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Here is Lawrence Boadt’s introduction to Joel
from Reading the Old Testament….
The Book of Joel is a difficult book to classify.
It seems to be as much a liturgy of penance as a collection of prophetic
oracles. It has as many connections to the psalms as it does to Isaiah or
Habakkuk or Jeremiah. It has no date and we know nothing of its author, so any
attempt to place it somewhere in Israel’s history must come from clues inside
the book itself. Because it never mentions older political enemies like the
Assyrians or Babylonians, and because it has high praise of the temple worship,
and because it speaks of the land once
before (the exile?) being totally destroyed (Jl 2:17-19,27; 3:19), scholars
generally place it in the post-exilic period after the rebuilding of the temple
in 516 B.C.
In many ways the style of this book is very
similar to a modern penitential liturgy for the sacrament of penance. The
penitents lament their evil state and all their sins; the priests call for
repentance and fasting; both together beg God to show mercy and forgiveness to
them; finally, the penitents receive reassurance of God’s forgiving love
through the blessing of the priests. But the book is also much more than this
alone. The theme of the day of the Lord weaves throughout, giving it a strong
prophetic note of warning. Perhaps like Nahum and Habakkuk, Joel is a temple
prophet who proclaims his message from God in the liturgical worship services.
If people will only change their hearts and return to the Lord, the day of doom
will become a day of blessing for them. But it must be sincere: “Rend your
heart and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious
and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in abiding love” (Jl 2:13).
The quotation of the covenant formula from Exodus
34:6-7 in this last passage is just one of numerous quotations from earlier
books of the Bible. Joel describes the day of the Lord in the words of Amos
5:18-20 (Jl 2:2), and portrays the warriors who bring it about in the images of
Nahum 2:1-5 and 3:1-3 (Jl 2:4-11); he reverses the metaphor of Isaiah 2:4 and
Micah 4:3 in which swords shall be made into plowshares (“Beat your plowshares
into swords”—Jl 3:10); he quotes the opening words of Amos 1:2 that God roars
his judgment from Zion (Jl 3:16); he refers to the great vision of the river
flowing from the side of the temple in Ezekiel 47:1-12 (Jl 3:18). Almost every
verse has some reference to an earlier part of the Old Testament. It indicates
perhaps that Joel was one of the very last of the prophetic books to be
completed, and may suggest that he lived closer to the year 400 than 500 B.C.
The oracles of Joel open with a vision depicting
a locust plague that has come over the land. It was a common horror in the
Ancient Near East. Palestine is struck once in a while even today, and it seems
that the African states below the Sahara are regularly devastated by locust
hordes. These insects can move across a thousand miles of the Sudan and
Ethiopia denuding all vegetation of its leaves. There still is no effective
means of preventing the locusts from swarming when their numbers increase
suddenly, and so it is not surprising that Joel would view this plague as a
severe punishment from God that is beyond human control. But in true prophetic
spirit, Joel saw far beyond the immediate evil of a locust attack. He saw it as
nothing less than a precursor, a forewarning, of the coming of the Lord himself.
He miexes two other powerful ideas along with
that of the grasshoppoer invasion. He describes an enemy army, the foe from the
north sweeping down across the land, with the same clear eye as Jeremiah who
had predicted the Babylonian invasion earlier. And he uses the imagery of the
desert windstorm, the sirocco, that withers up all the plant life with its hot
breath, as the symbol of God’s anger against the land.
Locusts had come before and would come again, but
there was to be a much greater moment when Yahweh made a definitive judgment
between good and evil. Chapter 3 goes much further than the promise of relief
from the plague and a restored harvest of plenty found in the end of chapter 2.
In the final great poem that runs from Joel 2:28 to the end of the book, Joel
pictures a new time in which the forces of nature itself will be changed into
allies of the divine warrior, a time when he will come to vindicate Jerusalem
and Mount Zion against all the pagan nations of the earth. This particular passage
in Joel moves far beyond the hopes of earlier prophets that God would once
again act in the days or years ahead to save his people. It uses images on a
cosmic scale, including a great battle between God and the pagan nations in the
Valley of Jehoshaphat somewhere near Jerusalem. This is the language of
apocalyptic, a whole new development out of and away from classical prophecy.
It no longer expects God to continue to act in ways that he has before, but
looks forward to a new and decisive beginning in which the present world will
be changed so much that one can honestly speak of an end of the present world
and the creation of a new world. The apocalyptic approach becomes very common
in the last centuries before Christ….
The strength of the Book of Joel lies in its
confident hope that God does not forget his people or refuse to hear their
prayers for help. It combines the traditions about Yahweh as divine warrior,
the day of the Lord, the fidelity and mercy of the covenant relationship, the
oracles against nations, the penitential psalms, and the promises of blessing
into a renewed message of hope to the people of fifth century Judah.
The verse from Joel that spoke most to me this
morning was Joel 2:13, “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and
merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…” The C. S. Lewis
Bible pairs this almost poignant, beautiful, and hopeful Lewis quote with this
passage….
A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one
that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man
who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up
and begin over again after each stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him,
repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of
voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out. (Mere Christianity)
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