A Call to the Priests: This entire section, which may be divided into five strophes (vv. 13, 14, 15–16, 17–18, 19–20) is directed at the priests in the Jerusalem temple, for if communion with God has been lost in Judah, the priests are those primarily responsible.
1:13 It was the priests’ duty in biblical Israel to teach and maintain their people in the ways of the Torah. But that did not mean simply teaching the people the law. Rather, the priests were responsible for preserving and handing on to the people all of the stories and traditions concerning Israel’s relationship with God throughout its entire history, and those traditions included the commandments that God had given. In short, the priests were responsible for passing on what now makes up much of our OT. Only if Israel knew what God had done in its past could it be faithful in the present. Thus, Hosea could say in his time that the people were rejected by God for lack of knowledge, and the blame for that was laid on the priests (Hos. 4:6).
The priests were also responsible for mediating between the people and God—for representing the people’s worship before God, and for representing God’s will to the people. As Leviticus says, they were to distinguish between the holy and the profane, between the clean and the unclean; and they were to teach the Israelites all the decrees the Lord had given them through Moses (Lev. 10:10–11). Thus in Exodus the priests are commanded to wear on their breastplates the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, symbolically bearing them into worship before the Lord (Exod. 28:21, 29–30, 38). So Joel turns to the priests in his preaching of repentance and points again to his primary concern: The means of communion with God through the sacrifices have been cut off (v. 13).
There are possible only two faithful responses to that situation. First, Joel summons the priests themselves to lamentation and repentance, asking them to gird themselves in the sackcloth of repentance and to undergo even the unusual discipline of repenting in the temple through the night, verse 13.
1:14 Second, Joel directs the priests, as the leaders of the covenant congregation, to call a public fast of repentance in which the entire populace comes to the temple, verse 14.
Such fasts of lamentation and repentance are known throughout the OT, and they were ordered by the leaders of the community whenever Israel suffered any calamity—war, famine, pestilence, captivity, here a locust plague and drought (cf. Judg. 20:26; 1 Sam. 7:6, etc.). We also know that such fasts were held in commemoration of past catastrophes, such as the destruction of the temple by the Babylonians in 587 BC (Zech. 7:1–7).
During the usual one-day fast, the people abstained from all normal activities—from eating and drinking, from work, and from sexual intercourse. Instead, they devoted themselves to prayer in loud weeping and wailing before God, often rending their clothes or striking themselves on the cheek, sprinkling themselves with dust and ashes (cf. our use of ashes on Ash Wednesday), prostrating themselves on the ground, or stretching out their hands to heaven in supplication to God to forgive and to turn aside the calamity (cf. 1 Sam. 7:6; Jer. 3:25; 4:8; 6:26; 31:19; Lam. 2:10, 19, etc.). Joel wants the priests to proclaim a ceremony of such repentance. But Joel’s concern is not just with the calamities of locusts and drought that Judah has suffered. His principal concern is with the fact that those calamities, which have made sacrifice impossible, are signs of Israel’s rupture of its covenant relationship with God.
1:15–16 More than that, the natural catastrophes bringing the cessation of the daily sacrifices are to Joel harbingers of a greater calamity to come—namely, final judgment day, the day of the LORD (yôm Yahweh), verse 15. Judah’s loss of communion with its God is not a temporary judgment, according to the prophet. It is the beginning of a final loss that threatens Judah with ultimate destruction because of God’s wrath upon Judah’s apostasy.
This all seems very foreign to modern ears, of course, because many in our age do not believe in sin or in a God who judges anyone. God, for many modern Americans, is rather an agreeable deity largely devoted to helping us out of difficulties, easily assuaging any guilt we may have, and making us feel as comfortable and secure as possible. As for sin, we would rather attribute evil or “socially unacceptable” actions to a poor environment, to faulty parenting, to inadequate schooling, and to the common human propensity for occasionally making mistakes. We “goof,” or we have “psychological hangups,” we “fall in with the wrong crowd,” or we take bad advice. But we hesitate to call anything sin, because sin involves a reciprocal relationship with God, and we blithely believe that God approves of us.
According to the Bible, however, God is not mocked (Gal. 6:7). God has made us to live in a trusting and obedient relationship. We are created to glorify and enjoy God forever. We must cleave to God all our days, walk according to God’s will, and love, serve, and praise God with all our hearts and minds and strength and will (Deut. 10:12–21; Mark 12:28–34; Rom.12:1–2). Sin, then, is rejecting that relationship and following our own ways and wills. Sin is refusing to let God be God and trying to be our own gods and goddesses instead (Gen. 3). And that sin God will not allow, because God will never be anything less than Lord and King over us (cf. Ezek. 20:33–38; Matt. 28:18; Phil. 2:10–11).
The Bible therefore tells us that we not only face God’s little judgments of every day, borne in upon us in our anxieties and trials, our broken homes and broken lives (cf. Isa. 28:13; Hos. 5:12; Rom.1:28–32). It also tells us that we face a final judgment of our ways in the day of the Lord. Both Jesus and Paul refer to that day (Mark 13 and parallels; Matt. 25:31–46; Rom. 2:5; 1 Cor. 1:8; 3:13; 5:5; 2 Cor. 1:14; Phil. 1:6, 10; 2:16;1 Thess. 5:2, etc.). And throughout the NT we are told that we all will stand before the judgment seat of God, accountable for our love and trust and obedience or lack thereof (Matt. 12:36; Rom. 14:10–12; 2 Cor. 5:10; 1 Pet. 4:5). The day of the Lord is near and is coming. The entire Bible affirms Joel’s message.
1:17–18 Joel then returns to the evidence of the first hints of the coming of the day—to the drought that is baking Judah in judgment, verses 17–18. Because of the covenant curse embodied in the lack of rain, the seeds under the soil simply wither and do not germinate. No grain grows to feed man or beast, and the granaries fall into ruin. The cattle low and mill about in their hunger, and even the sheep, who could live from the dry grasses of the steppes and would not need moist pasture, suffer for want of food. The Lord of nature has withdrawn all gifts because of Judah’s sin, and the effect is felt by all of nature.
1:19–20 The beasts of the field know, however, to whom to cry. As Isaiah had said, “The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner’s manger” (Isa. 1:3; cf. their presence in every Christmas crèche), and so the beasts of the field (wild animals) pant or “long for” God, verse 20.
Joel wants the priests to learn a lesson from the beasts and to cry to God as the animals of the field cry to their Lord. The prophet therefore composes a prayer for the priests to pray on the day of repentance, verse 19. But the fire mentioned in the prayer is not a natural manifestation of the drought—some commentators have believed that the dry fields have simply ignited by spontaneous combustion. No, fire is associated throughout the OT with God’s judgment (Isa. 47:14; 66:15–16; Jer. 4:4; 5:14, etc.), and the priests are to lead the people in contrition and turning to plead for an end to that judgment.
Additional Notes
1:13 Sackcloth was worn in biblical times as a sign of both mourning and penitence (cf. Joel 1:8; 1 Kgs. 21:27; Neh. 9:1–2; Jonah 3:5–6). The custom was to wrap the sackcloth around the loins, with the upper body of males left bare, in order that the chest might be struck in grief, which is the meaning of mourn in v. 13a.
1:14 The fact that the entire populace could be gathered together in the temple may be an indication of the small size of the postexilic Jerusalem population.
1:15 The day of the LORD: Found throughout the Bible, the concept of the day of the Lord had its beginnings in the times of the Judges and of Saul (1220–1020 BC; 1020–1000 BC) when Israel was often attacked by surrounding peoples and was forced to fight what scholars call the “holy war.” The name derives not from the fact that war was considered good, but from the practice of conducting such wars according to fixed cultic rules. The picture that we have of such wars in the OT shows us that they were largely conceived as the wars of God, who was the principal combatant and to whose aid Israel merely lent its service. God fought in the battles at the head of supernatural hosts (Josh. 10: 11; 24:7; Judg. 5:4–5), often instilling in the enemy terror and panic (Exod. 15:14–16; 23:27; Josh. 2:9, 24; 5:1; etc.). The belief therefore arose in Israel that God would always be on its side, and that when God came on the day of the Lord finally to destroy all enemies and to inaugurate a kingdom over all the earth, Israel would enjoy a blessed peace and prosperity as the favored and exalted people. The day of the Lord was therefore not one day, but a time when all of Israel’s enemies would be defeated and Israel would enjoy salvation (Isa. 32:16–20).
It was the prophet Amos, in the eighth century BC, who first upset this happy expectation of Israel’s. The day of the Lord was not light, he told the people, but darkness for them because of their sin, and it would mean for them not salvation but judgment (Amos 5:18–20). In this prophecy of woe, Amos was followed by Zephaniah (ch. 1), Isaiah (2:6–22), Ezekiel (ch. 7), and Malachi (4:5; 3:1–5; cf. Lam. 2:1, 21–22). Joel is taking these earlier prophecies and envisioning their fulfillment in his time.
1:17 This is one of the few places in Joel where the text is conjectural, because it contains two Hb. words that are found nowhere else in the OT. The LXX reads “the cows stamp about in their enclosure.” The Vg. has “the beasts of burden rot in their dung” (?). The LXX rewords the entire v., but only the first two lines are questionable, and the reading given in the NIV is probably the best to be had.