[1146] i. 3.
[1147] i. 17 ff.
[1148] ii. 17, ii. 9 ff.
[1149] למשל בם
[1150] A. B. Davidson, _Expos._, 1888, pp. 200 f.
[1151] ii. 4 ff.
[1152] Eng. ii. 28 ff., Heb. iii.
[1153] Eng. iii., Heb. iv.
[1154] _Die Prophetie des Joel u. ihre Ausleger_, 1879. The following summary and criticism of Merx’s views I take from an (unpublished) review of his work which I wrote in 1881.
[1155] For וַיְקַנֵּא etc. he reads וִיקַנֵּא etc.
[1156] “The proposal of Merx, to change the pointing so as to transform the perfects into futures, ... is an exegetical monstrosity.”—Robertson Smith, art. “Joel,” _Encyc. Brit._
[1157] i. 16.
[1158] Even the comparison of the ravages of the locusts to burning by fire. But probably also Joel means that they were accompanied by drought and forest fires. See below.
[1159] ii. 20.
JOEL i.—ii. 17
Joel, as we have seen, found the motive of his prophecy in a recent plague of locusts, the appearance of which and the havoc they worked are described by him in full detail. Writing not only as a poet but as a seer, who reads in the locusts signs of the great Day of the Lord, Joel has necessarily put into his picture several features which carry the imagination beyond the limits of experience. And yet, if we ourselves had lived through such a plague, we should be able to recognise how little license the poet has taken, and that the seer, so far from unduly mixing with his facts the colours of Apocalypse, must have experienced in the terrible plague itself enough to provoke all the religious and monitory use which he makes of it.
The present writer has seen but one swarm of locusts, in which, though it was small and soon swept away by the wind, he felt not only many of the features that Joel describes, but even some degree of that singular helplessness before a calamity of portent far beyond itself, something of that supernatural edge and accent, which, by the confession of so many observers, characterise the locust-plague and the earthquake above all other physical disasters. One summer afternoon, upon the plain of Hauran, a long bank of mist grew rapidly from the western horizon. The day was dull, and as the mist rose athwart the sunbeams, struggling through clouds, it gleamed cold and white, like the front of a distant snow-storm. When it came near, it seemed to be more than a mile broad, and was dense enough to turn the atmosphere raw and dirty, with a chill as of a summer sea-fog, only that this was not due to any fall in the temperature. Nor was there the silence of a mist. We were enveloped by a noise, less like the whirring of wings than the rattle of hail or the crackling of bush on fire. Myriads upon myriads of locusts were about us, covering the ground, and shutting out the view in all directions. Though they drifted before the wind, there was no confusion in their ranks. They sailed in unbroken lines, sometimes straight, sometimes wavy; and when they passed pushing through our caravan, they left almost no stragglers, except from the last battalion, and only the few dead which we had caught in our hands. After several minutes they were again but a lustre on the air, and so melted away into some heavy clouds in the east.
Modern travellers furnish us with terrible impressions of the innumerable multitudes of a locust-plague, the succession of their swarms through days and weeks, and the utter desolation they leave behind them. Mr. Doughty writes:[1160] “There hopped before our feet a minute brood of second locusts, of a leaden colour, with budding wings like the spring leaves, and born of those gay swarms which a few weeks before had passed over and despoiled the desert. After forty days these also would fly as a pestilence, yet more hungry than the former, and fill the atmosphere.” And later: “The clouds of the second locust brood which the Arabs call ‘Am’dan, _pillars_, flew over us for some days, invaded the booths and for blind hunger even bit our shins.”[1161] It was “a storm of rustling wings.”[1162] “This year was remembered for the locust swarms and great summer heat.”[1163] A traveller in South Africa[1164] says: “For the space of ten miles on each side of the Sea-Cow river and eighty or ninety miles in length, an area of sixteen or eighteen hundred square miles, the whole surface might literally be said to be covered with them.” In his recently published book on South Africa, Mr. Bryce writes:—[1165]