Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Joel · About this commentary
Wake Up, and Mourn
Joel 1:5-12
5 Wake up, you drunkards, and weep! Wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth. · WEB
The prophet wakes each group with the loss it will feel first, and the list ends with joy itself withering.
Wake up, you drunkards, and weep. The first summons is deliberately unflattering, and it is aimed with precision: the sweet wine is cut off from your mouth. Joel begins with the people whose loss is least dignified because theirs is the loss that will register soonest.
Verse 6 renames the swarm as a nation — strong, without number, with a lion's teeth — and verse 7 shows what it did to the vine and the fig tree, stripped and thrown down with the branches left white. Bark peeled to bare wood is the detail of an eyewitness.
Then the summons widens. A young widow in sackcloth, the priests mourning because grain and drink offerings have stopped, farmers and vinedressers told to be ashamed. Worship halts for the same reason dinner does — the offerings came off the same fields.
Verse 12 lists seven trees down to the pomegranate, palm and apple, and closes with a clause that is not agricultural at all: joy has withered away from the sons of men. The inventory of losses ends with the one that cannot be replanted.
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