Reflections on Joel 1

 Joel 01  (Contemporary English Version)

1. I am Joel the son of Pethuel. And this is the message the LORD gave to me.
   
2. Listen, you leaders and everyone else in the land. Has anything like this ever happened before?
   
3. Tell our children! Let it be told to our grandchildren and their children too.
   
4. Swarm after swarm of locusts has attacked our crops, eating everything in sight.
   
5. Sober up, you drunkards! Cry long and loud; your wine supply is gone.
   
6. A powerful nation with countless troops has invaded our land. They have the teeth and jaws of powerful lions.
   
7. Our grapevines and fig trees are stripped bare; only naked branches remain.
   
8. Grieve like a young woman mourning for the man she was to marry.
   
9. Offerings of grain and wine are no longer brought to the LORD's temple. His servants, the priests, are deep in sorrow.
   
10. Barren fields mourn; grain, grapes, and olives are scorched and shriveled.
    
11. Mourn for our farms and our vineyards! There's no wheat or barley growing in our fields.
    
12. Grapevines have dried up and so has every tree-- figs and pomegranates, date palms and apples. All happiness has faded away.
    
13. Mourn, you priests who serve at the altar of my God. Spend your days and nights wearing sackcloth. Offerings of grain and wine are no longer brought to the LORD's temple.
    
14. Tell the leaders and people to come together at the temple. Order them to go without eating and to pray sincerely.
    
15. We are in for trouble! Soon the LORD All-Powerful will bring disaster.
    
16. Our food is already gone; there's no more celebrating at the temple of our God.
    
17. Seeds dry up in the ground; no harvest is possible. Our barns are in bad shape, with no grain to store in them.
    
18. Our cattle wander aimlessly, moaning for lack of pasture, and sheep are suffering.
    
19. I cry out to you, LORD. Grasslands and forests are eaten by the scorching heat.
    
20. Wild animals have no water because of you; rivers and streams are dry, and pastures are parched.

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Joel begins immediately with a description of an unprecedented destruction that was to come on Judah. A plague of locust was to come like none Judah or Israel had ever seen, sweeping through in succeeding swarms. What the first swarm missed would be devoured by the next swarm, and a succeeding swarm would devour what the second missed. No vegetation would be left in its wake. Verse 6 speaks of nation invading the land, but is this referring, literally, to an invading army or another reference to the invasion of locust?

Mourning was called for, but its focus was on more than the loss of food. The primary reason given for mourning was that the grain and drink offerings had been "cut off from the house of the Lord." (1:9) Though the reason for this devastation has not yet been given, we can assume it was because Judah had turned away from the Lord making any offering the people brought for worship a mockery. Therefore, the Lord had cut off a significant source of offering and thus a significant part of the mockery in worship.

Though a primary source of offerings to the Lord had been cut off this didn't keep the people from fasting and assembling to cry out to the Lord in repentance. A solemn assembly was called. This devastation could yet be turned around through repentance. There is both a psychological and a historical cause for Judah to feel, after this much devastation, that something worse was yet to come.  The psychological cause is brought on by the experience of one bad thing after another enough times that one becomes conditioned to expect more bad things. But the historical cause of expecting something more devastating yet to come is the plagues that led to Israel's escape from Egypt. The plague that brought locusts on Egypt was the next to last plague that preceded the death of the first born.

Based on the last verses of the chapter it appears that drought had accompanied the locust plague. Seeds remained in the ground ungerminated and the riverbeds had dried up. But there was something more to come, and that was the Day of the Lord. It would bring "devastation from the Almighty." (1:15)