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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Joel 1:8 - 1:8
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The whole nation is to mourn over this devastation. Joe 1:8. “Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth. Joe 1:9. The meat-offering and the drink-offering are destroyed from the house of Jehovah. The priests, the servant of Jehovah. mourn. Joe 1:10. The field is laid waste, the ground mourns: for the corn is laid waste: the new wine is spoiled, the oil decays. Joe 1:11. Turn pale, ye husbandmen; howl, ye vinedressers, over wheat and barley: for the harvest of the field is perished. Joe 1:12. The vine is spoiled, and the fig-tree faded; the pomegranate, also the palm and the apple tree: all the trees of the field are withered away; yea, joy has expired from the children of men.” In Joe 1:8 Judah is addressed as the congregation of Jehovah. אֱלִי is the imperative of the verb אָלָה, equivalent to the Syriac 'elā', to lament. The verb only occurs here. The lamentation of the virgin for the בַּעַל נְעוּרֶיהָ, i.e., the beloved of your youth, her bridegroom, whom she has lost by death (Isa 54:6), is the deepest and bitterest lamentation. With reference to חֲגֻרַת־שַׂק, see Delitzsch on Isa 3:24. The occasion of this deep lamentation, according to Joe 1:9, is the destruction of the meat-offering and drink-offering from the house of the Lord, over which the servants of Jehovah mourn. The meat and drink offerings must of necessity cease, because the corn, the new wine, and the oil are destroyed through the devastation of the field and soil. Hokhrath minchâh does not affirm that the offering of the daily morning and evening sacrifice (Exo 29:38-42) - for it is to this that מִנְחָה וָנֶסֶךְ chiefly, if not exclusively, refers - has already ceased; but simply that any further offering is rendered impossible by the failure of meal, wine, and oil. Now Israel could not suffer any greater calamity than the suspension of the daily sacrifice; for this was a practical suspension of the covenant relation - a sign that God had rejected His people. Therefore, even in the last siege of Jerusalem by the Romans, the sacrificial worship was not suspended till it had been brought to the last extremity; and even then it was for the want of sacrificers, and not of the material of sacrifice (Josephus, de bell. Jud. vi. 2, 1). The reason for this anxiety was the devastation of the field and land (Joe 1:10); and this is still further explained by a reference to the devastation and destruction of the fruits of the ground, viz., the corn, i.e., the corn growing in the field, so that the next harvest would be lost, and the new wine and oil, i.e., the vines and olive-trees, so that they could bear no grapes for new wine, and no olives for oil. The verbs in Joe 1:11 are not perfects, but imperatives, as in the fifth verse. הֹבִישׁ has the same meaning as bōsh, as in Jer 2:26; Jer 6:15, etc., to stand ashamed, to turn pale with shame at the disappointment of their hope, and is probably written defectively, without וֹ, to distinguish it from הוֹבִישׁ, the hiphil of יָבֵשׁ, to be parched or dried up (Joe 1:10 and Joe 1:12). The hope of the husbandmen was disappointed through the destruction of the wheat and barley, the most important field crops. The vine-growers had to mourn over the destruction of the vine and the choice fruit-trees (Joe 1:12), such as the fig and pomegranate, and even the date-palm (gam-tâmâr), which has neither a fresh green rind nor tender juicy leaves, and therefore is not easily injured by the locusts so as to cause it to dry up; and tappūăch, the apple-tree, and all the trees of the field, i.e., all the rest of the trees, wither. “All trees, whether fruit-bearing or not, are consumed by the devastating locusts” (Jerome). In the concluding clause of Joe 1:12, the last and principal ground assigned for the lamentation is, that joy is taken away and withered from the children of men (hōbbı̄sh min, constr. praegn.). כִּי introduces a reason here as elsewhere, though not for the clause immediately preceding, but for the הֹבִישׁוּ and הֵילִילוּ in Joe 1:11, the leading thought in both verses; and we may therefore express it by an emphatic yea.