A swarm of insects eats a country to the ground, and a prophet nobody knows anything about tells the survivors to look past the damage. Something larger is coming, and the locusts were a picture of it.
A Bible study on Joel 1 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 12 min read
Table of Contents
Joel is three chapters long and we know almost nothing about the man who wrote it. No king is named, so the date cannot be fixed. No city is described. All we are given is a name and a father’s name — “The word of the LORD that came to Joel the son of Pethuel” — and then, immediately, a catastrophe.
What makes this small book matter out of all proportion to its length is what later writers do with it. Peter quotes it on the day of Pentecost. John quotes it in Revelation, more than once. And the phrase that runs through all three of its chapters — the day of the LORD — becomes one of the load-bearing ideas of the whole Bible.
Hath This Been In Your Days?
“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 1:2
The book opens with a question put to the oldest people in the country, and it is a test of scale. Have you seen this before? Did your fathers describe anything like it? The old men are being called as witnesses because they are the only ones who can say whether this is ordinary.
Then verse 3 turns the answer into an assignment: “Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.” Four generations, from one bad year. Joel is not interested in the locusts as news. He is interested in them as something that must be remembered and understood.
That instinct is worth borrowing. Most of what happens to a family or a nation gets told once and then forgotten, and the telling is usually about who suffered. Joel wants a disaster passed down four generations because he thinks it means something — and the meaning is not in the insects.
A Plague With Four Names
“That which the palmerworm 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 caterpiller eaten.”
Joel 1:4
Four waves, and the sentence is built so that each one begins where the last one stopped. Whatever the first left, the second took. Whatever the second left, the third took. By the end of the verse there is nothing.
The four names have been argued over for centuries — whether they are four different insects, or four stages in the life of one, or simply four words for a devouring that came in waves. The chapter does not settle it and does not need to. What the sentence is built to convey is thoroughness: whatever survived one thing was taken by the next.
That is what an actual locust plague does, and anyone who has read an account of one recognises the description. But Joel is not writing an agricultural report. Watch how he describes the swarm two verses later:
“For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion.”
Joel 1:6
A nation, with a lion’s teeth. The insects are already becoming something else in his hands, and by chapter 2 they will be an army with horses and chariots. Joel begins with what everybody can see out of the window and uses it to describe what nobody can see yet.
And the picture holds up when it is picked up centuries later. John describes the creatures out of the pit in Revelation 9 as locusts “like unto horses prepared unto battle” whose wings sound like chariots — which is Joel 2, almost word for word. A study of that chapter is at The Key Of The Bottomless Pit. Joel gave the later prophets a vocabulary.
What It Cost
The chapter goes through a whole society, trade by trade, and tells each part of it to grieve.
The drinkers, first, and the reason is almost comic: “Awake, ye drunkards, and weep … because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth” (Joel 1:5). Then the farmers and the vinedressers, ashamed because the harvest failed. Then the ground itself — the corn wasted, the new wine dried up, the oil languishing. Then the animals: “How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture” (Joel 1:18).
But the loss he keeps returning to is not economic at all.
“The meat offering and the drink offering is cut off from the house of the LORD; the priests, the LORD’s ministers, mourn.”
Joel 1:9
When the grain fails there is no grain offering. When the vines fail there is no drink offering. The daily service in the temple simply stops — not because anybody forbade it, and not because the nation rebelled, but because there was nothing left to bring.
That is the loss Joel puts at the centre. A country can survive a bad harvest. What he is describing is a country that has lost its way of approaching God.
It is worth sitting with that, because it is the kind of loss people do not notice at the time. Nobody in Joel’s account decided to stop worshipping. The offerings ended for a practical reason, one harvest at a time, and by the time anybody looked up, the daily service had quietly gone out. Things that get dropped for good reasons are the hardest ones to miss.
Lament Like A Virgin
“Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth.”
Joel 1:8
Of every comparison available for national grief, Joel picks the death of a young husband before the marriage has properly begun. Not the loss of a crop. The loss of a life that had only just been joined to yours, with everything still in front of it.
Prophets are often accused of being harsh. It is worth noticing how precisely this one measures grief, and that he expects it to be felt rather than performed.
The list of ruined trees in verse 12 does the same work by accumulation — the vine, the fig, the pomegranate, the palm, the apple, “even all the trees of the field, are withered.” Then the reason, which is not botanical at all: “because joy is withered away from the sons of men.” The trees are how he describes what happened to the people.
Sanctify Ye A Fast
“Sanctify ye a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the LORD your God, and cry unto the LORD,”
Joel 1:14
Here is the first instruction in the book, and it is worth seeing what it is not. Not organise relief. Not ration what is left. Not find out who is to blame. Gather everybody, and cry unto the LORD.
And the fast is not a hunger strike aimed at moving God. A people who have nothing to eat are being told to make their emptiness deliberate — to turn a condition into a prayer.
The priests get the hardest instruction of all: “come, lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God” (Joel 1:13). The men whose job was the offerings, with no offerings to make, are told to spend the night on the ground.
And the gathering is deliberately total: elders and all the inhabitants of the land. Not a delegation, not the religious ones. In chapter 2 the same summons will be spelled out to include nursing infants and a bridegroom on his wedding day. Joel has one instruction for a crisis and it applies to everybody at once.
Alas For The Day
“Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.”
Joel 1:15
This is the hinge of the chapter and of the book. Up to here, everything has been about insects. Now Joel says the plague is a small copy of something else, and gives it a name that will be used by prophet after prophet after him: the day of the LORD.
The logic is not complicated and it is not cruel. A nation has just watched something arrive that no wall could stop, that took everything and answered to nobody. Joel says: you have seen what that is like. There is a day coming that is like it, and larger.
That phrase, the day of the LORD, occurs five times in these three short chapters, and Joel uses it in two directions at once. It is a day of “destruction from the Almighty” here; by chapter 2 it will be the day when “whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered.” The same day, described from two sides, depending entirely on which side of it a person is standing.
Notice also the direction of the chapter’s last two verses. Having told everybody else to cry, the prophet does it himself: “O LORD, to thee will I cry: for the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness” (Joel 1:19). And then the animals again — “The beasts of the field cry also unto thee”. The chapter ends with the whole creation, human and otherwise, making the same noise in the same direction.
Paul says something similar in Romans: the whole creation groans together, waiting. Joel got there first, and in fewer words. The land, the beasts, the priests and the prophet are all doing one thing at the end of chapter 1, and it is the only thing left that anybody can do.
What This Asks Of Us
Joel 1 is a chapter about reading your own circumstances correctly, and it is unusually gentle about how it does it.
It does not say the locusts came because of a particular sin, and it names nobody. It does not tell the nation that it deserved this. What it does is refuse to let a disaster be nothing but a disaster: tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children (Joel 1:3). Whatever else happens, do not let this be forgotten as bad luck.
There is also something in this chapter for anybody whose faith has gone quiet without a decision being made. The offerings in Joel 1 stopped for reasons everyone could see and nobody chose. What the prophet asks for is not guilt about it. It is an assembly, a fast, and a cry — three things a person can do on a day when there is nothing left to bring.
And the instruction that follows is one anybody can obey on any day. Gather. Cry unto the LORD. The remedy offered to a stripped country is not a strategy for recovery; it is an assembly.
Next in this series: I Will Pour Out My Spirit — a trumpet in Zion, an instruction to rend the heart rather than the clothes, and a promise about rain.
