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Joel
📖 Joel
יוֹאֵל Yo'el — 'Jehovah is God' — the divine name joined to El, and a name shared by more than a dozen other people in the Hebrew Bible, including Samuel's eldest son. His father Pethuel is otherwise unknown. ⚠ The name is a creed in two syllables, and it is the only thing the book tells us about him.
Ἰωήλ (Iōēl) — The Septuagint places Joel fourth among the Twelve rather than second, and — importantly for readers of the New Testament — it does NOT have the Hebrew's four-chapter division. Peter's Pentecost sermon quotes the Greek of what the Hebrew numbers 3:1-5, which English Bibles print as 2:28-32.
A locust plague so total that the daily offering at the temple stopped for want of flour and wine — and a prophet who reads it as the near edge of the day of Jehovah, calls the whole country to a fast, and is answered with a promise of the spirit poured out on all flesh.
Chapters
1 of 3 chapters translated · 33.3%
Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.
Chapter by chapter
Joel 1Four waves of locusts strip Judah down to the wood — and Joel uses FOUR different Hebrew words for them, whose distinctions nobody has ever established: four species, four growth stages, or four names piled up for weight. But the loss is not measured in bushels. It is measured by what has stopped at the temple: with no flour and no wine, the daily grain and drink offering cannot be made, so the country’s standing conversation with God has gone silent — which is why the PRIESTS, not the farmers, are told to sleep in sackcloth. Then the day of Jehovah arrives in a pun no translation can carry (shod from SHADDAI), and a verse with three words that occur nowhere else in the Bible. It ends with the cattle, and with a verb borrowed from Psalm 42: even the beasts of the field PANT for you, because the streams have dried up.
About the book
Where it sits
Second of THE TWELVE in the Hebrew order (after Hosea, before Amos), which the Hebrew canon counts as a single book. ⚠ It has FOUR chapters in Hebrew: 1:1-20, 2:1-27, 3:1-5, 4:1-21. English Bibles fold Hebrew 3 into 2 (Hebrew 3:1-5 = English 2:28-32) and renumber Hebrew 4 as English 3. This site follows the Masoretic numbering throughout, so the Pentecost passage is at 3:1 here.
Genre
PROPHETIC ORACLE in poetry, unusually shapely: a lament and summons (ch 1), an alarm and a call to return with the divine answer (ch 2), and two chapters of aftermath — the spirit poured out, and judgment on the nations in the Valley of Decision. ⚠ Joel is the most CITATIONAL of the prophets: he quotes or reworks Amos, Obadiah, Isaiah, Zephaniah, Nahum, Ezekiel and Malachi, sometimes several in a verse. That is either evidence he came late enough to have read them, or evidence of a shared prophetic stock — and it is one of the main battlegrounds of his dating.
Author
JOEL SON OF PETHUEL, about whom nothing else is known — not his town, not his trade, not his king. His concerns are Judah, Jerusalem, Zion and above all the TEMPLE and its daily offering, and he addresses priests and 'all the inhabitants of the land' rather than a monarch or a court. Whether that means he was himself a temple prophet is a reasonable guess and no more.
Date written
⚠ THE MOST DISPUTED DATE IN THE BIBLE, with serious proposals spanning five hundred years. For an EARLY date (9th century, in the minority of King Joash): the book sits between Hosea and Amos in the Hebrew order; it names Judah's old enemies (Philistia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Edom) rather than Assyria or Babylon; and a boy-king would explain the silence about a monarch, with the priest Jehoiada governing. For a LATE date (post-exilic, 5th-4th century, now the majority): there is no king, no northern kingdom and no idolatry mentioned at all; the temple is standing and its daily service is the centre of national life; Judah's exile and scattering are spoken of as past (4:2-3); Greeks appear as slave-traders (4:6); and Joel's heavy quotation of other prophets suggests he had them to quote. Both cases are made from the same silences, which is why neither wins.
Place
JUDAH and JERUSALEM, with the temple at the centre. Zion is named seven times. The horizon widens only at the end, to the surrounding nations and the Valley of Jehoshaphat.
Audience
A farming population and the priesthood that served it — people for whom a failed harvest was simultaneously an economic catastrophe, a food emergency and a liturgical crisis, because the grain and the wine that fed them were also the grain and the wine offered every morning and evening.
How it's laid out
1THE PLAGUE — four waves of locusts, the land stripped, the daily offering stopped, and a summons to the elders, the drunkards, the farmers, the priests and finally the animals. 'Sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly.'
2:1-17THE ALARM — a trumpet on Zion, and the locusts described as an army scaling walls and running on rooftops, with the day of Jehovah 'great and very terrible.' Then the call: 'return to me with all your heart… and tear your hearts and not your garments.'
2:18-27THE ANSWER — God is jealous for his land and pities his people. Grain, wine and oil restored; the northern army driven off; and the promise readers remember best: 'I will restore to you the years the locust has eaten.'
3 (English 2:28-32)THE SPIRIT POURED OUT — 'on all flesh; your sons and your daughters will prophesy… and also on the male and female slaves.' Signs in heaven, and 'everyone who calls on the name of Jehovah will be saved.' This is the passage Peter quotes at Pentecost.
4 (English 3)THE NATIONS JUDGED — in the Valley of Jehoshaphat ('Jehovah judges'), with plowshares beaten into swords, the reverse of Isaiah 2 and Micah 4; and the book ends with Jehovah dwelling in Zion.
What it's about
- THE DAY OF JEHOVAH — five times in four chapters, the densest concentration in the Bible, and Joel is where it hardens into a doctrine. ⚠ It is aimed at JUDAH first: the locusts on their own fields are its near edge, and only later does it turn outward to the nations.
- A DISASTER MEASURED LITURGICALLY — the loss is counted not in tonnage but in what has stopped at the temple. When flour and wine fail, the daily offering fails, and the country's standing conversation with God goes silent. That is why the priests, not the farmers, are the ones told to lie down in sackcloth.
- RETURN, AND WHAT IT COSTS — 'tear your hearts and not your garments' (2:13) is the book's most quoted line, and it is followed immediately by a sentence with a startling hesitation in it: 'who knows? He may turn and relent.' Joel does not promise the outcome he is urging.
- THE SPIRIT ON ALL FLESH — sons and daughters, old and young, and slaves of both sexes. In a world where prophecy belonged to a few, this is the most socially radical sentence in the Twelve, and the New Testament church took it as its founding text.
- REVERSAL — the locusts' years repaid, the mourning turned to feasting, and, at the end, the great swords-to-plowshares image run BACKWARD (4:10): 'beat your plowshares into swords.' Joel knows the other prophets' line and inverts it for the nations.
Key words & people
Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:
People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:
The source text
Translated from the pointed Hebrew Masoretic Text (as printed by Mechon-Mamre), following the Hebrew FOUR-chapter division. ⚠ Joel's Hebrew is mostly clear but locally very hard: chapter 1 alone contains four words for locust whose distinctions are unknown, and verse 17 packs THREE words that occur nowhere else in the Bible (avshu, perudot, megrefoteihem) into one clause, so that every English rendering of it is a reasoned guess. Where the text is uncertain this translation says so rather than choosing silently, and where a pun cannot be carried (shod/Shaddai at 1:15) it flags the loss.
Looking forward
Joel reaches the New Testament chiefly through one passage and one line. ⚠ At PENTECOST, Peter stands up and says 'this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel,' and quotes Hebrew 3:1-5 entire (Acts 2:17-21) — the spirit poured out on all flesh, sons and daughters prophesying, slaves included, and 'everyone who calls on the name of Jehovah will be saved.' Paul quotes that last line again at Romans 10:13, and the book's phrase 'the day of Jehovah' becomes, in Greek, 'the day of the Lord' throughout the epistles. What the library will not do is flatten the original: in Joel the promise is made to a farming community in Judah after a locust plague, and Acts reads it as opened outward rather than as having meant that all along.
Where the debates are
THE DATE, which is the largest open question in the Twelve and is argued entirely from silences. WHETHER THE LOCUSTS ARE LITERAL — an actual plague, a metaphor for an invading army, or a real plague read as the advance sign of the day of Jehovah (the majority view). THE FOUR LOCUST WORDS — species, stages or synonyms. WHETHER JOEL IS QUOTING the other prophets or drawing with them on a common stock. And how to read the Pentecost citation: fulfilment, inauguration, or pattern — a question Acts raises and does not settle, since the signs in the heavens Joel describes did not accompany it.