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Joel 1: What the Passage Says

70 claims across 20 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Joel 1 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The word of the LORD comes to Joel about a locust invasion that has stripped the land bare. He calls on the elders, the wine drinkers, the farmers, and the priests to mourn, because the grain, new wine, and oil are gone, and the grain and drink offerings have stopped at the LORD's house. He orders a fast and a solemn assembly, and says the day of the LORD is near and will come as destruction from the Almighty. The chapter ends with the prophet crying out to the LORD over pastures and trees burned by fire and streams that have dried up.

Claim by Claim

  1. 1:1
    • The word of the LORD came to Joel.
    • Joel was the son of Pethuel.
  2. 1:2
    • The elders are commanded to hear this.
    • All the inhabitants of the land are commanded to give ear.
    • The hearers are asked whether anything like this has happened in their own days or in the days of their fathers.
  3. 1:3
    • The hearers are commanded to tell this to their children.
    • Their children are to tell it to their children.
    • Those children are to tell it to another generation.
  4. 1:4
    • What the first kind of locust left, the swarming locust ate.
    • What the swarming locust left, the young locust ate.
    • What the young locust left, the destroying locust ate.
  5. 1:5
    • Drunkards are commanded to wake up and weep.
    • All drinkers of wine are commanded to wail.
    • The wailing is because of the sweet new wine.
    • The sweet new wine has been cut off from their mouth.
  6. 1:6
    • A nation has come up against the LORD's land.
    • That nation is strong.
    • That nation is without number.
    • Its teeth are the teeth of a lion.
    • It has the fangs of a lioness.
  7. 1:7
    • It has laid the LORD's vine waste.
    • It has splintered the LORD's fig tree.
    • It has stripped the tree completely bare and thrown the bark away.
    • The branches of the tree have been made white.
  8. 1:8
    • The hearers are commanded to lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth.
    • That virgin laments for the husband of her youth.
  9. 1:9
    • The grain offering has been cut off from the house of the LORD.
    • The drink offering has been cut off from the house of the LORD.
    • The priests, who minister to the LORD, are mourning.
  10. 1:10
    • The field is ruined.
    • The ground mourns.
    • The grain is ruined.
    • The new wine has dried up.
    • The oil fails.
  11. 1:11
    • Farmers are commanded to be ashamed.
    • Vinedressers are commanded to wail.
    • The shame and wailing are over the wheat and the barley.
    • The harvest of the field has perished.
  12. 1:12
    • The vine is dried up.
    • The fig tree withers.
    • The pomegranate, the palm, and the apple tree are withered.
    • All the trees of the field are withered.
    • Joy has withered away from the sons of men.
  13. 1:13
    • The priests are commanded to gird themselves and lament.
    • The ministers of the altar are commanded to wail.
    • The ministers of Joel's God are commanded to come and spend the night in sackcloth.
    • The grain offering and the drink offering are withheld from the house of their God.
  14. 1:14
    • The hearers are commanded to consecrate a fast.
    • The hearers are commanded to call a solemn assembly.
    • The elders and all the inhabitants of the land are to be gathered into the house of the LORD their God.
    • They are commanded to cry out to the LORD.
  15. 1:15
    • An outcry is made over the day.
    • The day of the LORD is near.
    • The day of the LORD will come as destruction from the Almighty.
  16. 1:16
    • The question is asked whether food has not been cut off before their eyes.
    • The question is asked whether joy and gladness have not been cut off from the house of their God.
  17. 1:17
    • The seeds shrivel under their clods.
    • The storehouses are laid desolate.
    • The granaries are broken down.
    • The grain has withered.
  18. 1:18
    • An outcry is made over how the cattle groan.
    • The herds of cattle wander in confusion.
    • The herds have no pasture.
    • The flocks of sheep also suffer.
  19. 1:19
    • The speaker says he will cry to the LORD.
    • Fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.
    • Flame has burned all the trees of the field.
  20. 1:20
    • The beasts of the field also cry out to the LORD.
    • The channels of water have dried up.
    • Fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1
"The word of the LORD came to..." is the standard opening formula for a prophetic book, marking what follows as a message received rather than composed. Where LORD appears in capitals it stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew consonants usually written YHWH, which Jewish readers did not pronounce aloud. Nothing else is known about Joel or his father Pethuel, and the book gives no king or date, so when it was written is disputed.
1:2
The Hebrew word behind "old men" also means "elders" in the sense of community leaders. The question that follows is a standard test of scale: the old are asked because they hold the longest memory, and if they have never seen its like, the event is unprecedented.
1:4
The Hebrew uses four different words for locust here. Interpreters disagree whether they name four stages in a locust's growth, four separate species, or are simply four words piled up to say that nothing was left. KJV's "palmerworm," "cankerworm" and "caterpiller" are old English names for crop-destroying grubs, not translations of distinct insect species.
1:5
The "new wine" (Hebrew tirosh) is the fresh juice of the just-pressed grapes, drunk young. Drinkers are addressed first because they are the first to notice the loss: no grapes means no wine at all, not merely a poor vintage.
1:6
Calling the swarm a "nation" is deliberate: ancient writers routinely described locusts in military language, as an invading army with ranks and a front line. Whether Joel means an actual locust plague, a human army pictured as locusts, or intends both at once is disputed and the Hebrew does not settle it.
1:7
The vine and the fig tree were the standard image of settled, peaceful prosperity, since both take years to establish and a family that owned them was secure. Stripping the bark kills the tree outright rather than costing a single season's fruit.
1:8
A betrothal in ancient Israel was legally binding, so a woman still a virgin could already have a husband and could be widowed before the marriage was completed. That is the sharpest grief the prophet can name. Sackcloth was coarse dark cloth of goat hair, worn next to the skin as a public sign of mourning.
1:9
KJV's "meat offering" does not involve meat; in 1611 "meat" meant food of any kind. The offering was of grain, flour mixed with oil, and the drink offering was wine poured out beside it. Both were presented every morning and evening, so when the harvest fails the daily routine of the temple simply stops for lack of materials.
1:10
"Corn" in the KJV means grain in general, wheat and barley; maize was unknown in the ancient Near East and in England in 1611. Grain, new wine and oil are the three staple crops of the region, named together as a shorthand for everything the land produces.
1:11
"Husbandmen" is an older English word for farmers who work the soil; vinedressers are the specialists who prune and tend grapevines. The Hebrew verb rendered "be ye ashamed" means to be let down or dismayed by something that failed you, and it sounds nearly identical to the word for "dried up" that runs through the next verse.
1:12
The tree called "apple" in the KJV is a Hebrew word whose identification is uncertain; apricot and quince are also proposed, since apples grow poorly in that climate. Pomegranate, palm and this tree are named as the orchard crops that survive an ordinary bad year, so their withering shows the scale of the disaster.
1:13
"Gird yourselves" means to tie the sackcloth around the waist, the way a garment was fastened for work or mourning. Spending the night in it means the priests stay at the sanctuary in mourning dress instead of going home, turning private grief into an official, continuous act.
1:14
To "sanctify" a fast means to proclaim it formally and set the day apart, not to make it holy in feeling. Going without food was an emergency measure in a public crisis, a way of declaring distress rather than a private discipline. The "solemn assembly" is a called halt to ordinary work so the whole population can gather.
1:15
"The day of the LORD" was already a fixed expression before Joel used it: a day when God acts decisively and in the open, which popular expectation took to mean victory over enemies and which the prophets repeatedly turn back against Israel itself. The Hebrew here is also a pun that translation loses, the word for "destruction" (shod) echoing the divine title "the Almighty" (Shaddai).
1:16
Again "meat" in the KJV means food of any kind, not flesh.
1:17
The Hebrew of the first clause is obscure; two of its words appear nowhere else in the Bible, so "the seed is rotten under their clods" is an educated guess and other versions render it differently. "Garners" is an old English word for granaries, the storehouses where threshed grain was kept.
1:18
"Perplexed" here has its older sense of milling about in confusion. The picture is of penned or herded animals with nowhere to be driven, since every pasture has been eaten bare.
1:19
Whether the fire is literal, a wildfire running through parched scrubland at the end of a dry season, or a figure for scorching drought and heat, is left open by the Hebrew and read both ways.
1:20
"The rivers of waters" are wadis, seasonal watercourses that run in the rainy months and hold nothing in a drought; there are almost no year-round rivers in the region. The verb translated "cry" actually means to pant or long for, the sound of an animal gasping toward water it cannot find.

Read Joel 1