Joel1chapter 1

Joel 1:1-4

The word of the Lord that came to Joel: The book opens with only a patronymic, Joel the son of Pethuel, a name found nowhere else in the Old Testament, and no king or era is named as with most of the other prophets, which is why proposals for the book's date have ranged across several centuries. The word of the Lord announces a locust plague under four names in sequence, the palmerworm, the locust, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the commentators divide over whether these describe four successive stages of one insect's life or four separate waves of devastation. Whatever the entomology, the command tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children echoes the Passover's own pattern of a disaster turned into a generation-spanning testimony.

Joel 1:5-7

The drunkards are roused first because the vine is the plague's earliest casualty, the new wine cut off from their mouth before any theology is preached to them. Verse 6 names the locust swarm a nation, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, the double vision the book will not let go of, an insect plague described in an invading army's own vocabulary. The vine laid waste and the fig tree barked clean bare, its branches made white, pictures trees stripped to bare wood, a report travelers in genuine locust years have called accurate rather than exaggerated.

Joel 1:8-10

Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth turns the plague from agriculture to grief, a young widow's mourning borrowed for a ravaged land. The meat offering and the drink offering cut off from the house of the Lord marks the plague's deepest wound for a covenant people, worship itself interrupted for want of grain and wine, and the priests, the Lord's ministers, mourn because their office has nothing left to bring. The field wasted and the land mourning is stated twice in two verses, the ground itself given the mourner's part alongside the people.

Joel 1:11-12

The husbandmen are told to be ashamed and the vinedressers to howl for the wheat and the barley, since the harvest itself, not the vine alone, has failed. Verse 12 lists six trees by name, the vine, the fig, the pomegranate, the palm, and the apple, all withered together, an inventory the commentators read as deliberately exhaustive, nothing left standing in the field. The chapter's own explanation follows in the same verse, because joy is withered away from the sons of men, the crop failure and the human grief named as one event.

Joel 1:13-14

The priests who mourned in verse 9 are now given their task, gird yourselves, and lament, and lie all night in sackcloth, the altar's own ministers made the chapter's chief mourners since the offering they exist to bring has failed. Sanctify ye a fast, call a solemn assembly gathers every rank, elders and all the inhabitants of the land, into the house of the Lord for a single corporate act. The cry unto the Lord that closes verse 14 is the first prayer the book has offered after a chapter of pure description of ruin.

Joel 1:15-18

Alas for the day: Alas for the day! introduces the book's refrain, the day of the Lord is at hand, a phrase Joel repeats at 2:1, 2:11, and 3:14, binding the locust year to a horizon larger than any one harvest. The word rendered destruction plays in the Hebrew on the divine name Shaddai, shod mishaddai, a wordplay the commentators note the King James cannot carry across into English. Even the animals are drawn into the lament, the beasts groan, the herds of cattle are perplexed for lack of pasture, and the flocks of sheep made desolate, creation itself given a voice in the book's grief.

Joel 1:19-20

The prophet's own prayer closes the chapter, O Lord, to thee will I cry, the first time in the book Joel speaks for himself rather than summoning others to lament. Fire joins drought as a second disaster, the pastures of the wilderness devoured by flame as well as by locust, which some commentators read as the same locust imagery intensified and others as an actual accompanying drought and fire. The beasts of the field crying unto God in verse 20 repeats verse 18's turn to the animals, ending the chapter on the whole created order's need, which chapter 2 will begin to answer.