1. The prophecy springs out of the circumstances of the time. Its central thought is the idea of the Day of Jehovah, which is suggested to the prophet by the drought and the visitation of locusts from which at the time the land of Judah was suffering. Joel sees in the locusts more than a mere swarm of insects, however vast: they are Jehovah's army (Joe_2:11; Joe_2:25); He is at their head; they come to perform the mission which He has entrusted to them (Joe_2:11). But repentance may avert the judgment; and this accordingly is the duty which the prophet earnestly impresses upon his countrymen. They respond to his exhortations; and he is accordingly commissioned to announce the removal of the plague. To this announcement Joel, in the manner of the prophets, attaches promises of the material and spiritual felicity to be enjoyed by the people afterwards; and further takes occasion to draw an ideal picture of the day of Israel's justification, and the destruction of the powers hostile to it.
2. Two matters require special attention in the prophecy of Joel, one the reality of the visitation of locusts, the other the condition attaching to the prophecy.
(1) Many interpreters, both ancient and modern, have taken the locusts as figurative and allegorical. But, after allowing for a certain amount of hyperbole, which is always more or less present in poetic description, and for Eastern rhetoric, there is nothing to suggest that throughout a literal plague of locusts is not intended. It is difficult to conceive any writer comparing the swarms of locusts pictured by the prophet to an army of soldiers if these locusts were already the figure of an invading host. Nor could he well speak of an enemy entering a beleaguered city like a thief. There is, however, no reference to any desolation wrought by a human foe, and the promise “to restore the years that the locust hath eaten” certainly suggests that throughout the ravages have been caused by a real swarm of locusts. At the same time it is fairly evident that it is made the basis of a prediction of some other great catastrophe; e.g., in the destruction of the locust army Joel sees a type of hostile nations repelled; in the return of the rain, a symbol of the outpouring of the Spirit (Joe_2:28); and in the temporal blessings bestowed, not only a witness to Jehovah's loving mercy towards His people but also a pledge that He will continue to abide with them.
If we ourselves had lived through such a plague, we should be able to recognize how little licence the poet has taken, and that the seer, so far from unduly mixing with his facts the colours of Apocalypse, must have experienced in the terrible plague itself enough to provoke all the religious and monitory use which he makes of it.
The present writer has seen but one swarm of locusts, in which, though it was small and soon swept away by the wind, he felt not only many of the features that Joel describes, but even some degree of that singular helplessness before a calamity of portent far beyond itself, something of that supernatural edge and accent, which, by the confession of so many observers characterize the locust-plague and the earthquake above all other physical disasters. One summer afternoon, upon the plain of Hauran, a long bank of mist grew rapidly from the western horizon. The day was dull, and as the mist rose athwart the sunbeams, struggling through clouds, it gleamed cold and white, like the front of a distant snow-storm. When it came near, it seemed to be more than a mile broad, and was dense enough to turn the atmosphere raw and dirty, with a chill as of a summer sea-fog, only that this was not due to any fall in the temperature. Nor was there the silence of a mist. We were enveloped by a noise, less like the whirring of wings than the rattle of hail or the crackling of bush on fire. Myriads upon myriads of locusts were about us, covering the ground, and shutting out the view in all directions. Though they drifted before the wind, there was no confusion in their ranks. They sailed in unbroken lines, sometimes straight, sometimes wavy; and when they passed pushing through our caravan, they left almost no stragglers, except from the last battalion, and only the few dead which we had caught in our hands. After several minutes they were again but a lustre on the air, and so melted away into some heavy clouds in the east.1 [Note: G. A. Smith, The Book of Twelve Prophets, ii. 398.]
Joel compares the locusts to horses; and to this day the same metaphor is familiar in every Arab camp. One of my Arabs gave me a long list of reasons why the locust is like the horse or horseman. They were very ingenious, and often amusing; but, probably because he himself belonged to a tribe of notorious freebooters, he did not add the most forcible point of resemblance-their sudden appearance in the cultivated lands like a Bedouin raid, their sweeping advance and the desolation which marks their track. Their straight onward march was one of his points of similarity.
Of this we had a striking instance. On arriving at the banks of the Jordan, the swarms, then in a larva or wingless state, marched steadily up the trees which fringe the river. These they denuded of every strip of foliage, and even of the tender bark, not sparing even the resinous tamarisk. As they had stripped the twigs they crept onward, pushed by the hordes behind, and fell by myriads into the rapid stream.
As in the visitation of Egypt, so now it is found that the only means of deliverance from the plague is when a strong wind drives them into the sea; and even then, as mentioned by Joel, their dead bodies taint the air and induce pestilence. In their resistless march, which is without leaders, but all by a common impulse (“the locusts have no king”) they climb walls, enter houses by doors or windows, just as they did in the Egyptian plague, and as they are described by Joel, and even gnaw the woodwork of the rooms.1 [Note: H. B. Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible (ed. 1911), 314.]
It is a strange sight, beautiful if you can forget the destruction it brings with it. The whole air, to twelve or even eighteen feet above the ground, is filled with the insects, reddish brown in body, with bright, gauzy wings. When the sun's rays catch them it is like the sea sparkling with light. When you see them against a cloud they are like the dense flakes of a driving snow-storm. You feel as if you had never before realized immensity in number. Vast crowds of men gathered at a festival, countless tree-tops rising along the slope of a forest ridge, the chimneys of London houses from the top of St. Paul's-all are as nothing to the myriads of insects that blot out the sun above and cover the ground beneath and fill the air whichever way one looks. The breeze carries them swiftly past, but they come on in fresh clouds, a host of which there is no end, each of them a harmless creature which you can catch and crush in your hand, but appalling in their power of collective devastation.2 [Note: J. Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, 229.]
(2) It is the law of Old Testament prophecy that prophecy is to be understood as conditional, unless it is expressly stated to be absolute. There is a fine remark made by Jerome: “It does not follow, because a prophet has foretold a calamity, that therefore that calamity shall come to pass; for God's prophets do not foretell calamity in order that it may come to pass, but in order that God may be able to withhold it.” That is the gospel conception of prophecy. The people are penitent. Instantly Joel declares to them that God's attitude to them is altered; and when they do repent, the first thing promised them is a superabundance of earthly and material prosperity.
There are men who say that this is a degrading thing in Joel's prophecy, and they make a similar charge in regard to other parts of the Old Testament. Degrading? Not a bit of it. Rather it is a fine thing that those Old Testament prophets did believe, with a tremendous conviction, that all earthly mercies come from the love of God. This is the doctrine we need to have preached if we really desire to have the love of God in our religion, in our real life, and not in unreal life, i.e., life artificially put on when we get into an ecclesiastical building. Prosperity is to be sought after as a good; but the prosperity that is a good must come to a man in the line of the will of God, and that is only another way of saying that it must come from God.
My Father and his Brothers, already Master-masons, established themselves in Ecclefechan. They all henceforth began to take on a civic existence, to “accumulate” in all senses; to grow. They were among the best and truest men of their craft (perhaps the very best) in that whole district; and recompensed accordingly. Their gains, the honest wages of Industry, their savings were slow but constant; and in my Father's case continued (from one source or other) to the end. He was born and brought up the poorest; by his own right hand he had become wealthy, as he accounted wealth, and in all ways plentifully supplied. His household goods valued in money may perhaps somewhat exceed £1000; in real inward worth, their value was greater than that of most kingdoms-than all Napoleon's conquests, which did not endure. He saw his children grow up round him to guard him and do him honour; he had (ultimately) a hearty respect from all; could look forward from the verge of this Earth, rich and increased in goods, into an Everlasting Country where through the immeasurable Deeps shone a solemn sober Hope. I must reckon my Father one of the most prosperous men I have ever in my life known.1 [Note: Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences (ed. 1887), i. 43.]
