The thing is true, and permanently valid. Only the great natural processes can break up the systems of dogma and ritual in which we make ourselves comfortable and formal, and drive us out into God’s open air of reality. In the crash of nature’s forces even our particular sins are forgotten, and we feel, as in the immediate presence of God, our whole, deep need of repentance. So far from blaming the absence of special ethics in Joel’s sermon, we accept it as natural and proper to the occasion.
Such, then, appears to be the explanation of the first part of the prophecy, and its development towards the call to repentance, which follows it. If we are correct, the assertion[1185] is false that no plan was meant by the prophet. For not only is there a plan, but the plan is most suitable to the requirements of Israel, after their adoption of the whole Law in 445, and forms one of the most necessary and interesting developments of all religion: the revival, in an artificial period, of those primitive forces of religion which nature alone supplies, and which are needed to correct formalism and the forgetfulness of the near presence of the Almighty. We see in this, too, the reason of Joel’s archaic style, both of conception and expression: that likeness of his to early prophets which has led so many to place him between Elijah and Amos.[1186] They are wrong. Joel’s simplicity is that not of early prophecy, but of the austere forces of this revived and applied to the artificiality of a later age.
One other proof of Joel’s conviction of the religious meaning of the plague might also have been pled by the earlier prophets, but certainly not in the terms in which Joel expresses it. Amos and Hosea had both described the destruction of the country’s fertility in their day as God’s displeasure on His people and (as Hosea puts it) His divorce of His Bride from Himself.[1187] But by them the physical calamities were not threatened alone: banishment from the land and from enjoyment of its fruits was to follow upon drought, locusts and famine. In threatening no captivity Joel differs entirely from the early prophets. It is a mark of his late date. And he also describes the divorce between Jehovah and Israel, through the interruption of the ritual by the plague, in terms and with an accent which could hardly have been employed in Israel before the Exile. After the rebuilding of the Temple and restoration of the daily sacrifices morning and evening, the regular performance of the latter was regarded by the Jews with a most superstitious sense of its indispensableness to the national life. Before the Exile, Jeremiah, for instance, attaches no importance to it, in circumstances in which it would have been not unnatural for him, priest as he was, to do so.[1188] But after the Exile, the greater scrupulousness of the religious life, and its absorption in ritual, laid extraordinary emphasis upon the daily offering, which increased to a most painful degree of anxiety as the centuries went on.[1189] The New Testament speaks of _the Twelve Tribes constantly serving God day and night_;[1190] and Josephus, while declaring that in no siege of Jerusalem before the last did the interruption ever take place in spite of the stress of famine and war combined, records the awful impression made alike on Jew and heathen by the giving up of the daily sacrifice on the 17th of July, A.D. 70, during the investment of the city by Titus.[1191] This disaster, which Judaism so painfully feared at every crisis in its history, actually happened, Joel tells us, during the famine caused by the locusts. _Cut off are the meal and the drink offerings from the house of Jehovah.[1192] Is not food cut off from our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God?[1193] Perhaps He will turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind Him, meal and drink offering for Jehovah our God._[1194] The break “of the continual symbol of gracious intercourse between Jehovah and His people, and the main office of religion,” means divorce between Jehovah and Israel. _Wail like a bride girt in sackcloth for the husband of her youth! Wail, O ministers of the altar, O ministers of God!_[1195] This then was another reason for reading in the plague of locusts more than a physical meaning. This was another proof, only too intelligible to scrupulous Jews, that the great and terrible Day of the Lord was at hand.