Thus Joel reaches the climax of his argument. Jehovah is near, His Day is about to break. From this it is impossible to escape on the narrow path of disaster by which the prophet has led up to it. But beneath that path the prophet passes the ground of a broad truth, and on that truth, while judgment remains still as real, there is room for the people to turn from it. If experience has shown that God is in the present, near and inevitable, faith remembers that He is there not willingly for judgment, but with all His ancient feeling for Israel and His zeal to save her. If the people choose to turn, Jehovah, as their God and as one who works for their sake, will save them. Of this God assures them by His own word. For the first time in the prophecy He speaks for Himself. Hitherto the prophet has been describing the plague and summoning to penitence. _But now oracle of Jehovah of Hosts._[1196] The great covenant name, _Jehovah your God_, is solemnly repeated as if symbolic of the historic origin and age-long endurance of Jehovah’s relation to Israel; and the very words of blessing are repeated which were given when Israel was called at Sinai and the covenant ratified:—
_For He is gracious and merciful, Long-suffering and plenteous in leal love, And relents Him of the evil_
He has threatened upon you. Once more the nation is summoned to try Him by prayer: the solemn prayer of all Israel, pleading that He should not give His people to reproach.
_The Word of Jehovah which came to Jo’el the son of Pethû’el._[1197]
_Hear this, ye old men, And give ear, all inhabitants of the land! Has the like been in your days, Or in the days of your fathers? Tell it to your children, And your children to their children, And their children to the generation that follows. That which the Shearer left the Swarmer hath eaten, And that which the Swarmer left the Lapper hath eaten. And that which the Lapper left the Devourer hath eaten._
These are four different names for locusts, which it is best to translate by their literal meaning. Some think that they represent one swarm of locusts in four stages of development, but this cannot be, because the same swarm never returns upon its path, to complete the work of destruction which it had begun in an earlier stage of its growth. Nor can the first-named be the adult brood from whose eggs the others spring, as Doughty has described,[1198] for that would account only for two of the four names. Joel rather describes successive swarms of the insect, without reference to the stages of its growth, and he does so as a poet, using, in order to bring out the full force of its devastation, several of the Hebrew names, that were given to the locust as epithets of various aspects of its destructive power. The names, it is true, cannot be said to rise in climax, but at least the most sinister is reserved to the last.[1199]
_Rouse ye, drunkards, and weep, And wail, all ye bibbers of wine! The new wine is cut off from your mouth! For a nation is come up on My land, Powerful and numberless; His teeth are the teeth of the lion, And the fangs[1200] of the lioness his. My vine he has turned to waste, And My fig-tree to splinters; He hath peeled it and strawed it, Bleached are its branches!_
_Wail as a bride girt in sackcloth for the spouse of her youth. Cut off are the meal and drink offerings from the house of Jehovah! In grief are the priests, the ministers of Jehovah. The fields are blasted, the ground is in grief, Blasted is the corn, abashed is the new wine, the oil pines away. Be ye abashed, O ploughmen! Wail, O vine-dressers, For the wheat and the barley; The harvest is lost from the field! The vine is abashed, and the fig-tree is drooping; Pomegranate, palm too and apple, All trees of the field are dried up: Yea, joy is abashed_ and _away from the children of men._