Let us Beat Swords Into Plowshares, a sculpture by Evgeniy Vuchetich, given by the Soviet Union to the United Nations in 1959

Joel 3

¹ For then, in those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, ² I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat, and I will enter into judgment with them there, on account of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations. They have divided my land, ³ and cast lots for my people, and traded boys for prostitutes, and sold girls for wine, and drunk it down.

⁴ What are you to me, O Tyre and Sidon, and all the regions of Philistia? Are you paying me back for something? If you are paying me back, I will turn your deeds back upon your own heads swiftly and speedily. ⁵ For you have taken my silver and my gold, and have carried my rich treasures into your temples. ⁶ You have sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, removing them far from their own border. ⁷ But now I will rouse them to leave the places to which you have sold them, and I will turn your deeds back upon your own heads. ⁸ I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the people of Judah, and they will sell them to the Sabeans, to a nation far away; for the LORD has spoken.

⁹ Proclaim this among the nations:
Prepare war, stir up the warriors. Let all the soldiers draw near, let them come up.
¹⁰ Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears;
let the weakling say, “I am a warrior.”
¹¹ Come quickly, all you nations all around, gather yourselves there.
Bring down your warriors, O LORD.
¹² Let the nations rouse themselves, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat;
for there I will sit to judge all the neighboring nations.
¹³ Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe.
Go in, tread, for the wine press is full.
The vats overflow, for their wickedness is great.
¹⁴ Multitudes, multitudes, in the valley of decision!
For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.
¹⁵ The sun and the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining.
¹⁶ The LORD roars from Zion, and utters his voice from Jerusalem, and the heavens and the earth shake. But the LORD is a refuge for his people, a stronghold for the people of Israel.
¹⁷ So you shall know that I, the LORD your God, dwell in Zion, my holy mountain.
And Jerusalem shall be holy, and strangers shall never again pass through it.
¹⁸ In that day the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
the hills shall flow with milk, and all the stream beds of Judah shall flow with water;
a fountain shall come forth from the house of the LORD and water the Wadi Shittim.
¹⁹ Egypt shall become a desolation and Edom a desolate wilderness,
because of the violence done to the people of Judah,
in whose land they have shed innocent blood.
²⁰ But Judah shall be inhabited forever, and Jerusalem to all generations.
²¹ I will avenge their blood, and I will not clear the guilty, for the LORD dwells in Zion.

This final chapter of Joel may seem bloodthirsty and distasteful to many modern Christians who have grown up without the experience of war and famine devastating their land. The image of God as the divine warrior who humiliates the enemies of the people of God may seem like a remnant of a more violent time, but it also reflects our ability to trust in our own military might to secure our future rather than God being the defender of Israel (or any other nation). In the aftermath of the Babylonian exile the military power Israel or Judah could exert was shattered. Although we do not know much about the geopolitics of the fourth and fifth century BCE it is clear that Joel’s complaints against the other nations parallel the events listed in other prophets. The army of locusts which devastated the land in Joel 1-2 for a community which suffered a series of crises as it tried to regain its footing in the land must have seemed like the straw that broke the camel’s back. (Birch, 1997, p. 162) As Judah and Jerusalem imagine a hopeful future beyond the locusts and the evil inflicted on them by their neighbors in their troubled past it involves both the renewal of the agricultural prosperity of the land and the removal of the threat of their neighbors.

Although the United States has been involved in conflicts during the fifty years of my life, these conflicts have always taken place in some other land and have been conducted by a volunteer military whose experiences are not shared by the majority of the population. In contrast in Israel:

Every forty-four years out of the last four thousand, on average, an army has marched through it, whether to conquer it, to rescue it from someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight a different enemy, or to take advantage of is as the natural route for getting somewhere else to fight there instead. (Wright, 1992, p. 3)

Especially at this juncture of history where Jerusalem and Judah are a weak client state of Persia surrounded by hostile neighbors, the people were scattered among the nations, the land was divided up after the conquest of Babylon and is only partially restored after Persia allows some of the people to resettle, and where slavery for men and women and even children is a recent memory their desire for justice on their oppressors is understandable. More critical in Joel’s vision is that the LORD has taken offense at the misuse of “my people and my heritage Israel.” The nations have taken advantage of Israel’s inability to protect itself through multiple crises and have profited off this weakness to obtain land, and to either be those who captured people to sell into slavery or served as markets where slaves were sold to other nations.

Human trafficking or slavery was an assumed part of conflicts in the ancient world. One of the bounties that armies marching through a land would take is from selling both the defeated enemy, but also captured civilians into slavery. Both the economic and the human capital of Judah and Jerusalem have been plundered and moved through the seaports of Tyre and Sidon and Philistia. Families cry out for their lost generations and God promises to return them home to Judea and to do to Phoenicia (Tyre and Sidon) and Philistia what they did to God’s people and inheritance. The silver and gold will be returned from their temples (or palaces)[1] and while the children of Israel were sold into slavery among the Greeks, the Sabeans in the south are the promised destination of the children of these nations.

In verse nine the text becomes more poetic as the LORD issues a challenge to the nations. It is important to note that the LORD is not telling Israel to prepare for war but throws down the gauntlet to challenge the nations to face God at the valley of judgment.[2] Although the famous image of Isaiah 2: 1-4 and Micah 4: 1-3 where the nations turn their swords into plowshares[3] and spears into pruning hooks (or knives) is reversed here so that the nations are invited to take up what weapons they can fashion if they choose to oppose the LORD who awaits their arrival as a divine warrior. The image of God treading the winepress echoes Isaiah 63: 1-6:

“Who is this that comes from Edom, from Bozrah in garments stained crimson? Who is this so splendidly robed marching in his great might?”“ It is I, announcing vindication, mighty to save.: “Why are your robes red, and your garments like theirs who tread the wine press?” “I have trodden the wine press alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in anger and trampled them in wrath; their juice spattered on my garments, and stained all my robes. For the day of vengeance was in my heart, and the year for my redeeming work had come. I looked and there was no helper; I stared, but there was no one to sustain me; so my own arm brought me victory, and my wrath sustained me. I trampled down peoples in my anger, I crushed them in my wrath,and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth.

The God of Israel will not allow the oppression of God’s people and God’s inheritance to go on indefinitely and the wickedness of the world must be eliminated. The scene is violent and there is no way around the violence of the imagery, but the nations are invited to gather before the LORD and only their continued opposition to the LORD has brought about this bloody moment. The advent of God’s presence brings about a cosmic reaction as the sun and moon are darkened and the earth shakes. The imagery is similar to Amos 1: 1-2 but also reflects the common Jewish thought that the creation itself reacts to the divine presence drawing near.

The presence of God as the divine warrior and protector of the people ensures the safety of Zion. God’s presence sanctifies the land, but that sanctification for Joel also means the exclusion of the nations (Gentiles). (Collins, 2013, p. 28) Perhaps this is only the exclusion of political occupation, but as mentioned in the previous post Joel does not see this vision of God’s Spirit being poured upon all the people as including the nations. This restoration of safety by the exclusion of the nations and the punishment of those who had oppressed Israel probably stretches to the limit of the imagination of Joel. The later expansion of this vision in the early Christians would be a struggle documented in the book of Acts. It also echoes the renewal of agricultural prosperity from Joel 2: 18-27. The wine that had dried up in chapter one now drips from the mountains, the sheep and cattle who were dying of starvation now produce milk in the hills, and the creeks dried up in the drought now flow with water. In an image that echoes Ezekiel 47: 1-12, water now flows from the temple of God and flows out to provide water for the Wadi Shittim.

From the position of many Western Christians who have not experienced the oppression of an external enemy or the life-threatening environmental crisis of Joel these images of God may seem difficult to square with the God of love proclaimed in many churches. Yet, for Joel and most other Jewish and early Christians God judges because God cares about God’s people, God’s land, and God’s inheritance. For those who have lived in the shadow of terror where children have become the victims of human trafficking, where men and women of all ages are sold into slavery and where violence has ruled the land their hope is for a God who can and will defend them.

Prior to becoming a pastor, I served as an officer in the Army during the time the peacekeeping missions in Bosnia. The experience of Bosnia or Rwanda is probably closer to the experience of Judah and Jerusalem than the peaceful existence of the United States throughout my lifetime. Years ago, I encountered Miroslav Volf’s profound reflections on forgiveness in light of his experiences as a Croatian in the aftermath of the desolation of his country and people by the Serbians, and Exclusion and Embrace is one of the books I use frequently to inform how I encounter the God of the scriptures who comes to provide judgment on earth. As Volf states:

Most people who insist on God’s “nonviolence” cannot resist using violence themselves (or tacitly sanctioning its use by others). They deem the talk of God’s judgment irreverent, but think nothing of entrusting judgment into human hands, persuaded presumably that this is less dangerous and more humane than to believe in a God who judges! That we should bring “down the powerful from their thrones” (Luke 1: 51-52) seems responsible; that God should do the same, as the song of that revolutionary Virgin explicitly states, seems crude. And so, violence thrives, secretly nourished by belief in a God who refuses to wield the sword.

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover it takes the quiet suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. (Volf, 1996, pp. 303-304)

These images may never be easy for many Christians to read, but they are an essential part of the hope of a people who are unable to defend themselves. God is their divine warrior who provides not only protection but prosperity and turns away the warring of the nations. In the language of Psalm 46:

Come, behold the works of the LORD; see what desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire. “Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth.”    (Psalm 46: 8-10)

Only when we step away from our privileged and hear these words from the troubled world that Joel inhabits can we properly hear these words of hope that Joel speaks to this grieving community. There is no hope of a future that can be separated from physical safety for themselves and their children. I do think God calls on us for our imaginations to continue to expand as we envision a future for ourselves and our enemies, but it is also critical to understand that the prophets speak to a specific people with specific traumas that need to be healed. Perhaps for Joel it is only the nations mobilizing with their swords and spears that can finally bring them to the point that Isaiah and Micah can hope for where nations no longer train for war and the instruments of war are returned to implements of agriculture. For Joel forgiveness is not possible for the nations before justice (or retribution) for the wrong his people have suffered has been exacted by their God. Joel’s voice is not unique in scripture, but it is also not the only voice.

[1] The word in Hebrew can mean either temple or palaces. Likely this refers to the items taken from the temple of the LORD or from the household of the king since most people would not have access to large amounts of silver or gold.

[2] Jehoshaphat means the LORD judges.

[3] Or mattocks. As James D. Nogalski notes this probably refers to a mattock which is smaller than an animal pulled plowshare and would be turned into a short sword rather than what is often seen in sculptures. (Nogalski, 2023, p. 166)