Millions of swarming Australian plague locusts on the move By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35486123

Joel 1

¹ The word of the LORD that came to Joel son of Pethuel:
² Hear this, O elders, give ear, all inhabitants of the land! Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your ancestors?
³ Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.
⁴ What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten.
⁵ Wake up, you drunkards, and weep; and wail, all you wine-drinkers, over the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth.
⁶ For a nation has invaded my land, powerful and innumerable; its teeth are lions’ teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness.
⁷ It has laid waste my vines, and splintered my fig trees; it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down; their branches have turned white.
⁸ Lament like a virgin dressed in sackcloth for the husband of her youth.
⁹ The grain offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the LORD. The priests mourn, the ministers of the LORD.
¹⁰ The fields are devastated, the ground mourns; for the grain is destroyed, the wine dries up, the oil fails.
¹¹ Be dismayed, you farmers, wail, you vinedressers, over the wheat and the barley; for the crops of the field are ruined.
¹² The vine withers, the fig tree droops. Pomegranate, palm, and apple — all the trees of the field are dried up; surely, joy withers away among the people.
¹³ Put on sackcloth and lament, you priests; wail, you ministers of the altar. Come, pass the night in sackcloth, you ministers of my God! Grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God.
¹⁴ Sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the LORD your God, and cry out to the LORD.
¹⁵ Alas for the day! For the day of the LORD is near, and as destruction from the Almighty it comes.
¹⁶ Is not the food cut off before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God?
¹⁷ The seed shrivels under the clods, the storehouses are desolate; the granaries are ruined because the grain has failed.
¹⁸ How the animals groan! The herds of cattle wander about because there is no pasture for them; even the flocks of sheep are dazed.
¹⁹ To you, O LORD, I cry. For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and flames have burned all the trees of the field.
²⁰ Even the wild animals cry to you because the watercourses are dried up, and fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.

The prophet Joel looks at the environmental disaster that threatens the people, the animals, and the land itself through the word that he receives from the LORD the God of Israel. The destruction of the locusts and the drought have brought life in Israel to a critical point and Joel calls upon the priests to lead the people in the actions that demonstrate to the LORD the people’s desire to repent and restore the relationship with God. Even though Joel never indicates what actions the people need to repent from he sounds a clarion call to awake from their slumber and realize that the only hope that the people has is to remember their covenant with God, to show that they intend to be obedient, and pray for God to restore their fortunes. Joel’s shrill cry to the people points the way to a future beyond the judgment of God.

The book of Joel begins with the declaration that the word of the LORD came to Joel. This is a formula that is common in the prophets, but unlike many of the major and minor prophets there are no details in this introduction to locate the prophet in the time of a king or a major event. The only information we have on Joel is the name of his father (a name not used elsewhere in scriptures). The name Joel is common in genealogies, and it means ‘YHWH is God.’ It is the same components of Elijah’s name in reverse order. Scholars best guess to the context for Joel is the mid to late Persian empire before 343 BCE, but as mentioned in Transitioning to the Prophet Joel this educated guess is based upon clues throughout the short book.

The first recorded word of the prophet Joel is “hear” (Hebrew shemah) which immediately calls the attentive ear to Deuteronomy where the people of Israel are called to “hear.” The central commandment for the Jewish way of life comes from Deuteronomy 6: 4-5:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

Deuteronomy articulates a way of life centered around obedience to the commandments of God. It concludes with blessings if the people live wisely in accordance with the commandments of God and curses if they foolishly abandon the way of their God. As James D. Nogalski points out, many of the same elements in these curses articulated in Deuteronomy 28:15-68 are being experienced in this initial chapter of Joel: heat and drought (22-24), attack by locusts (28, 38, 42), devastated vineyards and olive groves (39-40) and the loss of both the harvest of trees and the fields (42). (Nogalski, 2023, p. 86) Joel is a writer who has access to the scriptures, which becomes apparent by his use of imagery found throughout scripture, and it is not surprising that his insight is framed in the language of Deuteronomy. Yet, Joel’s hope is also framed in the language of Deuteronomy:

When all these things have happened to you, the blessings and the curses that I have set before you, if you call them to mind among all the nations where the LORD your God has driven you, and return to the LORD your God, and you and your children obey him with all your heart and with all your soul, just as I am commanding you today, then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you…and the LORD your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings, in the fruit of your body, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the LORD your God will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors. (Deuteronomy 30: 1-3, 9)

In calling the inhabitants of the land to hear, Joel wants them to understand that the environmental catastrophe they are enduring is a work of God to call them back to obedience. Joel is reminding the people how to interpret their lives theologically and calling them to repentance so that this judgment of God may be reversed, and they may experience prosperity again.

Viewing an infestation of locusts, drought, and wildfire through the lens of a punishment of God may seem like an alien concept to most who live in the modern world of weather forecasts, insecticides, and scientific explanations. People who proclaim natural disasters like hurricanes, tornados, droughts, or wildfires as a judgment of God are often viewed in our world as people disconnected from modern society. They are crazy or delusional or they are pushing a judgmental view of God to maintain power over their followers. Joel may have been looked on as a voice out of tune with the rest of society even two millennia in the past. Prophets have rarely been welcomed in their time, and it would be easy to dismiss Joel’s correlation between these disasters and God, but the reality of this short book being included in our scriptures encourages us to slow down and reconsider our world in a different framework than we are used to employing.

Joel asks the elders among his hearers to look to their experience and the experience of their ancestors and see if they can find something comparable in their memory or the stories of their parents and grandparents. The word elders may refer to the leaders of the people, but it may be simply asking the elderly among the people to look back upon the longer span of their lives and look back into the past as far as their memories and stories will allow. Joel wants them to examine and discover that what is happening to their land in the present is not normal, it is like the onslaught of locusts Egypt experienced in the Exodus (Exodus 10: 1-20). This event is to be remembered by them and the future generations so they may return to the ways of God, and their descendants may not encounter these life-threatening conditions.

Most of the people reading this reflection are probably not connected to the land and the annual cycle of preparing, planting, growing, and harvesting that life depends upon. In a drought the prices may increase at the grocery store and municipalities may limit the amount of water to be utilized on landscaping, but life continues without interruption. Some have looked at Joel and thought the situation of the people of Joel’s time was not worth comparing to the military invasions that other prophets dealt with, but that would misunderstand the threat to life. Four different words[1] are used for locusts, and Joel 2:25 indicates that this invasion of locusts may have continued for years. If it was a single lost harvest people may rely on reserves of seed and food from previous years. There is no hardware store or nursery where the people can go to purchase new seeds, they rely on the previous year’s harvest for what will be planted. Not only is one harvest ruined. This crisis places the cycle of production itself at risk. Often the invasion of armies has used the metaphor of locust who eat everything to denote their destructiveness, now in Joel the metaphor is reversed: the invading army is the locusts.

Joel calls the people to wake from their stupor and realize the perilous situation they are in and the hope that their rituals can offer. Not only the wheat and barley have suffered from this invasion of locusts, but the vines and trees are also dying. The wine of the vineyard has been cut off and the vines are laid waste. Even more catastrophic than the devastation of the vineyards is the locusts eating the bark off the trees.  Trees without bark will die, it may be a slow death, but even if the bark of a tree is removed in a ring (a process called girdling) the tree cannot endure. The white branches on the trees are probably mildew or signs of disease.

For Joel the proper response is lament and grief. Public grief for a broken relationship like a virgin mourning the loss of a husband that was promised. Not only the people involved in the activity of planting and harvesting are to mourn but the priests are to mourn as well. No food among the people means no sacrifices to bring to the altar and the priests are suffering along with the people. Without the offerings the priests have no way to feed themselves and their families. Unlike Amos or Isaiah[2] who are critical of the actions of sacrificing and piety, Joel is calling the priests to lead the people in these actions which demonstrate their repentance. Wearing sackcloth both during the day and at night, fasting, lamenting, wailing, calling a solemn assembly, and crying out to God are all appropriate actions in the face of this disaster.

Their broken relationship with God is a problem for the people, but also for the creation. The animals also cry out to God, both the wild animals and the domestic, in the absence of food and water. The pastures of the wilderness, the grazing land for cattle, have been destroyed by wildfire caused by the drought. Even the sheep, which are able to subsist in rockier terrain and are able to eat a more varied diet, are struggling in the decimated land. The animals know who to cry out to, but the people of the land need to prophet to awaken them and help them realize how to respond.

[1] Four is a common pattern in judgments, possible referencing the four corners of the earth or the four winds. See for example Jeremiah 15:3, Ezekiel 14: 21, Daniel 7 and 8, Zechariah 1: 18 and 6:1 and of course the four horsemen of Revelation 6: 1-8.

[2] Amos 5:21, Isaiah 1:13