Joel chapter 1

vs 11

And your livelihood is gone. And the food you were going to feed to your children is also gone. There wasn't a farming safety net. This punishment of God means children die.

vs 12


All the fruits that are mentioned here are summed up in the last sentence - the joy of people. There's no chocolate - fruit is the old chocolate. Fruit was the flavour sensation of the ancient world.

It's also the thing you could still live on in the times when cultivated land wasn't available - you could go and pick wild fruits at least. But now even this is gone.

vs 13

A time of mourning and repentance is called for by the prophet among those who work the temple. The TNIV interestingly uses the subheading 'Call for Lamentation', where the NIV used 'Call for Repentance'. That's the thing - Joel never links this stuff to any actions done by Israel. You can look at other prophets and see them denouncing Israel for doing this and that, not doing the other, and et cetera. But not here.

Anyway, the reason for lamentation is that now the sacrifices that they apparently were making could no longer be made.

vs 14

This is all that is left to do. Can't grow anything. Can't harvest anything. Can't sacrifice anything. There's now nothing left to do but to hold a sacred assembly and have everyone in Israel come to the temple and cry out to God. If nothing else, this will at least teach the lesson of reliance on God rather than ability to farm, the Land itself, or the sacrifices themselves.

vs 15

I don't mean to criticize, but "Alas for that day!" is not really a fabulous translation in my eyes. I mean, that may well be what it says. But what does that mean?

I guess you can't put .

And so we see the link between a time of distress and heartache and the Day of the Lord. It's certainly not near in a temporal sense, not for the people Joel's talking to. Rather, it becomes near when you are experiencing bad stuff. There's a funky terminology for this writing style that Hebrew uses, but I don't remember it.

vs 16

Interesting to think of the sacrifices that are given to God as representing "joy and gladness". But they do. I mean, unless it was a sin offering, you partook in the sacrifice yourself. The Hebrews did not have any false notions about God eating a bit of the sacrifice, or leaving some for him or anything like that. You poured some out, you at the rest with the priests. But now they can't.

vs 17

I dare say that, unless the locusts came equipped with battering rams, there is either some hyperbole, or the granaries just happened to be in a state of disrepair. Or perhaps there's something I don't know - like granaries break when they're emptied of grain or something.

The point being that the food stores, which you would normally use to get through a time of famine, are also gone.

vs 18

I read this somewhere, that animals in the OT suffer almost human-like, and are talked about in that fashion a fair bit. Think of the cattle in Jonah, if you want a clearer example. The reason that was given in this book (LaSor) was that since the Hebrews didn't make clear distinctions between animate and inanimate, and people and animals, that they were comfortable with poetic devices that crossed this line, and that this served to demonstrate the interrelatedess of these things, especially when it comes to sin taking its toll on people and on the Land and animals.

Or, you could say that it's just to assure those of us who are thinking "But they've got animals to eat, right?" that even the animals are in a poor way because of the locusts.

vs 19

Now this and verse 20 confuse me. Where did fire come from? Since when did locusts bring fire? I guess you could say two things - firstly, that the description of locusts sounding "like the crackling of fire" later on is being referenced here, or that the focus has changed, and we are now talking about an actual army. Is there ever an actual army talked about in Joel? Hard to say, really.

vs 20

Again, where did the water go? Locusts may drink a bunch of water, this may be something I am simply unaware of. And again, we have the fire. Since I'm fairly sure locusts ate the pastures, perhaps that answers my earlier question. But I don't know if it's that simple (are the prophets ever that simple?). It is possible that Joel is foretelling of a coming attack from an army that is actually like locusts in their destructiveness. Could this be a pre-exile warning?

Dunno.