If, in a free-association test, the cue was "locust," some significant number of respondents might answer, "Plague of locusts in the Old Testament!" For that, we can credit the relatively high profile of the Exodus narrative, and the fact that locusts were one of the plagues sent by Yahweh to persuade Pharaoh to let his people go. But there is no biblical book in which locusts play a bigger role than Joel. It's a very brief book and is dominated by locusts the way that Hamlet is dominated by Hamlet. I don't mean to say that the insects are speaking forty percent of the time (as Hamlet is in his play), but they're usually on stage, and Joel's interest in them raises the question of whether he was, besides a prophet, one of the earliest entomologists:
What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten.
Lots of locusts! The commentaries take up the question of whether the different Hebrew words rendered "cutting," "swarming," "hopping," and "destroying" refer to different varieties of an insect species or perhaps different stages of an insect's development. As a Sunday School scholar, I remember out of boredom musing to myself about why they can't just call them grasshoppers. It seems the Bible has to invent new words to make the most common things seem . . . Biblical. (Abraham did more than "know" Sarah.) I see now, however, that "grasshopper" would not be the right English word for what Joel is talking about. A decent definition of "locust" is, according to an article in Scientific American, "grasshoppers gone biblical." Apparently they get serotonin on the brain, which causes them to swarm and ravenously eat, which is what turns the harmless grasshopper into a plague of locusts. There is no other biblical book the consideration of which leads inevitably to zoology. Birds eat grasshoppers, and when serotonin has worked it's magic, they have been known to eat so many of them so easily as to become temporarily flightless: grounded, by a very large meal. Sounds like a possible case of science explaining a bizarre religious "vision."
The locusts are almost the only vivid thing about the book of Joel. I can understand why the commentaries should discuss elaborately the different Hebrew words for locust, for they can thereby avoid the question of what it all might be intended to mean. That has certainly been my strategy up to this point! Broadly speaking, however, the locusts are, as you'd expect, a visitation from God punishing the people for their sins. That much is clear. What exactly they've done to make God so mad isn't so clear—one is tempted to say the shade cast by the locusts makes everything hard to see. In the most impressive of the prophetic books, God's anger is kindled by Israel's laxity about social justice and, to make matters worse, the laxity is accented by copious amounts of self-satisfied religious observance. "I hate, I despise your feasts," inveighs Amos, "and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. . . . Your burnt offerings and your cereal offerings are an abomination to me. . . . But let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!" So clear, forceful, and memorable—nothing remotely like that in the Book of Joel. Indeed, he recommends placating God's anger with the kind of public worship that in other prophetic works is a source of God's nausea (especially if unaccompanied by care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the sick, the sojourner from a foreign land):
Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sanctify a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation;
assemble the elders;
gather the children. . . .
Between the vestibule and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep
and say, "Spare thy people, O Lord. . . ."
Nor does the historical setting or any biographical tidbit lighten the shade. Scholars assign the work to "the Persian period of Jewish history (539-331 B.C.)" (headnote to Joel in Oxford Annotated Bible)—if the window is wide enough, you can't go wrong. The first sentence of the book
The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel
is all anyone knows of Joel—namely, that he was Pethuel's son—but that doesn't help since nothing is known of Pethuel, either.
So: for our imaginary "general reader," determined for some inscrutable reason to read through the Bible and record an honest impression of all the books no matter their status, what bones of Joel may be inspected for a few strings of meaty interest? There is this:
Proclaim this among the nations:
Prepare war, stir up the mighty men.
Let all the men of war draw near, let them come up.
Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears;
let the weak say, "I am a warrior."
If this sounds at all familiar, it's because in much more famous prophetic oracles the language is identical except for the order of operations being reversed. Here, for example, from the book of Isaiah:
[The Lord] shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.
Regarding these parallel but opposite passages, the conclusions of scholarship relate to questions of dating and historical setting. Joel's parodic sally depends upon the text from Isaiah being well known; therefore, Joel was after Isaiah. Moreover, the international situation when Joel prophesied might have been tense and marked by the threat of foreign aggression. Since one of the themes of these mini-essays relates to the troubles associated with regarding every word of the Bible as the inspired and inerrant word of God, I'd simply observe that centuries hence pious political figures faced with questions of war or peace, aggression or diplomacy, may quote Scripture to their advantage no matter which side they take.
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