This prophecy divides into two parts-the outpouring of the Spirit, and the appearance of the terrible Day of the Lord.

2

The Spirit of God is to be poured on all flesh, says the prophet. By this term, which is sometimes applied to all things that breathe, and sometimes to mankind. as a whole,1 Joel means Israel only: the heathen are to be destroyed. Nor did Peter, when he quoted the passage at the Day of Pentecost, mean anything more. He spoke to Jews and proselytes: for the promise is to you and your children, and to them that are afar off: it was not till afterwards that he discovered that the Holy Ghost was granted to the Gentiles, and then he was unready for the revelation and surprised by it. But within Joel's Israel the operation of the Spirit was to be at once thorough and universal. All classes would be affected, and affected so that the simplest and rudest would become prophets.

The limitation was therefore not without its advantages. In the earlier stages of all religions, it is impossible to be both extensive and intensive. With a few exceptions, the Israel of Joel's time was a narrow and exclusive body, hating and hated by other peoples. Behind the Law it kept itself strictly aloof. But without doing so, Israel could hardly have survived or prepared itself at that time for its influence on the world. Heathenism threatened it from all sides with the most insidious of infections; and there awaited it in the near future a still more subtle and powerful means of disintegration. In the wake of Alexander's

All living things, Gen. vi. 17, 19, etc.; mankind, Isa. xl. 5, xlix. 26. See Driver's note.

expeditions, Hellenism poured across all the East. There was not a community nor a religion, save Israel's, which was not Hellenised. That Israel remained Israel, in spite of Greek arms and the Greek mind, was due to the legalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, and to what we call the narrow enthusiasm of Joel. The hearts which kept their passion so confined felt all the deeper for its limits. They would be satisfied with nothing less than the inspiration of every Israelite, the fulfilment of the prayer of Moses: Would to God that all Jehovah's people were prophets! And of itself this carries Joel's prediction to a wider fulfilment. A nation of prophets is meant for the world. But even the best of men do not see the full force of the truth God gives to them, nor follow it even to its immediate consequences. Few of the prophets did so, and at first none of the apostles. Joel does not hesitate to say that the heathen shall be destroyed. He does not think of Israel's mission as foretold by the Second Isaiah; nor of "Malachi's" vision of the heathen waiting upon Jehovah. But in the near future of Israel there was waiting another prophet to carry Joel's doctrine to its full effect upon the world, to rescue the gospel of God's grace from the narrowness of legalism and the awful pressure of Apocalypse, and by the parable of Jonah, the type of the prophet nation, to show to Israel that God had granted to the Gentiles also repentance unto life.

That it was the lurid clouds of Apocalypse, which thus hemmed in our prophet's view, is clear from the next verses. They bring the terrible manifestations of God's wrath in nature very closely upon the lavish outpouring of the Spirit: the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood, the great and terrible Day

of the Lord. Apocalypse must always paralyse the missionary energies of religion. Who can think of converting the world, when the world is about to be convulsed? There is only time for a remnant to be saved.

But when we get rid of Apocalypse, as the Book of Jonah does, then we have time and space opened up again, and the essential forces of such a prophecy of the Spirit as Joel has given us burst their national and temporary confines, and are seen to be applicable to all mankind.

H

CHAPTER XXX

THE JUDGMENT OF THE HEATHEN

JOEL iii. (Eng.; iv. Heb.)

ITHERTO Joel has spoken no syllable of the

heathen, except to pray that God by His plagues will not give Israel to be mocked by them. But in the last chapter of the Book we have Israel's captivity to the heathen taken for granted, a promise made that it will be removed and their land set free from the foreigner. Certain nations are singled out for judgment, which is described in the terms of Apocalypse; and the Book closes with the vision, already familiar in prophecy, of a supernatural fertility for the land.

It is quite another horizon and far different interests from those of the preceding chapter. Here for the first time we may suspect the unity of the Book, and listen to suggestions of another authorship than Joel's. But these can scarcely be regarded as conclusive. Every prophet, however national his interests, feels it his duty to express himself upon the subject of foreign peoples, and Joel may well have done so. Only, in that case, his last chapter was delivered by him at another time and in different circumstances from the rest of his prophecies. Chaps. i.—ii. (Eng. ; i.—iii. Heb.) are complete in themselves. Chap. iii. (Eng.;

iv. Heb.) opens without any connection of time or subject with those that precede it.1

The time of the prophecy is a time when Israel's fortunes are at low ebb,2 her sons scattered among the heathen, her land, in part at least, held by foreigners. But it would appear (though this is not expressly said, and must rather be inferred from the general proofs of a post-exilic date) that Jerusalem is inhabited. Nothing is said to imply that the city needs to be restored.3

All the heathen nations are to be brought together for judgment into a certain valley, which the prophet calls first the Vale of Jehoshaphat and then the Vale of Decision. The second name leads us to infer that the first, which means Jehovah-judges, is also symbolic. That is to say, the prophet does not single out a definite valley already called Jehoshaphat. In all probability, however, he has in his mind's eye some vale in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, for since Ezekiel the judgment of the heathen in face of Jerusalem has been a standing feature in Israel's vision of the last things; and as no valley about that city lends itself to the picture of judgment so well as the valley of the Kedron with the slopes of Olivet, the name Jehoshaphat has naturally been applied to it." Cer

4

1 I am unable to feel Driver's and Nowack's arguments for a connection conclusive. The only reason Davidson gives is (p. 204) that the judgment of the heathen is an essential element in the Day of Jehovah, a reason which does not make Joel's authorship of the last chapter certain, but only possible.

2 The phrase of ver. 1, when I turn again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, may be rendered when I restore the fortunes of Israel.

See above, p. 386, especially n. 5.

4 xxxviii.

* Some have unnecessarily thought of the Vale of Berakhah, in which Jehoshaphat defeated Moab, Ammon and Edom (2 Chron. xx.).