Joel Chapter 2

vs 1


Apparently, Israel had an early warning system for the Day of the Lord. Sort of like an ancient Tsunami system - where once it goes off, it's really too late to do anything about it.

vs 2

Obviously the Day of the Lord is not a time of happy fun puppets. It's dark, and foreboding, and nasty. It is a time of judgment, after all. It's the New Testament that paints the end of days as good for believers, but even then Revelation paints a pretty stark picture of "It will be good... eventually."

vs 3

Even though this description sounds like a real army, I'm not so sure. In fact, the pictures in Joel 2, in my opinion, fluctuate between a bunch of locusts and a bunch of army. The link of the fire here to the fire in chapter 1 is not lost on me. But it's hard to make distinctions about what goes where. Sufficed to say that, whether it's a locust plague yet to come, or an army yet to come (what we might call as "a Day of the Lord") or whether it's the final time of judgment (that's "the Day of the Lord"), it's not going to be pretty.

vs 4

Because there is now a list of comparisons to an army, that makes me think that it's locusts. You don't really describe cavalry as galloping along like cavalry. Not unless you suck at describing things.

vs 5

Chariots don't leap over mountains.

So why the army metaphors (similes, mostly?)? I guess the difference between a locust plague and an army is that armies don't just spring up and go rampaging for no reason, with no leadership. By calling these locusts an army of God, it is putting the leadership and responsibility for them at God's feet. God takes responsibility for bad stuff that happens. If he didn't, then we'd have to believe that stuff 'just happens', and that's stupid.

vs 6

That goes for both armies and locusts, I suppose.

vs 7

So we're still on locusts then.

vs 8

I'm being fairly casual and flippant about this, but if I were in a mud brick house that suddenly got swarmed by a billion of these suckers, I would freak the hell out. Locusts are huge. I remember Stephan's dad had one encased in resin. Big, scary looking sucker. One of them in the house would be bad enough - it's like a rat - you can't just step on it or hit it with a thong. Imagine millions of them. Eew.

vs 9

I would be earnestly praying for flyscreens at this point.

vs 10

The idea of the sun dimming because there's a huge cloud of insects about to land on your town is scary. The fact that the cloud is so big that it blocks out the sun and the moon (that is, it goes all day and night) - well, I think I'd be going pretty nuts about then.

The thing is, people survive locust plagues. When you compare it to an army, sure there's something you can do (get out there and fight them) but when an army invades your town, they can burn it to the ground. And kill your family.

Ancient life sucked.