Mining the Minors: Joel (2)

The book of Joel is unusual among the Minor Prophets in several ways, and lends itself to a little different treatment than our usual verse-by-verse trek through the text.

Before we get too far into the specific details of Joel’s prophecy, let’s do a quick flyover to consider the larger context and help us formulate a method of approach to provide us with a consistent way of assessing the intended meaning of individual verses as we come to them.

If nobody else, that should at least help me stay on track.

Overview of Joel

1/ Outline of the Book

Post-introduction (see last week), the book of Joel divides naturally into seven sections:

1. The invasion (1:2-4)
2. Lament for an invaded Judah (1:5-20)
3. The invading army described (2:1-11)
4. An appeal to return to the Lord (2:12-17)
5. The Lord takes pity on Israel (2:18-30)
6. The judgment of the nations (3:1-16)
7. The millennial reign (3:17-21)

2/ List of Commands to Judah

Another method of breaking up the book is to consider its narrative flow by listing the Lord’s commands to the reader. (We should recognize Joel is written largely to Jews in Israel during the great tribulation, with obvious personal applications for Christians few and far between.) These commands may be grouped under four or five headings, the last being questionable:

Recall and Retell
Hear (1:2)
Tell your children (1:3)

Get Real
Awake, drunkards (1:5)
Lament (1:8)
Be ashamed, farmers (1:11)
Lament and fast, priests (1:13-14)
Sound the alarm and tremble (2:1)

Repent
Return to the Lord (2:12-13)
Sound the call for corporate repentance (2:15-16)
Pray (2:17)

Rejoice
Fear not (2:21-22)
Be glad (2:23)

Rally*
Proclaim (3:9)
Prepare for war (3:10)

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* It’s possible the commands of 3:9-10 are actually directed to the nations under judgment rather than to the remnant of Israel, and continue into verses 11 and 12. It’s also possible the Lord is gathering his earthly faithful to fight with him against the nations. Much depends on how one views the nature and duration of the final conflict in Jerusalem from other prophetic passages.

3/ Views of Joel

a. A Warning of Judgment Abrogated:

David Guzik suggests the prophesied invasion was called off by God:

“It’s hard to know what invasion Joel predicted here. Probably Joel warned of an invasion that never happened because Judah responded to the invitation to repent and God held back this army.”

Guzik is right that identifying the relevant invasion is not an easy task, as I note below. That doesn’t necessarily mean God did not or will not eventually do what he promised here.

It is certainly true that God sometimes responds to repentance by deferring or rescinding judgment (see the book of Jonah). The difficulty with Guzik’s view in this case is that the invasion as described in chapter 3 is most definitely future and literal, and seems to be the main narrative thrust of the book. It is hard to see why an earlier invasion of locusts that the Lord called off might serve as a useful introduction to Joel’s depiction of Armageddon. Given fallen human nature, I think it’s fair to say that abrogated prophecies in scripture are rare birds.

b. A historical locust plague anticipates a future armed invasion:

The idea here is that the locusts of chapter 1 are literal and past, and that they were intended as a warning to the faithful in Israel of either (1) a historical invasion then to come, (2) a future invasion in the end times, or (3) both historical and future simultaneously. The vast majority of commentators adopt some version of this view.

As Guzik notes, however, views (1) and (3) are problematic in that we must then ask the question To which historical invasion of Jerusalem do the locusts point us? It’s not the Assyrian invasion of Judah in the days of Hezekiah. That ended with the angel of the Lord striking down 185,000 in the Assyrian camp, not with the Lord driving “the northerner” into the eastern and western sea. It’s not the Babylonian invasion of Judah under Nebuchadnezzar or the Roman sacking of Jerusalem in AD70. Both were successful invasions, and ended with the deportation of most of God’s people among the nations just as promised, not with the Lord intervening miraculously on Israel’s behalf to provide salvation. It’s not some Maccabean-period invasion from the north, as there are no comparable events in secular intertestamental accounts or in 1 or 2 Maccabees to point us that way.

There are also good reasons not to view the locust army of chapter 1 as literal and historical. First, we have no biblical or extra-biblical record of such an event. Second, the Hebrew tenses in the passage are all over the place; what appears historical in English on the basis of the apparent tense used by the writer may well point to future events, as demonstrated in last week’s post. Third, the fifth trumpet judgment in Revelation is a manifestly non-literal locust invasion; there’s no compelling reason this could not be the same event as both are followed by the gathering of the nations for judgment (see the sixth trumpet and Joel 3). Fourth, the majority of arguments for literal locusts hinge on Joel’s apparent use of similes to describe them. The English word “like” appears five times in my ESV and other translations concerning the “locusts”. They are “like war horses”, “like a powerful army”, “like warriors”, “like soldiers” and “like a thief”. Many commentators say this constitutes evidence for literal locusts described metaphorically as an “army”. Yet in every case except the first, the word “like” is absent from the Hebrew and has been inserted by the translators. That’s interpretation, not translation. Joel could just as easily be describing a literal army (or future military technology, for that matter) that will behave like a locust swarm with respect to damage inflicted and its mode of operation.

c. It’s all one invasion

My own view is that Joel is describing a single still-future invasion from the north, not just of Israel itself, but of the entire area. The invaders will strip Israel bare, just as locusts or fire would, and drive its people to return to the Lord prior to the final gathering of the nations for judgment in Jerusalem. To me, several features of the book of Joel point this way:

1) Its Timelessness: You can’t pin down any of the events in Joel to a specific historical time or place apart from references in chapter 3 to raids on Judah from Tyre, Sidon and Philistia, for which God promises to judge them at a future date. These references tell us nothing about how much time will pass before God judges these nations.

2) The Ambiguous Sin of Judah: Likewise, no specific sin of Judah is addressed. Joel is perhaps the only prophet to call the earthly people of God to “return to the Lord” without telling us what they did to get away from him in the first place. If Joel’s message had been primarily intended for his own generation, he would surely have identified specific things his contemporaries could change to demonstrate their repentance, just as John the Baptist called out specific sins among the people of Israel in the first century.

3) The Intended Audience: If we take him at his word, the primary audience for Joel’s prophecy is future, not then-living: “Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another [literally a “different”, “further” or “strange”] generation.” Why? Because they will be the ones who need to return to the Lord in the context of the prophecy.

4) The Unity of Chapters 1 and 2: Those commentators who view the locusts of chapter 1 as literal and the locusts of chapter 2 as an invading army, past or future, have to overlook the way Joel ties the two chapters together. The four types of locusts described in 1:4 show up again in 2:25, which is specifically a restoration of the damage they did in 1:4 (“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten”). Accordingly, I have difficulty assigning the two chapters to different time periods.

Thus, in this study I’m going to treat the three chapters of Joel as if they all point toward the same future events. I will not insist this is the only way they may rightly be read, but a plethora of commentaries exist that handle Joel in the first two ways mentioned above. There is no need to multiply their numbers, and plenty of reason to think the more generally accepted views do not cover all the possibilities.

4/ The Standing Temple

It is of non-trivial interest to me that reading Joel’s prophecy this way demands a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem. Joel mentions the “house of the Lord” in 1:9, 13-14 and 16, its priests and ministers in 1:13, its altar in 2:17 and its services throughout. These are treated as being in existence prior to the locust invasion of chapter 1, and remaining in existence through chapter 2, which many commentators, including yours truly, view as future.

The temple, the priesthood, and the priestly services are not currently present and in operation in Jerusalem. If Joel’s predictions are correct, Israel is going to have to rebuild its temple, and probably sooner than later.