THE CHAPTER XXIX PROSPERITY AND THE SPIRIT JOEL ii. 18-32 (Eng.; ii. 18-iii. Heb.) HEN 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; 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 A.V., adhering to the Massoretic text, in which the verbs are pointed for the past, has evidently understood them as instances of the prophetic perfect. But "this is grammatically indefensible": Driver, in loco; see his Heb. Tenses, § 82, Obs. Calvin and others, who take the verbs of ver. 18 as future, accept those of the next verse as past and with it begin the narrative. But if God's answer to His people's prayer be in the past, so must His jealousy and pity. All these verbs are in the same sequence of time. Merx proposes to change the vowel-points of the verbs and turn them into futures. But see above, p. 395. Ver. 21 shows that Jehovah's action is past, and Nowack points out the very unusual character of the construction that would follow from Merx's emendation. Ewald, Hitzig, Kuenen, Robertson Smith, Davidson, Robertson, Steiner, Wellhausen, Driver, Nowack, etc., all take the verbs in the past. 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 terriblę manifestations in heaven and earth. I. THE RETURN OF PROSPERITY (ii. 19-27). And I will not again make you a reproach among And the Northern Foe1 will I remove far from you; 2 Till the stench of him rises,3 Because he hath done greatly. 'This is scarcely a name for the locusts, who, though they might reach Palestine from the N.E. under certain circumstances, came generally from E. and S.E. But see above, p. 397: so Kuenen, Wellhausen, Nowack. W. R. Smith suggests the whole verse as an allegorising gloss. Hitzig thought of the locusts only, and rendered DYN & TUÓWUixós, Acts xxvii. 14; but this is not proved. 2 I.e. the Dead Sea (Ezek. xlvii. 18; Zech. xiv. 8) and the Medi terranean. • The construction shows that the clause preceding this, nbyı, is a gloss. So Driver. But Nowack gives the other clause as the gloss. Locusts disappear with the same suddenness as they arrive. A wind springs up and they are gone.1 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 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." 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.1 3 Fear not, O Land! Rejoice and be glad, 1 Nah. iii. 17; Exod. x. 19. i. 17-20 see above, p. 403. " Prophetic past: Driver. For the pastures of the steppes are springing with new grass, The trees bear their fruit, Fig-tree and vine yield their substance. O sons of Zion, be glad, And rejoice in Jehovah your God: For He hath given you the early rain in normal measure,1 1 Opinion is divided as to the meaning of this phrase: p5 for righteousness. A. There are those who take it as having a moral reference; and (1) this is so emphatic to some that they render the word for early rain, П, which also means teacher or revealer, in the latter significance. So (some of them applying it to the Messiah) Targum, Symmachus, the Vulgate, doctorem justitiæ, some Jews, e.g. Rashi and Abarbanel, and some moderns, e.g. (at opposite extremes) Pusey and Merx. But, as Calvin points out (this is another instance of his sanity as an exegete, and refusal to be led by theological presuppositions: he says, "I do not love strained expositions"), this does not agree with the context, which speaks not of spiritual but wholly of physical blessings. (2) Some, who take as early rain, give П the meaning for righteousness, ad justitiam, either in the sense that God will give the rain as a token of His own righteousness, or in order to restore or vindicate the people's righteousness (so Davidson, Expositor, 1888, I., p. 203 n.), in the frequent sense in which пp is employed in Isa. xl. ff. (see Isaiah xl.— lxvi., Expositor's Bible, pp. 219 ff.). Cf. Hosea x. 13, PTY; above, Vol. I., p. 289, n. 2. This of course is possible, especially in view of Israel having been made by their plagues a reproach among the heathen. Still, if Joel had intended this meaning, he would have applied the phrase, not to the early rain only, but to the whole series of blessings by which the people were restored to their standing before God. B. It seems, therefore, right to take py in a purely physical sense, of the measure or quality of the early rain. So even Calvin, rain according to what is just or fit; A.V. moderately (inexact); R.V. in just measure; Siegfried-Stade sufficient. The root-meaning of ply is probably according to norm (cf. Isaiah xl.—lxvi., p. 215), and in that case the meaning would be rain of normal quantity. This too suits the parallel in the next clause: as formerly. In Himyaritic the word is applied to good harvests. DPTY, full or good harvests and fruits: Corp. Inscr. Sem., Pars Quarta, Tomus I., No. 2, lin. 1-5; cf. the note. אפקל ואתמר A man prays to God for And poured on you winter rain and latter rain as before.3 And the threshing-floors shall be full of wheat, And the vats stream over with new wine and oil. And I will restore to you the years which the The Lapper, the Devourer and the Shearer, 2. THE OUTPOURING OF THE SPIRIT (ii. 28-32 Eng.; iii. Heb.). Upon these promises of physical blessing there follows another of the pouring forth of the Spirit: the prophecy by which Joel became the Prophet of Pentecost, and through which his book is best known among Christians. When fertility has been restored to the land, the seasons again run their normal courses, and the people eat their food and be full-It shall come to pass after these things, I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh. The order of events makes us pause to question: does Joel mean to imply that physical prosperity must 1 Driver, in loco. 2 Heb. also repeats here early rain, but redundantly. , in the first. A.V. adds month. But LXX. and Syr. read, which is probably the correct reading, as before or formerly. |