The Prophets
Joel
A field stripped bare, and a Spirit poured out on everyone
Something eats the crops, and a prophet reads it. That is the whole book — a natural disaster taken as a message, and a message that runs further than the disaster by about eight hundred years.
The book with no date
Every other prophet in this section opens by telling you who was on the throne. Joel does not. There is no king named, no empire named, no war, nothing to hang a year on.
What we can say is small. His name means the LORD is God. He knows Jerusalem from the inside, speaking of it as a man within its walls would, and he is familiar enough with the priests and the priesthood that some have thought he was one. We cannot prove that. We know only that he was a prophet.
The other case is worth knowing. Some read Joel as post-exilic, three or four centuries later, and read the silence about a king as meaning there was no king to name. It is a real argument and it is not being ruled on here. Joel stands first because the early reading is the one this study follows, and because he reads well beside Amos either way.
When he prophesied. On the early dating: to Judah, in the reign of Uzziah, alongside Hosea and Amos. See the kings and prophets chart, where Joel carries a footnote laying out both datings.
What the locusts did
A plague of locusts had destroyed the crops and vegetation of Judah, and it touched every segment of society. The book opens with it and will not move on from it for a whole chapter.
“What young locusts leave, mature locusts will eat. What mature locusts leave, adult locusts will eat. What adult locusts leave, grasshoppers will eat.”Joel 1:4 · GW
Four words for the same insect at four stages, stacked so that each one finishes what the last one started. It is a description of totality. Nothing is left.
The description behind it is of a swarm — a million or more, blown in on the desert wind out of Arabia, covering the land and eating everything until it is bare. Anyone who has seen one knows there is nothing metaphorical about the first chapter.
And Joel does not treat it as weather. He sees more than a coincidence of insect and wind; he sees the hand of God in judgment on an unfaithful people, and so the whole chapter turns into a summons. To the careless (1:5–10), to the farmers (1:11–12), to the priests (1:13). Then a call to gather everyone to the temple and fast (1:14–20).
The point he is making is one the whole Bible keeps making: the sovereign God can use the natural creation to get the attention of man. Compare the plagues of Egypt. The locusts are not the judgment. They are the interruption before it.
Tear your hearts, not your clothes
Chapter 2 says the locusts were the small version. Something worse is coming, and it has boots.
An army is described advancing over the land the way the swarm did — and it could be read as the Assyrian force that came in Hezekiah’s day (II Kings 18), and certainly as the Babylonian army that eventually destroyed Jerusalem and carried the people off (II Chronicles 36:15).
And then, in the middle of that, the sentence the book is remembered for.
“Tear your hearts, not your clothes. Return to the LORD your God. He is merciful and compassionate, patient, and always ready to forgive and to change his plans about disaster.”Joel 2:13 · GW
Tearing your clothes was the recognised sign of grief, and it was public, and it was cheap. Joel is not telling them to stop mourning. He is telling them the visible part is not the part that counts.
Notice also what the reason is. Not because God is angry — because He is merciful. Repentance here is not offered as a way of escaping a hard God; it is offered because the God in question is already known to be the kind who forgives. That description — merciful, compassionate, patient, ready to forgive — is the ancient creed of Israel, given to Moses at Sinai. Jonah quotes the same lines, and he quotes them as a complaint.
Then the promise that answers chapter 1 exactly:
“Then I will repay you for the years that the mature locusts, the adult locusts, the grasshoppers, and the young locusts ate your crops.”Joel 2:25 · GW
Same four insects, same order, reversed in effect. What was counted as loss is counted back. That is not a general reassurance; it is an itemised one.
The day of the LORD, at three distances
The phrase runs through the book, and it does not mean one thing. Joel uses it at three ranges, and the outline follows them.
Behind them — the locust plague already suffered (chapter 1). Close in front of them — the invading army, near enough to prepare for (2:1–27). Far ahead of them — a day beyond any of it (2:28 – 3:21).
Reading the phrase as though it always meant the last of the three is the commonest way to get lost in this book. It means the day God acts, and God acts more than once.
Where it lands
The third section is the one the New Testament reaches back for.
“After this, I will pour my Spirit on everyone. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams. Your young men will see visions. In those days I will pour my Spirit on servants, on both men and women.”Joel 2:28–29 · GW
Read that against everything around it. In Joel’s world the Spirit came on particular men for particular tasks — a judge, a king, a prophet. Here it comes on sons and daughters, old and young, and on slaves of both sexes. The categories that decided who got to speak are simply listed and then ignored.
The time of that prophecy’s fulfilment has been given to us by the Holy Spirit Himself. Peter stands up in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, is accused of being drunk at nine in the morning, and answers by quoting this passage (Acts 2:14–21). He does not say it is like Joel. He says this is that.
And 2:32 gives the way of salvation as calling on the name of the LORD — literally fulfilled when Peter, in the same sermon, calls the people to call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
What follows in chapter 3 is a description of God’s day of judgment, and Jesus takes those same truths and shows how they are to be understood in the light of His person and work (Matthew 25:31 onwards). The closing verses are an Old Testament way of describing the eternal joy of the kingdom of God.
Walking through the book
I. Looking back at the day of the LORD 1:1–20
The locust plague (1:1–4). Warnings in the light of it (1:5–20) — a call to repent addressed to the careless, the farmers and the priests, then a call to prayer: an assembly (1:14–18), in the light of the drought that followed the locusts (1:19–20).
II. Looking forward to the imminent day of the LORD 2:1–27
A plea for preparation (2:1–11): the call in the light of the coming army, then the army described. What they must now do (2:12–27): turn to God in mercy (2:12–14) — some of the greatest words in Scripture concerning the willingness of God to receive the one who turns to Him with his whole heart — and call an assembly (2:15–27), a call to humility before God.
III. A yet future day of the LORD 2:28 – 3:21
The outpouring of the Spirit (2:28–32). The judgment of the nations (3:1–16). The eternal blessing of the righteous (3:17–21).
Before you move on
Read this whole book in different translations, and the Spirit will give you understanding.
Then read Jonah, who quotes the same creed Joel quotes — merciful, compassionate, patient, ready to forgive — and throws it at God as an accusation.