A large and growing majority of critics of all schools[1133] hold that Joel starts, like other prophets, from the facts of experience. His locusts, though described with poetic hyperbole—for are they not the vanguard of the awful Day of God’s judgment?—are real locusts; their plague has just been felt by his contemporaries, whom he summons to repent, and to whom, when they have repented, he brings promises of the restoration of their ruined harvests, the outpouring of the Spirit, and judgment upon their foes. Prediction is therefore found only in the second half of the book (ii. 18 onwards): it rests upon a basis of narrative and exhortation which fills the first half.
But a number of other critics have argued (and with great force) that the prophet’s language about the locusts is too aggravated and too ominous to be limited to the natural plague which these insects periodically inflicted upon Palestine. Joel (they reason) would hardly have connected so common an adversity with so singular and ultimate a crisis as the Day of the Lord. Under the figure of locusts he must be describing some more fateful agency of God’s wrath upon Israel. More than one trait of his description appears to imply a human army. It can only be one or other, or all, of those heathen powers whom at different periods God raised up to chastise His delinquent people; and this opinion is held to be supported by the facts that chap. ii. 20 speaks of them as the Northern and chap. iii. (Eng.; iv. Heb.) deals with the heathen. The locusts of chaps. i. and ii. are the same as the heathen of chap. iii. In chaps. i. and ii. they are described as threatening Israel, but on condition of Israel repenting (chap. ii. 18 ff.) the Day of the Lord which they herald shall be their destruction and not Israel’s (chap. iii.).[1134]
The supporters of this allegorical interpretation of Joel are, however, divided among themselves as to whether the heathen powers symbolised by the locusts are described as having already afflicted Israel or are predicted as still to come. Hilgenfeld,[1135] for instance, says that the prophet in chaps. i. and ii. speaks of their ravages as already past. To him their fourfold plague described in chap. i. 4 symbolises four Persian assaults upon Palestine, after the last of which in 358 the prophecy must therefore have been written.[1136] Others read them as still to come. In our own country Pusey has been the strongest supporter of this theory.[1137] To him the whole book, written before Amos, is prediction. “It extends from the prophet’s own day to the end of time.” Joel calls the scourge the Northern: he directs the priests to pray for its removal, that _the heathen may not rule over God’s heritage_;[1138] he describes the agent as a responsible one;[1139] his imagery goes far beyond the effects of locusts, and threatens drought, fire and plague,[1140] the assault of cities and the terrifying of peoples.[1141] The scourge is to be destroyed in a way physically inapplicable to locusts;[1142] and the promises of its removal include the remedy of ravages which mere locusts could not inflict: the captivity of Judah is to be turned, and the land recovered from foreigners who are to be banished from it.[1143] Pusey thus reckons as future the relenting of God, consequent upon the people’s penitence: chap. ii. 18 ff. The past tenses in which it is related, he takes as instances of the well-known prophetic perfect, according to which the prophets express their assurance of things to come by describing them as if they had already happened.
This is undoubtedly a strong case for the predictive and allegorical character of the Book of Joel; but a little consideration will show us that the facts on which it is grounded are capable of a different explanation than that which it assumes, and that Pusey has overlooked a number of other facts which force us to a literal interpretation of the locusts as a plague already past, even though we feel they are described in the language of poetical hyperbole.