[1205] Lit. _press themselves_ in perplexity.
[1206] Reading, with Wellhausen and Nowack (“perhaps rightly,” Driver) נשמו for נאשמו, _are guilty_ or _punished_.
[1207] מדבר, usually rendered _wilderness_ or _desert_, but literally _place where the sheep are driven_, land not cultivated. See _Hist. Geog._, p. 656.
[1208] See on Amos iii. 6: Vol. I., p. 82.
[1209] Zeph. i. 15. See above, p. 58.
[1210] פרשׂ in Qal _to spread abroad_, but the passive is here to be taken in the same sense as the Ni. in Ezek. xvii. 21, _dispersed_. The figure is of dawn crushed by and struggling with a mass of cloud and mist, and expresses the gleams of white which so often break through a locust cloud. See above, p. 404.
[1211] So travellers have described the effect of locusts. See above, p. 403.
[1212] Ezek. xxxvi. 35.
[1213] Heb. _in his own ways_.
[1214] יעבטון, an impossible metaphor, so that most read יעבתון, a root found only in Micah vii. 3 (see Vol. I., p. 428), _to twist_ or _tangle_; but Wellhausen reads יְעַוְּתוּן, _twist_, Eccles. vii. 13.
[1215] Heb. _highroad_, as if defined and heaped up for him alone.
[1216] See above, p. 401.
[1217] Zeph. i. 14; “Mal.” iii. 2.
[1218] So (and not _elders_) in contrast to children.
[1219] _Canopy_ or _pavilion_, bridal tent.
[1220] למשל בם, which may mean either _rule over them_ or _mock them_, but the parallelism decides for the latter.
JOEL ii. 18-32 (Eng.; ii. 18—iii. Heb.)
_Then did Jehovah become jealous for His land, and took pity upon His people_—with these words Joel opens the second half of his book. Our Authorised Version renders them in the future tense, as the continuation of the prophet’s discourse, which had threatened the Day of the Lord, urged the people to penitence, and now promises that their penitence shall be followed by the Lord’s mercy. But such a rendering forces the grammar;[1221] and the Revised English Version is right in taking the verbs, as the vast majority of critics do, in the past. Joel’s call to repentance has closed, and has been successful. The fast has been hallowed, the prayers are heard. Probably an interval has elapsed between vv. 17 and 18, but in any case, the people having repented, nothing more is said of their need of doing so, and instead we have from God Himself a series of promises, vv. 19-27, in answer to their cry for mercy. These promises relate to the physical calamity which has been suffered. God will destroy the locusts, still impending on the land, and restore the years which His great army has eaten. There follows in vv. 28-32 (Eng.; Heb. chap, iii.) the promise of a great outpouring of the Spirit on all Israel, amid terrible manifestations in heaven and earth.
1. THE RETURN OF PROSPERITY (ii. 19-27).
_And Jehovah answered and said to His people: Lo, I will send you corn and wine and oil, And your fill shall ye have of them; And I will not again make you a reproach among the heathen. And the Northern_ Foe[1222] _will I remove far from you; And I will push him into a land barren and waste, His van to the eastern sea and his rear to the western,[1223] Till the stench of him rises,[1224] Because he hath done greatly._
Locusts disappear with the same suddenness as they arrive. A wind springs up and they are gone.[1225] Dead Sea and Mediterranean are at the extremes of the compass, but there is no reason to suppose that the prophet has abandoned the realism which has hitherto distinguished his treatment of the locusts. The plague covered the whole land, on whose high watershed the winds suddenly veer and change. The dispersion of the locusts upon the deserts and the opposite seas was therefore possible at one and the same time. Jerome vouches for an instance in his own day. The other detail is also true to life. Jerome says that the beaches of the two seas were strewn with putrifying locusts, and Augustine[1226] quotes heathen writers in evidence of large masses of locusts, driven from Africa upon the sea, and then cast up on the shore, which gave rise to a pestilence. “The south and east winds,” says Volney of Syria, “drive the clouds of locusts with violence into the Mediterranean, and drown them in such quantities, that when their dead are cast on the shore they infect the air to a great distance.”[1227] The prophet continues, celebrating this destruction of the locusts as if it were already realised—_the Lord hath done greatly_, ver. 21. That among the blessings he mentions a full supply of rain proves that we were right in interpreting him to have spoken of drought as accompanying the locusts.[1228]