The word of Jehovah that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.
The book opens with no date, no king's reign, and almost nothing about the man. All we are told is that a message from God reached a prophet named Joel. Everything that follows rests on that one claim: these are not Joel's thoughts but God's word.
These opening words place Joel beside the other prophets. Each of them claimed to speak with authority that was not his own.
The prophets also spoke with one voice and with the highest authority. Take the first of them: "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the LORD has spoken" (Isa. 1:2). The minor prophets begin with "The word of the LORD that came to Hosea." Joel, Jonah, Micah, and Zephaniah open with almost the same words. Amos says five times over in his first chapter, "Thus says the LORD." Peter says of them all, "men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21).
The verse gives a name and a father's name, and Scripture says no more. People have tried to fill the gap, without success.
Joel means "Jehovah is God." This name comes up often in the Old Testament (1 Sam. 8:2; 1 Chronicles 4:35, 5:4, 8, 12, etc.). The prophet Joel was the son of Pethuel. People have guessed a great deal about who he was… Some Jewish writers say that Pethuel was Samuel, because Samuel had a son named Joel. But the sons of Samuel were evildoers, so this is wrong. The book itself does not give a single hint about his personal history.
Commentators differ over when he lived. One writer says the silence itself should be respected.
There have been many guesses as to when Joel lived. Some scholars date the book around 400 BC or even later. Other writers think Joel lived in the 9th century BC, perhaps in the days of king Jehoash in Judah… Scripture is silent about the time of writing, and we ought to respect that silence.
Joel's message came in a season of ruin that everyone in the land could see.
The occasion of the book and prophecy of Joel was a terrible disaster that swept over the land of Israel. Swarms of locusts had fallen on the land and stripped it of everything green. There was also a great drought. All of it was a chastisement from the Lord. So in the first chapter we hear old and young, priests and people, mourning and turning back to God.
The outward wreckage matched something inward:
The ruin all around them matched the ruin that sin had worked inside them. The people had wandered far from the LORD, and their condition was such that He could take no pleasure in them.
Joel stands among the earliest of the prophets, and his aim is narrower than Hosea's — which is exactly what sharpens him.
Like Hosea, Joel is one of the earliest prophets, earlier even than Jonah. But he differs in one basic way. Hosea looks at the whole people. God led Joel to keep to that part of them which outwardly clung to the house of David and to the ordinances of the law. This gives us a much smaller field. For that very reason it makes what he does notice clearer and sharper, and his vivid style helps too.
The book works on two levels at once. Reading only one of them loses the point.
The great subject of our prophet is the day of the LORD… Like all the prophets, Joel takes some present fact, or something close at hand, as the groundwork for what was still future… No prophecy of Scripture explains itself on its own; it is built so that it cannot. To limit it to the past would be an oversight. To set the future aside would destroy the most important purpose God has in it.
One writer hears more than a grieving man in these laments.
I believe it is the blessed Lord, in the spirit of prophecy, identifying Himself with His people in their sorrow. He Himself feels the pressure that is on them. He gives voice to the feelings that the Spirit of God would produce in them through the trial.
- Word — The book begins where the prophets begin: a message that came from God, not from the man who spoke it.
- Man — "Joel" means "Jehovah is God." Beyond his father's name, Scripture tells us nothing. Every claim about his family or his date is only a guess.
- Occasion — Locusts and drought stripped the land. The ruin outside matched the people's wandering inside.
- Reach — The theme is the day of the LORD. A present disaster lays the groundwork for a future one, so drop neither the past nor the future.
- Voice — Behind the grieving prophet, one writer hears the Lord Himself, sharing the sorrow of His people.
Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land. Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?
Joel's first recorded words are not an explanation but a summons. He calls the oldest men in the land, and every other resident with them, to listen and then to search their memories. His question — has anything like this ever happened before? — turns a plague of insects into something more than bad weather.
Joel puts the question to those most able to answer it. Whatever the elders could recall, and whatever any resident could dig up, the answer came back the same. That gap in the memory was the point.
However far back the oldest could go, and however hard every inhabitant searched, no such thing had happened in their days or in their fathers' days. What had happened then was to be passed on from one descendant to another. Yet it was a scourge people could easily blame on secondary causes, and so lose all the benefit, because that shut God out. If they listened to Him, what had just fallen on the land would stir them to repentance. If they ignored Him, the prophet warns of greater troubles.
Verse 2 leads straight into the instruction to pass the account down the generations. One writer reads the two verses together as the door into the book.
Verses 2 and 3 are an introduction to the description that follows of the great disaster which had fallen on the land. It takes the form of an appeal. What had happened to the land is so dreadful that it is without precedent. They must tell future generations how the locust plague visited the land, because the locusts carry a great prophetic meaning about the future.
Another writer names the hand the people refused to see, and traces the warning back to Moses and Solomon.
The great locust plague and the drought were a punishment from Jehovah. Moses and Solomon had already foretold such judgements (Deuteronomy 28:38-39 and 1 Kings 8:37). But the people of Israel would not recognise the hand of Jehovah in it. This is why, in chapter 1, the prophet calls the old men and the priests to lamentation and to repentance.
One writer sees here a regular working method of prophecy. God takes a disaster people can see and uses it to picture one they cannot yet see.
Here we see something usual in prophetic teaching. The Spirit of prophecy takes up an event that should act on the conscience of the people. It wakes their conscience at the very time of the event, but far more it uses that event as a picture of some event in the last days of much greater importance... So chapter 1 of Joel takes up the ravages of these insects, which, it seems, caused a frightful shortage of food. It uses them to work on the conscience of the people at the time of the prophecy. But from the beginning of chapter 2 the prophecy throws itself into the future.
The day the prophet announced as near has still not come. One writer names what holds it back.
The army of insects was only a forerunner. But at that moment, instead of joy and gladness in the house of God, God was judging. The prophet said the day of the Lord "is at hand"; but God's long-suffering put off its full execution, and puts it off still.
Kelly steps back to what any prophet's arrival already says about the people, and what every prophecy carries with it.
Prophecy always supposes a state of ruin... On one hand it convicts of the state of ruin. It points out where men have sinned against God, and it pronounces His judgment. On the other hand it bears witness of a better state of things in God's grace, which will replace what is now in ruins... God does not fulfil the hope of something better until He actually judges the present evils that men have already seen to be evil.
- Hear — the verse opens with a command to listen. Joel addresses the oldest first, then every inhabitant. Nothing in the message works until someone stops and pays attention.
- Search — the question about "your days" and "the days of your fathers" sends them searching their memory, and the search comes up empty. The disaster is unprecedented, and that is what makes it a signal rather than a season.
- Attribute — you can put the same event down to natural causes, or take it from God's hand. Put it down to nature and, as Kelly says, you lose all the benefit.
- Tell — what you cannot explain away, you hand down. The locusts carry a meaning that reaches past the generation that suffered them.
- Repent — the insects are only a forerunner. The delay before the greater day is God's long-suffering. Prophecy convicts, but it always holds out something better beyond the judgment.
Tell your children of it, and [let] your children [tell] their children, and their children another generation
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
that which the palmer-worm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.
Joel opens with a disaster Judah had just lived through. Wave after wave of locusts stripped the land, each swarm finishing what the one before it left. The prophet's question is not what kind of insects came. It is who sent them, and what they were meant to say.
The verse names four devourers. One writer explains the Hebrew names and the order behind them:
We left the Hebrew words untranslated. They do not describe insects of different species. They are one insect, the locust, in a fourfold stage. Gazam means "to gnaw off." Arbeh means "to be many" — the common name of the locusts, because of their migratory habits. Jelek is "to lick off." Chasel means "to devour or consume." First it is the gnawing locust, newly hatched. Then it gets its wings and flies about. Then it starts its destructive work by licking off whatever it finds. At last it reaches full growth and devours everything in its path.
Older translations name them the palmer-worm, locust, canker-worm and caterpillar. The ESV calls them the cutting, swarming, hopping and destroying locust. A second writer agrees they are probably stages of one creature, and warns that the names tell us little more:
It seems safer to keep the Hebrew terms. But the names are all we have for defining the species. It would seem that Joel 1:4 does not refer to the palmer-worm (gnawer), the canker-worm (licker) and the caterpillar (consumer). It points rather to the locust in general, probably in the different stages of its growth. All of them were most destructive to plant life, as a scourge from God.
The verse's real subject is not the insects. It is the God who sent them.
In earlier days God had no doubt used Midianites, Philistines and other enemies to discipline Israel when they were guilty, especially of idolatry. But here He shows that His hand was stretched out to deal with it in a most humbling way. Faithfulness to His government would have brought blessing to their baskets and their storehouses. Instead they had been most unfaithful. So now Jehovah would use even the insect world, so to speak, to deal with His people. I take all this in its plain literal sense, as having actually happened then.
Judah had been warned about this long before Joel's day:
The great locust plague and the drought were a punishment from Jehovah. Moses and Solomon had already foretold such forms of judgement (Deuteronomy 28:38-39 and 1 Kings 8:37). But the people of Israel would not recognise the hand of Jehovah in it. This is why, in chapter 1, the prophet calls the old men and the priests to lamentation and to repentance.
The worst loss was not the harvest.
In all this sorrow, what grieved the prophet most was this: the grain offering and the drink offering were cut off from the house of the Lord. The means were no longer there to keep up these sacrifices. Twice in chapter 1 the prophet laments this, and no wonder, for the grain and drink offerings spoke of Christ. And now they had ceased. As God looked down from heaven, nothing in Judah pictured Christ to His eye any more.
The bare fields were a portrait of something invisible:
We must remember that all these things have a moral bearing. The desolation all around matched the ruin that sin had worked within. The people had wandered badly from Jehovah. Their state was such that He could take no pleasure in them.
The plague was real. It also pointed past itself:
Here we have an instance of what is usual in prophetic teaching. The Spirit of prophecy takes up some event that should work on the conscience of the people. No doubt this was meant to wake their conscience at the very time of the event. But far more, He uses it as a picture of some event in the last days of much greater weight.
The book does not leave the land stripped.
"I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you" (Joel 2:25). So God will more than undo the damage. He will restore what He did not take away. By the fullness of His blessing He will wipe out all their past sorrow and shame.
- Sent — no accident. God's hand held the swarms, as Moses had warned long before, and the prophet called Judah to mourn and turn back.
- Staged — four names, one devourer: it gnaws, flies, licks and consumes. Writers keep the Hebrew, because no one can name the species with confidence.
- Stripped — the loss reached past the fields to the altar. No grain meant no offerings, and nothing left in Judah to picture Christ to God's eye.
- Signalled — the empty fields matched the emptiness within. The Spirit uses a real plague to picture a far weightier day ahead.
- Restored — He gives back the years the locust ate. He restores what He never took, and wipes away every trace of the shame.