Introduction to Joel

Title and authorship

Joel son of Pethuel is named once and never appears again in Scripture. His name means Yahweh is God, and his father's name is otherwise unknown, so the heading supplies an identification and nothing more — no town, no office, no king to date him by.

What the book does supply is an audience. He addresses elders, priests, farmers, vinedressers, drunkards, and the whole population of the land Joel 1:2 Joel 1:5 Joel 1:11 Joel 1:13, and he speaks of Yahweh's house as standing and its offerings as interrupted Joel 1:9. He is a prophet with access to the temple courts and the authority to call a national fast, and the book tells us that much about him by what he does rather than by describing him.

Date

Joel cannot be dated, and it is more honest to say so than to choose. The book names no king, no invasion, and no event fixed elsewhere in Scripture — the omission that every other minor prophet's heading supplies.

The internal markers point in different directions. The temple is functioning and priests are ministering Joel 1:13; elders rather than a monarch are the civil leadership; and the hostile nations are Tyre, Sidon, Philistia, Egypt and Edom Joel 3:4 Joel 3:19 rather than Assyria or Babylon, which dominate the prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries. Against that, Greeks appear as distant slave-buyers Joel 3:6, and Judah is spoken of as having been scattered and its land divided Joel 3:2.

Proposals accordingly range across several centuries, and Scripture settles none of them. Nothing in the book's argument depends on the answer, which is likely why the heading omits it.

Backgrounds

A locust plague had stripped the country. The book opens by asking the elders whether anything like it had happened in their lifetime or their fathers' Joel 1:2, and instructs that the story be told to the third and fourth generation — a disaster meant to be remembered as a landmark.

The damage described is total and specific: grain, wine, and oil gone; vines and fig trees stripped white; seed rotting under the clods; granaries broken down; cattle bewildered for want of pasture, and the wild animals panting toward God Joel 1:17–20. Four different words for the insect are used in a single verse Joel 1:4, each stage taking what the one before it left.

What makes it a prophetic book rather than a lament is what Joel does with the plague. He treats it as a small-scale showing of something larger — the day of Yahweh, a phrase the book uses five times Joel 1:15 Joel 2:1 Joel 2:11 Joel 2:31 Joel 3:14, more concentrated than anywhere else in Scripture. The locusts are real, and they are also a rehearsal.

Theology and purpose

The book turns on a single word in Joel 2:12: yet even now. Two chapters of devastation are interrupted by an offer that has not expired, and the summons is not to ceremony but to the person underneath it — tear your heart and not your garments Joel 2:13.

The ground given for that summons is God's own self-description, quoted from the name proclaimed to Moses Exodus 34:6. Joel adds a clause Exodus does not have, that God relents from sending calamity — and the identical expanded form appears on Jonah's lips Jonah 4:2. What Jonah quoted in anger, because it meant a hated city might be spared, Joel quotes as an invitation to his own.

The promise runs past restored harvests. God will repay the years the locusts ate Joel 2:25 — a striking thing to promise, since lost years are the one loss that cannot be undone in the ordinary way. Then the horizon opens further: the Spirit poured out on all flesh, on sons and daughters, old and young, male and female servants alike Joel 2:28–29, with the barriers of age, sex and status named in order to be dismissed. Peter stood up at Pentecost and said this was that Acts 2:16–17.

And it closes in a valley where the nations are gathered and a decision is made Joel 3:14 — the sun and moon darkened again, Yahweh roaring from Zion, and a fountain running out of his house.

Additional notes

Note — one creed, three prophets, three uses. When God proclaimed his name to Moses he said he was gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abundant in lovingkindness, and would by no means clear the guilty Exodus 34:6–7. Three of the books in this section quote it, and the differences are measurable in the Hebrew.

Joel 2:13 and Jonah 4:2 carry the same expanded form: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abundant in lovingkindness — and relenting from calamity, a clause Exodus does not contain. Joel quotes it to persuade his people to return; Jonah quotes it as a complaint, because it meant Nineveh might be spared.

Nahum 1:3 takes the other half about that same city: slow to anger, and by no means leaving the guilty unpunished.

So the creed is not a slogan any of them repeats. It is a text three prophets argue from, in three directions — invitation, protest, and sentence — and the halves are not in tension. Slowness to anger is the interval in which repentance is possible; Nineveh used it once under Jonah and did not use it again.

Outline

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