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Joel 1 - Locusts and Lament

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This narration is from a previous version of the study and may include a combined recording of multiple chapters.

The offering has disappeared from the altar. Before Joel names a remedy, he lets us feel what has been lost: food in the fields, wine on the lips, fruit on the branches, and the gifts with which the people worship God. The famine wounds a whole way of life. Those who work the soil and those who serve at the altar can no longer imagine that their lives are separate.

Joel begins by teaching the people to hear, remember, and grieve together. He gives them neither an explanation of every sufferer’s fault nor permission to retreat into numbness. He brings them into the house of God with their hunger and their tears. The chapter ends with prayer before it offers any account of recovery.

Wake and remember the stripped land (Joel 1:1-7)

1: The word of the Lord which came to Joel the son of Bathuel. 2: Hear these words, ye elders, and hearken all ye that inhabit the land. Have such things happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers? 3: Tell your children concerning them, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation. 4: The leavings of the caterpillar has the locust eaten, and the leavings of the locust has the palmerworm eaten, and the leavings of the palmerworm has the cankerworm eaten. 5: Awake, ye drunkards, from your wine, and weep: mourn, all ye that drink wine to drunkenness: for joy and gladness are removed from your mouth. 6: For a strong and innumerable nation is come up against my land, their teeth are lion’s teeth, and their back teeth those of a lion’s whelp. 7: He has ruined my vine, and utterly broken my fig-trees: he has utterly searched my vine, and cast it down; he has peeled its branches.

The word comes to Joel, but its first command is addressed to everyone. Elders must hear alongside all the inhabitants. Their long memory matters, yet the disaster exceeds what even they can recall. Children and grandchildren must receive its story. Remembering together keeps the community from treating this devastation as an unfortunate interruption before life returns unchanged.

Verse 4 leaves almost nothing standing. Each creature consumes what its predecessor spared. The names accumulate until the reader feels the exhaustion of looking for something left. The lion’s teeth in verse 6 give this consuming force a terrifying likeness to an invading nation. The peeled vine makes the damage unmistakable. These are crops on which households depend, not scenery for an inward lesson.

Into this loss comes the command to the drunkards: wake and weep. Their mouths have lost the means of their pleasure, and Joel calls them into truthful sorrow. Comfort becomes dangerous when it prevents us from hearing God or noticing another person’s hunger. A person can keep that kind of drunkenness without touching wine, using noise, purchases, work, or endless entertainment to avoid a truth that prayer would expose.

Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty, a modern Coptic commentator, reads Joel 1:5 in this inward sense, then connects its failed wine with Peter’s answer to the accusation of drunkenness at Pentecost in Acts 2:15-17.1 Across Joel, the loss of numbing pleasure can prepare the reader to recognize a different fullness in the promised Spirit. This is a Christian connection across the book, not the immediate meaning of every detail of the plague. The first response remains simple and demanding: become awake enough to grieve what has actually happened.

The wound reaches the altar (Joel 1:8-14)

8: Lament to me more than a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth. 9: The meat-offering and drink-offering are removed from the house of the Lord: mourn, ye priests that serve at the altar of the Lord. 10: For the plains languish: let the land mourn, for the corn languishes; the wine is dried up, the oil becomes scarce; 11: the husbandmen are consumed: mourn your property on account of the wheat and barley; for the harvest has perished from off the field. 12: The vine is dried up, and the fig-trees are become few; the pomegranate, and palm-tree, and apple, and all the trees of the field are dried up: for the sons of men have abolished joy. 13: Gird yourselves with sackcloth, and lament, ye priests: mourn, ye that serve at the altar: go in, sleep in sackcloths, ye that minister to God: for the meat-offering and drink-offering are withheld from the house of your God. 14: Sanctify a fast, proclaim a solemn service, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of your God, and cry earnestly to the Lord,

The comparison with a young woman mourning her husband gives grief a personal face. A lost harvest contains lost hopes: a household’s provision, the fruit of labour, the expectation of another year. Joel allows lament its full weight. Faith does not require the bereaved to speak as though nothing precious has been taken from them.

Then the prophet names the wound twice: the offering is removed from God’s house. Brenton’s older expression “meat-offering” here means the grain offering. The harvest supplied both human nourishment and the gifts brought before the Lord. Without grain and wine, the interruption reaches the altar itself. Worship belongs to embodied life; the farmer’s work and the priest’s ministry meet in an offering received with thanksgiving.

This also explains why priests must mourn. They stand within the people’s affliction, serving the Lord whose house has been deprived of its offerings. Sackcloth and the night spent in lament forbid a ministry that observes hunger from a safe distance. For a Christian servant, intercession grows more truthful when the names spoken in prayer belong to people whose need we have allowed ourselves to know.

Brenton’s verse 12 ends with an arresting phrase: “the sons of men have abolished joy.” People appear as agents in joy’s loss, not simply its passive sufferers. The wording makes room for examination of conscience amid the ruined trees. We can diminish a household’s joy through contempt, dishonesty, or the pursuit of our own ease. Yet the verse gives no licence to assign a hidden sin to every hungry family. Shared repentance and compassion belong together; accusation of the afflicted can become another way of withholding love.

Gems from the Fathers 💎

St. John Chrysostom, explaining Romans 12:15 rather than commenting directly on Joel, describes the fellow-feeling that makes communal lament genuine. He distinguishes the help everyone can offer from the removal of a calamity that may lie beyond our power: “For when your neighbor is ill-treated, you ought to make the calamity your own. Take share then in his tears, that you may lighten his low spirits.”2 His words bring Joel’s assembly close to parish life. We may be unable to repair the whole loss, but we can listen without explaining it away, bring a meal, relieve an expense, or remain beside a person after others have stopped asking.

Joel’s answer to the silenced altar is a gathering, a sanctified fast, and an earnest cry. Those whose fields are empty still have a place in God’s house. They need not manufacture abundance before approaching Him. Their poverty itself can be brought into prayer.

The Church’s Voice in Worship ⛪

The printed Holy Pascha book of St. Mary Ottawa, Lent 1734 A.M./2018, places Joel 1:5-15 among the prophecies at the Sixth Hour of the Eve of Monday of Holy Pascha.3 This is a printed Holy Pascha witness, not a Coptic Reader-confirmed appointment. Its sequence leads from the call to wake through the missing offering to the solemn assembly. Heard beside the Passion, the empty altar directs Christian hope toward Christ’s self-offering. The grieving people are being brought before the Lord who gives Himself for the life of the world.

The whole creation cries (Joel 1:15-20)

15: Alas, alas, alas for the day! for the day of the Lord is nigh, and it will come as trouble upon trouble. 16: Your meat has been destroyed before your eyes, joy and gladness from out of the house of your God. 17: The heifers have started at their mangers, the treasures are abolished, the wine-presses are broken down; for the corn is withered. 18: What shall we store up for ourselves? the herds of cattle have mourned, because they had no pasture; and the flocks of sheep have been utterly destroyed. 19: To thee, O Lord, will I cry: for fire has devoured the fair places of the wilderness, and a flame has burnt up all the trees of the field. 20: And the cattle of the field have looked up to thee: for the fountains of waters have been dried up, and fire has devoured the fair places of the wilderness.

The day of the Lord brings a reckoning larger than private distress. Joel’s threefold lament gives that prospect its proper gravity. In verse 15 Brenton reads “trouble upon trouble,” while the NKJV reads “destruction from the Almighty.”4 This is a wording difference between the translations, not a change of verse numbering. Brenton makes the mounting anguish especially audible; the following verses show it in empty stores, broken presses, and animals without pasture.

No part of the disaster is too ordinary for prayer. The animals’ need for water belongs within the prophet’s vision, just as the lack of food belongs beside the absence of joy in God’s house. Human life depends upon gifts it cannot simply command into existence. The dry fountains expose that dependence without making the creatures’ pain less real.

At last Joel enters the cry himself: “To thee, O Lord, will I cry.” Having summoned priests and people, he prays with them. The cattle looking upward complete the picture of helpless creation turned toward its Maker. There is no quick recovery scene to relieve the reader. Faith is already active in this address to God, even while the fields remain burnt.

Christian readers can hear a kinship with creation’s groaning in Romans 8:19-23. Joel’s own ending keeps that connection grounded: suffering is brought before God with the expectation that His creatures matter to Him. The next study, Joel 2:1-27, will carry the cry into return and restoration. Here, remaining in prayer beside the hungry is already an act of hope.

Spiritual Fruit 🍇

Joel gives us a way to respond when the usual comforts fail. Wakefulness can begin with one honest admission in prayer: the thing we have been using to avoid God, the grief we have refused to name, or the neighbour whose pain we have kept at a distance. Confession addresses our own sins; mercy brings us near the sufferer without pretending to know the reason for every loss. A fast joined to attention, prayer, and practical help begins to answer the command to gather and cry earnestly.

The field is still bare when Joel turns toward the Lord. He brings no harvest to disguise that barrenness, only the truth of the need before him. We too may come with an unfinished grief and little strength for words. Christ receives the cry that comfort could no longer silence. Beside Him, we can stay awake long enough to love someone else in the same darkness.

Footnotes

  1. Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty, A Patristic Commentary: The Book of Joel, trans. Dr. George Botros, English ed. 2007, chapter 1, “2- The Results of the Attacks,” comment on Joel 1:5, PDF pp. 15-16, especially p. 16: commentary. A modern Coptic pastoral interpretation. ↩

  2. St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily XXII, on Romans 12:15, paragraph beginning “Since it is possible”; Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 11: homily. ↩

  3. St. Mary Ottawa, Holy Pascha, Lent 1734 A.M./2018, “The Sixth Hour of Monday Eve,” Prophecies, Joel 1:5-15, printed pp. 86-87. Historical printed witness, recorded in the lectionary reference edition 1.3.3; not a current Coptic Reader confirmation. ↩

  4. Compare Brenton, Joel 1:15, with the New King James Version, Joel 1:15. ↩

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