A humongous disaster hit ancient Israel - an invasion of countless locusts. Scholars do not know the date. Yet Joel recorded it.
Farming is an essential pillar of human civilization. All people must eat.
Now ancient farmers, like modern farmers, were hardy men and women. They often dealt with adversity. And locusts were probably common in the ancient near east. Note that John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey when living out in a remote desert area of Judea.
I add that during the pandemic in 2020, I read a BBC article which told of a locust threat at that time in a region in Africa. Thus locusts are even an issue here about 2,700 years later.
Yet the magnitude of this locust invasion was unprecedented. Those locusts stripped crops which would have otherwise fed people and livestock. And it probably involved waves of locusts, considering Joel’s statement in verse 4. Whatever the details, the prophet Joel asks, “…Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your forefathers?” (Joel 1:2).
In ancient Israel, this swarm of locust ruined the crops.
Imagine if you went to your local grocery store, and there were only a few food items on the shelf, for months. That is a rough example for the way it was for the Hebrew people. Their food was eaten by countless gliding grasshoppers. It is most likely that plenty of people were hungry, and for a long time.
When I was a new Christian, I did not read much from the Scripture books of the prophets, because in giving them some brief looks, the writing seemed to primarily speak of gloom and doom. Yet in following years as I started carefully reading the prophets of God under the Mosaic covenant, I learned there are incredible messages of hope. We must keep reading Joel in order to get to such prophecy of hope, including the prophecy of the epic event which took place on Pentecost, around seven centuries after Joel wrote this Scripture. And Joel foretold of an event which would take place thousands of years after his time. How incredible and how important to know that prophecy remains a hope in our future.
Hunter Irvine
