are asked whether anything in their experience compares with what the land has suffered, and the disaster is ordered to be told onward through successive generations. The loss then moves through every layer of communal life. Wine disappears, vines and fig trees are stripped, farmers and vinedressers lose their harvest, and the house of the LORD loses the grain and drink offerings that depended on those fields. Priests therefore gather the community for fasting and lament while the approaching day of the LORD gives the visible scarcity a larger horizon. By the end, the damage has reached seed, barns, pasture, watercourses, cattle, sheep, and wild beasts. Human prayer and animal distress stand beside one another in a land whose ability to sustain life has been steadily stripped away.