The Plague and the Day of the Lord

The book of Joel opens on a real catastrophe, an invasion of locusts that ravages the whole land, and it makes of this the starting point of its entire message. The prophet looks at this present disaster and reads in it the sign of a still greater threat: the Day of the Lord, that moment when God comes in person to judge. The plague of insects thus becomes the foretaste of a more fearsome army, and the call to weep over the lost harvests prepares the call to tremble before the coming of God.

The prophet and his book

Of the prophet, the book says almost nothing: it opens on his name alone. “Word of the Lord that came to Joel, son of Pethuel.” Joel 1:1. The name Joel means “the Lord is God,” and that is his whole presentation: no date, no office, no account of a calling. The man effaces himself behind the word he transmits. From the outset, he calls the people to measure the scale of what is happening, and to keep it in memory: “Hear this, you elders; give ear, all you inhabitants of the land! Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers?” Joel 1:2. What strikes the land is without precedent, so much so that it must be told from generation to generation: “Tell it to your children, and your children to their children.” Joel 1:3. The disaster is so grave that it must become a transmitted memory, an event of which people will speak for a long time.

The invasion of locusts

The plague is an invasion of insects that devour everything in their path. The prophet describes it by four successive names, which tell of total devastation, wave after wave: “What the gazam left, the locust devoured; what the locust left, the yeleq devoured; what the yeleq left, the chasil devoured.” Joel 1:4. The gazam, the yeleq and the chasil are Hebrew names for kinds or stages of locusts; naming them one after another gives the image of a complete destruction, where each wave finishes what the previous one had left. Nothing remains. The prophet compares this swarm of insects to an invading army, powerful and numberless: “For a people has come up over my land, powerful and numberless; its teeth are the teeth of a lion.” Joel 1:6. And he describes the ruin of all that gave the land its life, the vine and the fig tree laid bare: “It has laid waste my vine, and broken my fig tree; it has stripped them bare and cast them down; the branches have turned all white.” Joel 1:7. The trees stripped of bark, whitened, are the image of a land laid bare to the bone.

The mourning of the whole earth

The disaster strikes everything, and everything enters into mourning. The offerings of the Temple themselves cease, for lack of grain and wine to present, and the priests are in affliction: “Offerings and libations have been cut off from the house of the Lord; they are in mourning, the priests, ministers of the Lord!” Joel 1:9. When the land yields no more, it is worship itself that stops, for there is nothing left to offer to God. The fields, the vinedressers, the ploughmen, all are confounded: “The fields are ravaged, the ground is in mourning; for the grain is destroyed, the new wine is in confusion, the oil languishes.” Joel 1:10. The grain, the wine and the oil, the three fundamental goods that nourished the land, are wiped out together. And the mourning reaches even the beasts, deprived of pasture and water, that cry out to God: “How the beasts groan! The herds of cattle are bewildered, because they have no pasture.” Joel 1:18. Even the wild animals turn toward God in their distress: “The wild beasts themselves cry out after you, because the streams of water are dry.” Joel 1:20. The whole creation, men, beasts and earth, is gathered in one same lament that rises toward God.

The Day of the Lord approaches

Here the prophet passes from the present plague to a greater threat. In the heart of the distress, he makes heard a cry that opens the whole horizon of the book: “Ah! what a day!... For the day of the Lord is near! It comes like a devastation, from the Almighty!” Joel 1:15. The “Day of the Lord” is a major expression of the prophets: it names the moment when God himself intervenes in history to judge, to bring down the proud and to establish his reign. The plague of locusts was only a sign; what comes is the coming of God in person. The prophet then sounds the alarm on the holy mountain: “Sound the horn in Zion, and sound the trumpet on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord comes, for it is near!” Joel 2:1. And he describes this Day as a day of darkness, before which an army without equal advances: “Day of darkness and gloom, day of clouds and thick darkness! Like the dawn that spreads over the mountains, a people comes, numerous and strong, such as there has never been.” Joel 2:2. This army prolongs the image of the locusts, but it surpasses it: before it, the land passes from garden to desert. “Before it the fire devours, and behind it the flame burns. The land is like a garden of Eden before it, and behind it, a desolate desert.” Joel 2:3.

The voice of God at the head of the army

The description of this army reaches its summit when God himself appears at its head. The whole creation is shaken by his coming: “Before him the earth trembles, the heavens shake, the sun and the moon grow dark, the stars lose their brightness.” Joel 2:10. The darkening of the stars is the constant sign of the Day of the Lord: the order of the world wavers when God comes to judge. And it is God who commands this army, whose voice resounds with a fearsome power: “The Lord makes his voice heard at the head of his army; for immense is his camp, for mighty is the one who carries out his word. For the day of the Lord is great and very terrible; and who could endure it?” Joel 2:11. The question remains suspended: who could stand before this Day? No one can endure the coming of God by his own strength. It is precisely this unanswered question that opens the rest of the book, for at the moment when no one can stand, God himself will show the way of salvation: to return to him.