Wake Up, and Mourn
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. 6 For a nation has come up on my land, strong, and without number. His teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he has the fangs of a lioness. 7 He has laid my vine waste, and stripped my fig tree. He has stripped its bark, and thrown it away. Its branches are made white. 8 Mourn like a virgin dressed in sackcloth for the husband of her youth! 9 The meal offering and the drink offering are cut off from Yahweh’s house. The priests, Yahweh’s ministers, mourn. 10 The field is laid waste. The land mourns, for the grain is destroyed, The new wine has dried up, and the oil languishes. 11 Be confounded, you farmers! Wail, you vineyard keepers, for the wheat and for the barley; for the harvest of the field has perished. 12 The vine has dried up, and the fig tree withered— the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all of the trees of the field are withered; for joy has withered away from the sons of men.
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.
settled What this mark means