_THE LOCUSTS AND THE DAY OF THE LORD_
JOEL i.—ii. 17
Joel, as we have seen, found the motive of his prophecy in a recent
plague of locusts, the appearance of which and the havoc they worked
are described by him in full detail. Writing not only as a poet but
as a seer, who reads in the locusts signs of the great Day of the
Lord, Joel has necessarily put into his picture several features which
carry the imagination beyond the limits of experience. And yet, if
we ourselves had lived through such a plague, we should be able to
recognise how little license the poet has taken, and that the seer, so
far from unduly mixing with his facts the colours of Apocalypse, must
have experienced in the terrible plague itself enough to provoke all
the religious and monitory use which he makes of it.
The present writer has seen but one swarm of locusts, in which, though
it was small and soon swept away by the wind, he felt not only many of
the features that Joel describes, but even some degree of that singular
helplessness before a calamity of portent far beyond itself, something
of that supernatural edge and accent, which, by the confession of so
many observers, characterise the locust-plague and the earthquake above
all other physical disasters. One summer afternoon, upon the plain of
Hauran, a long bank of mist grew rapidly from the western horizon. The
day was dull, and as the mist rose athwart the sunbeams, struggling
through clouds, it gleamed cold and white, like the front of a distant
snow-storm. When it came near, it seemed to be more than a mile broad,
and was dense enough to turn the atmosphere raw and dirty, with a chill
as of a summer sea-fog, only that this was not due to any fall in the
temperature. Nor was there the silence of a mist. We were enveloped
by a noise, less like the whirring of wings than the rattle of hail
or the crackling of bush on fire. Myriads upon myriads of locusts
were about us, covering the ground, and shutting out the view in all
directions. Though they drifted before the wind, there was no confusion
in their ranks. They sailed in unbroken lines, sometimes straight,
sometimes wavy; and when they passed pushing through our caravan, they
left almost no stragglers, except from the last battalion, and only the
few dead which we had caught in our hands. After several minutes they
were again but a lustre on the air, and so melted away into some heavy
clouds in the east.
Modern travellers furnish us with terrible impressions of the
innumerable multitudes of a locust-plague, the succession of their
swarms through days and weeks, and the utter desolation they leave
behind them. Mr. Doughty writes:[1160] “There hopped before our feet a
minute brood of second locusts, of a leaden colour, with budding wings
like the spring leaves, and born of those gay swarms which a few weeks
before had passed over and despoiled the desert. After forty days these
also would fly as a pestilence, yet more hungry than the former, and
fill the atmosphere.” And later: “The clouds of the second locust brood
which the Arabs call ‘Am’dan, _pillars_, flew over us for some days,
invaded the booths and for blind hunger even bit our shins.”[1161] It
was “a storm of rustling wings.”[1162] “This year was remembered for
the locust swarms and great summer heat.”[1163] A traveller in South
Africa[1164] says: “For the space of ten miles on each side of the
Sea-Cow river and eighty or ninety miles in length, an area of sixteen
or eighteen hundred square miles, the whole surface might literally be
said to be covered with them.” In his recently published book on South
Africa, Mr. Bryce writes:—[1165]
“It is a strange sight, beautiful if you can forget the destruction it
brings with it. The whole air, to twelve or even eighteen feet above
the ground, is filled with the insects, reddish brown in body, with
bright, gauzy wings. When the sun’s rays catch them it is like the sea
sparkling with light. When you see them against a cloud they are like
the dense flakes of a driving snow-storm. You feel as if you had never
before realised immensity in number. Vast crowds of men gathered at a
festival, countless tree-tops rising along the slope of a forest ridge,
the chimneys of London houses from the top of St. Paul’s—all are as
nothing to the myriads of insects that blot out the sun above and cover
the ground beneath and fill the air whichever way one looks. The breeze
carries them swiftly past, but they come on in fresh clouds, a host of
which there is no end, each of them a harmless creature which you can
catch and crush in your hand, but appalling in their power of
collective devastation.”
And take three testimonies from Syria: “The quantity of these insects
is a thing incredible to any one who has not seen it himself; the
ground is covered by them for several leagues.”[1166] “The whole face
of the mountain[1167] was black with them. On they came like a living
deluge. We dug trenches and kindled fires, and beat and burnt to death
heaps upon heaps, but the effort was utterly useless. They rolled up
the mountain-side, and poured over rocks, walls, ditches and hedges,
those behind covering up and passing over the masses already killed.
For some days they continued to pass. The noise made by them in
marching and foraging was like that of a heavy shower falling upon a
distant forest.”[1168] “The roads were covered with them, all marching
and in regular lines, like armies of soldiers, with their leaders in
front; and all the opposition of man to resist their progress was in
vain.” Having consumed the plantations in the country, they entered the
towns and villages. “When they approached our garden all the farm
servants were employed to keep them off, but to no avail; though our
men broke their ranks for a moment, no sooner had they passed the men,
than they closed again, and marched forward through hedges and ditches
as before. Our garden finished, they continued their march toward the
town, devastating one garden after another. They have also penetrated
into most of our rooms: whatever one is doing one hears their noise
from without, like the noise of armed hosts, or the running of many
waters. When in an erect position their appearance at a little distance
is like that of a well-armed horseman.”[1169]
Locusts are notoriously adapted for a plague, “since to strength
incredible for so small a creature, they add saw-like teeth, admirably
calculated to eat up all the herbs in the land.”[1170] They are the
incarnation of hunger. No voracity is like theirs, the voracity of
little creatures, whose million separate appetites nothing is too
minute to escape. They devour first grass and leaves, fruit and
foliage, everything that is green and juicy. Then they attack the young
branches of trees, and then the hard bark of the trunks.[1171] “After
eating up the corn, they fell upon the vines, the pulse, the willows,
and even the hemp, notwithstanding its great bitterness.”[1172] “The
bark of figs, pomegranates and oranges, bitter, hard and corrosive,
escaped not their voracity.”[1173] “They are particularly injurious to
the palm-trees; these they strip of every leaf and green particle, the
trees remaining like skeletons with bare branches.”[1174] “For eighty
or ninety miles they devoured every green herb and every blade of
grass.”[1175] “The gardens outside Jaffa are now completely stripped,
even the bark of the young trees having been devoured, and look like a
birch-tree forest in winter.”[1176] “The bushes were eaten quite bare,
though the animals could not have been long on the spot. They sat by
hundreds on a bush gnawing the rind and the woody fibres.”[1177]
“Bamboo groves have been stripped of their leaves and left standing
like saplings after a rapid bush fire, and grass has been devoured so
that the bare ground appeared as if burned.”[1178] “The country did not
seem to be burnt, but to be much covered with snow through the
whiteness of the trees and the dryness of the herbs.”[1179] The fields
finished, they invade towns and houses, in search of stores. Victual of
all kinds, hay, straw, and even linen and woollen clothes and leather
bottles, they consume or tear in pieces.[1180] They flood through the
open, unglazed windows and lattices: nothing can keep them out.
These extracts prove to us what little need Joel had of hyperbole in
order to read his locusts as signs of the Day of Jehovah; especially if
we keep in mind that locusts are worst in very hot summers, and often
accompany an absolute drought along with its consequence of prairie and
forest fires. Some have thought that, in introducing the effects of
fire, Joel only means to paint the burnt look of a land after locusts
have ravaged it. But locusts do not drink up the streams, nor cause the
seed to shrivel in the earth.[1181] By these the prophet must mean
drought, and by _the flame that has burned all the trees of the
field_,[1182] the forest fire, finding an easy prey in the trees which
have been reduced to firewood by the locusts’ teeth.
Even in the great passage in which he passes from history to
Apocalypse, from the gloom and terror of the locusts to the lurid dawn
of Jehovah’s Day, Joel keeps within the actual facts of experience:—
_Day of darkness and murk,
Day of cloud and heavy mist,
Like dawn scattered on the mountains,
A people many and powerful._
No one who has seen a cloud of locusts can question the realism even
of this picture: the heavy gloom of the immeasurable mass of them,
shot by gleams of light where a few of the sun’s imprisoned beams have
broken through or across the storm of lustrous wings. This is like
dawn beaten down upon the hilltops, and crushed by rolling masses of
cloud, in conspiracy to prolong the night. No: the only point at which
Joel leaves absolute fact for the wilder combinations of Apocalypse is
at the very close of his description, chap. ii. 10 and 11, and just
before his call to repentance. Here we find, mixed with the locusts,
earthquake and thunderstorm; and Joel has borrowed these from the
classic pictures of the Day of the Lord, using some of the very phrases
of the latter:—
_Earth trembles before them,
Heaven quakes,
Sun and moon become black,
The stars withdraw their shining,
And Jehovah utters His voice before His army._
Joel, then, describes, and does not unduly enhance, the terrors of
an actual plague. At first his whole strength is so bent to make his
people feel these, that, though about to call to repentance, he does
not detail the national sins which require it. In his opening verses he
summons the drunkards,[1183] but that is merely to lend vividness to
his picture of facts, because men of such habits will be the first to
feel a plague of this kind. Nor does Joel yet ask his hearers what the
calamity portends. At first he only demands that they shall feel it, in
its uniqueness and its own sheer force.
Hence the peculiar style of the passage. Letter for letter, this is
one of the heaviest passages in prophecy. The proportion in Hebrew of
liquids to the other letters is not large; but here it is smaller than
ever. The explosives and dentals are very numerous. There are several
keywords, with hard consonants and long vowels, used again and again:
Shuddadh, ‘ābhlah, ‘umlal, hôbhîsh. The longer lines into which Hebrew
parallelism tends to run are replaced by a rapid series of short, heavy
phrases, falling like blows. Critics have called it rhetoric. But it
is rhetoric of a very high order and perfectly suited to the prophet’s
purpose. Look at chap. i. 10: Shuddadh sadheh, ‘ābhlah ‘adhamah,
shuddadh daghan, hôbhîsh tîrôsh, ‘umlal yiṣḥar.[1184] Joel loads his
clauses with the most leaden letters he can find, and drops them in
quick succession, repeating the same heavy word again and again, as if
he would stun the careless people into some sense of the bare, brutal
weight of the calamity which has befallen them.
Now Joel does this because he believes that, if his people feel the
plague in its proper violence, they must be convinced that it comes
from Jehovah. The keynote of this part of the prophecy is found in
chap. i. 15: “Keshôdh mishshaddhai,” _like violence from the
All-violent doth it come_. “If you feel this as it is, you will feel
Jehovah Himself in it. By these very blows, He and His Day are near. We
had been forgetting how near.” Joel mentions no crime, nor enforces any
virtue: how could he have done so in so strong a sense that “the Judge
was at the door”? To make men feel that they had forgotten they were in
reach of that Almighty Hand, which could strike so suddenly and so
hard—Joel had time only to make men feel that, and to call them to
repentance. In this we probably see some reflection of the age: an age
when men’s thoughts were thrusting the Deity further and further from
their life; when they put His Law and Temple between Him and
themselves; and when their religion, devoid of the sense of His
Presence, had become a set of formal observances, the rending of
garments and not of hearts. But He, whom His own ordinances had hidden
from His people, has burst forth through nature and in sheer force of
calamity. He has revealed Himself, El-Shaddhai, _God All-violent_, as
He was known to their fathers, who had no elaborate law or ritual to
put between their fearful hearts and His terrible strength, but cowered
before Him, helpless on the stripped soil, and naked beneath His
thunder. By just these means did Elijah and Amos bring God home to the
hearts of ancient Israel. In Joel we see the revival of the old
nature-religion, and the revenge that it was bound to take upon the
elaborate systems which had displaced it, but which by their formalism
and their artificial completeness had made men forget that near
presence and direct action of the Almighty which it is nature’s own
office to enforce upon the heart.
The thing is true, and permanently valid. Only the great natural
processes can break up the systems of dogma and ritual in which we make
ourselves comfortable and formal, and drive us out into God’s open air
of reality. In the crash of nature’s forces even our particular sins
are forgotten, and we feel, as in the immediate presence of God, our
whole, deep need of repentance. So far from blaming the absence of
special ethics in Joel’s sermon, we accept it as natural and proper to
the occasion.
Such, then, appears to be the explanation of the first part of the
prophecy, and its development towards the call to repentance, which
follows it. If we are correct, the assertion[1185] is false that
no plan was meant by the prophet. For not only is there a plan,
but the plan is most suitable to the requirements of Israel, after
their adoption of the whole Law in 445, and forms one of the most
necessary and interesting developments of all religion: the revival,
in an artificial period, of those primitive forces of religion which
nature alone supplies, and which are needed to correct formalism and
the forgetfulness of the near presence of the Almighty. We see in
this, too, the reason of Joel’s archaic style, both of conception and
expression: that likeness of his to early prophets which has led so
many to place him between Elijah and Amos.[1186] They are wrong. Joel’s
simplicity is that not of early prophecy, but of the austere forces of
this revived and applied to the artificiality of a later age.
One other proof of Joel’s conviction of the religious meaning of the
plague might also have been pled by the earlier prophets, but certainly
not in the terms in which Joel expresses it. Amos and Hosea had both
described the destruction of the country’s fertility in their day as
God’s displeasure on His people and (as Hosea puts it) His divorce of
His Bride from Himself.[1187] But by them the physical calamities were
not threatened alone: banishment from the land and from enjoyment of
its fruits was to follow upon drought, locusts and famine. In
threatening no captivity Joel differs entirely from the early prophets.
It is a mark of his late date. And he also describes the divorce
between Jehovah and Israel, through the interruption of the ritual by
the plague, in terms and with an accent which could hardly have been
employed in Israel before the Exile. After the rebuilding of the Temple
and restoration of the daily sacrifices morning and evening, the
regular performance of the latter was regarded by the Jews with a most
superstitious sense of its indispensableness to the national life.
Before the Exile, Jeremiah, for instance, attaches no importance to it,
in circumstances in which it would have been not unnatural for him,
priest as he was, to do so.[1188] But after the Exile, the greater
scrupulousness of the religious life, and its absorption in ritual,
laid extraordinary emphasis upon the daily offering, which increased to
a most painful degree of anxiety as the centuries went on.[1189] The
New Testament speaks of _the Twelve Tribes constantly serving God day
and night_;[1190] and Josephus, while declaring that in no siege of
Jerusalem before the last did the interruption ever take place in spite
of the stress of famine and war combined, records the awful impression
made alike on Jew and heathen by the giving up of the daily sacrifice
on the 17th of July, A.D. 70, during the investment of the city by
Titus.[1191] This disaster, which Judaism so painfully feared at every
crisis in its history, actually happened, Joel tells us, during the
famine caused by the locusts. _Cut off are the meal and the drink
offerings from the house of Jehovah.[1192] Is not food cut off from our
eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God?[1193] Perhaps He will
turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind Him, meal and drink
offering for Jehovah our God._[1194] The break “of the continual symbol
of gracious intercourse between Jehovah and His people, and the main
office of religion,” means divorce between Jehovah and Israel. _Wail
like a bride girt in sackcloth for the husband of her youth! Wail, O
ministers of the altar, O ministers of God!_[1195] This then was
another reason for reading in the plague of locusts more than a
physical meaning. This was another proof, only too intelligible to
scrupulous Jews, that the great and terrible Day of the Lord was at
hand.
Thus Joel reaches the climax of his argument. Jehovah is near, His Day
is about to break. From this it is impossible to escape on the narrow
path of disaster by which the prophet has led up to it. But beneath
that path the prophet passes the ground of a broad truth, and on that
truth, while judgment remains still as real, there is room for the
people to turn from it. If experience has shown that God is in the
present, near and inevitable, faith remembers that He is there not
willingly for judgment, but with all His ancient feeling for Israel and
His zeal to save her. If the people choose to turn, Jehovah, as their
God and as one who works for their sake, will save them. Of this God
assures them by His own word. For the first time in the prophecy He
speaks for Himself. Hitherto the prophet has been describing the plague
and summoning to penitence. _But now oracle of Jehovah of Hosts._[1196]
The great covenant name, _Jehovah your God_, is solemnly repeated as if
symbolic of the historic origin and age-long endurance of Jehovah’s
relation to Israel; and the very words of blessing are repeated which
were given when Israel was called at Sinai and the covenant ratified:—
_For He is gracious and merciful,
Long-suffering and plenteous in leal love,
And relents Him of the evil_
He has threatened upon you. Once more the nation is summoned to try Him
by prayer: the solemn prayer of all Israel, pleading that He should not
give His people to reproach.
_The Word of Jehovah
which came to Jo’el the son of Pethû’el._[1197]
_Hear this, ye old men,
And give ear, all inhabitants of the land!
Has the like been in your days,
Or in the days of your fathers?
Tell it to your children,
And your children to their children,
And their children to the generation that follows.
That which the Shearer left the Swarmer hath eaten,
And that which the Swarmer left the Lapper hath eaten.
And that which the Lapper left the Devourer hath eaten._
These are four different names for locusts, which it is best to
translate by their literal meaning. Some think that they represent
one swarm of locusts in four stages of development, but this cannot
be, because the same swarm never returns upon its path, to complete
the work of destruction which it had begun in an earlier stage of its
growth. Nor can the first-named be the adult brood from whose eggs the
others spring, as Doughty has described,[1198] for that would account
only for two of the four names. Joel rather describes successive swarms
of the insect, without reference to the stages of its growth, and he
does so as a poet, using, in order to bring out the full force of its
devastation, several of the Hebrew names, that were given to the locust
as epithets of various aspects of its destructive power. The names,
it is true, cannot be said to rise in climax, but at least the most
sinister is reserved to the last.[1199]
_Rouse ye, drunkards, and weep,
And wail, all ye bibbers of wine!
The new wine is cut off from your mouth!
For a nation is come up on My land,
Powerful and numberless;
His teeth are the teeth of the lion,
And the fangs[1200] of the lioness his.
My vine he has turned to waste,
And My fig-tree to splinters;
He hath peeled it and strawed it,
Bleached are its branches!_
_Wail as a bride girt in sackcloth for the spouse of her youth.
Cut off are the meal and drink offerings from the house of Jehovah!
In grief are the priests, the ministers of Jehovah.
The fields are blasted, the ground is in grief,
Blasted is the corn, abashed is the new wine, the oil pines away.
Be ye abashed, O ploughmen!
Wail, O vine-dressers,
For the wheat and the barley;
The harvest is lost from the field!
The vine is abashed, and the fig-tree is drooping;
Pomegranate, palm too and apple,
All trees of the field are dried up:
Yea, joy is abashed_ and _away from the children of men._
In this passage the same feeling is attributed to men and to the fruits
of the land: _In grief are the priests, the ground is in grief_. And it
is repeatedly said that all alike are _abashed_. By this heavy word we
have sought to render the effect of the similarly sounding “hôbhîsha,”
that our English version renders _ashamed_. It signifies to be
frustrated, and so _disheartened_, _put out_: _soured_ would be an
equivalent, applicable to the vine and to joy and to men’s hearts.
_Put on_ mourning _, O priests, beat the breast;
Wail, ye ministers of the altar;
Come, lie down in sackcloth, O ministers of my God:
For meal-offering and drink-offering are cut off
from the house of your God._
_Hallow a fast, summon an assembly,
Gather[1201] all the inhabitants of the land to the house
of your God;
And cry to Jehovah:
“Alas for the Day! At hand is the Day of Jehovah!
And as vehemence from the Vehement[1202] doth it come.”
Is not food cut off from before us,
Gladness and joy from the house of our God?
The grains shrivel under their hoes,[1203]
The garners are desolate, the barns broken down,
For the corn is withered—what shall we put in them?[1204]
The herds of cattle huddle together,[1205] for they have no pasture;
Yea, the flocks of sheep are forlorn.[1206]
To Thee, Jehovah, do I cry:
For fire has devoured the pastures of the steppes,[1207]
And the flame hath scorched all the trees of the field.
The wild beasts pant up to Thee:
For the watercourses are dry,
And fire has devoured the pastures of the steppes._
Here, with the close of chap. i., Joel’s discourse takes pause, and in
chap. ii. he begins a second with another call to repentance in face
of the same plague. But the plague has progressed. The locusts are
described now in their invasion not of the country but of the towns, to
which they pass after the country is stripped. For illustration of the
latter see above, p. 401. The _horn_ which is to be blown, ver. 1, is
an _alarm horn_,[1208] to warn the people of the approach of the Day
of the Lord, and not the Shophar which called the people to a general
assembly, as in ver. 15.
_Blow a horn in Zion,
Sound the alarm in My holy mountain!
Let all inhabitants of the land tremble,
For the Day of Jehovah comes—it is near!
Day of darkness and murk, day of cloud and heavy mist.[1209]
Like dawn scattered[1210] on the mountains,
A people many and powerful;
Its like has not been from of old,
And shall not again be for years of generation upon generation.
Before it the fire devours,[1211]
And behind the flame consumes.
Like the garden of Eden[1212] is the land in front,
And behind it a desolate desert;
Yea, it lets nothing escape.
Their visage is the visage of horses,
And like horsemen they run.
They rattle like chariots over the tops of the hills,
Like the crackle of flames devouring stubble,
Like a powerful people prepared for battle.
Peoples are writhing before them,
Every face gathers blackness._
_Like warriors they run,
Like fighting-men they come up the wall;
They march every man by himself,[1213]
And they ravel[1214] not their paths.
None jostles his comrade,
They march every man on his track,[1215]
And plunge through the missiles unbroken.[1216]
They scour the city, run upon the walls,
Climb into the houses, and enter the windows like a thief.
Earth trembles before them,
Heaven quakes,
Sun and moon become black,
The stars withdraw their shining.
And Jehovah utters His voice before His army:
For very great is His host;
Yea, powerful is He that performeth His word.
Great is the Day of Jehovah, and very awful:
Who may abide it?_[1217]
_But now_ hear _the oracle of Jehovah:
Turn ye to Me with all your heart,
And with fasting and weeping and mourning.
Rend ye your hearts and not your garments,
And turn to Jehovah your God:
For He is gracious and merciful,
Long-suffering and plenteous in love,
And relents of the evil.
Who knows but He will turn and relent,
And leave behind Him a blessing,
Meal-offering and drink-offering to Jehovah your God?_
_Blow a horn in Zion,
Hallow a fast, summon the assembly!
Gather the people, hallow the congregation,
Assemble the old men,[1218] gather the children, and
infants at the breast;
Let the bridegroom come forth from his chamber,
And the bride from her bower.[1219]
Let the priests, the ministers of Jehovah, weep
between porch and altar;
Let them say, Spare, O Jehovah, Thy people,
And give not Thine heritage to dishonour, for the
heathen to mock them:[1220]
Why should it be said among the nations, Where is
their God?_
FOOTNOTES:
[1160] _Arabia Deserta_, p. 307.
[1161] _Arabia Deserta_, p. 335.
[1162] _Id._, 396.
[1163] _Id._, 335.
[1164] Barrow, _South Africa_, p. 257, quoted by Pusey.
[1165] _Impressions of South Africa_, by James Bryce: Macmillans, 1897.
[1166] Volney, _Voyage en Syrie_, I. 277, quoted by Pusey.
[1167] Lebanon.
[1168] Abridged from Thomson’s _The Land and the Book_, ed. 1877,
Northern Palestine, pp. 416 ff.
[1169] From Driver’s abridgment (_Joel and Amos_, p. 90) of an account
in the _Journ. of Sacred Lit._, October 1865, pp. 235 f.
[1170] Morier, _A Second Journey through Persia_, p. 99, quoted by
Pusey, from whose notes and Driver’s excursus upon locusts in _Joel and
Amos_ the following quotations have been borrowed.
[1171] Shaw’s _Travels in Barbary_, 1738, pp. 236-8; Jackson’s _Travels
to Morocco_.
[1172] Adansson, _Voyage au Sénegal_, p. 88.
[1173] Chénier, _Recherches Historiques sur les Maures_, III., p. 496.
[1174] Burckhardt, _Notes_, II. 90.
[1175] Barrow, _South Africa_, p. 257.
[1176] _Journ. of Sac. Lit._, October 1865.
[1177] Lichtenstein, _Travels in South Africa_.
[1178] _Standard_, December 25th, 1896.
[1179] Fr. Alvarez.
[1180] Barheb., _Chron. Syr._, p. 784; Burckhardt, _Notes_, II. 90.
[1181] i. 20, 17.
[1182] i. 19.
[1183] i. 5.
[1184] Cf. i. 12, 13, and many verses in chap. ii.
[1185] Of Merx and others: see above, p. 394.
[1186] See above, p. 377.
[1187] See Vol. I., pp. 242, 245 f.
[1188] Jer. xiv.
[1189] Cf. Ezek. xlvi. 15 on the Thamid, and Neh. x. 33; Dan. viii. 11,
xi. 31, xii. 11: cf. p. 382.
[1190] Acts xxvi. 7.
[1191] XIV. _Antt._ iv. 3, xvi. 2; VI. _Wars_ ii. 1.
[1192] i. 9, 13.
[1193] i. 16.
[1194] ii. 14.
[1195] i. 8, 13.
[1196] ii. 12.
[1197] LXX. Βαθουήλ
[1198] See above, pp. 399 f.
[1199] חסיל from חסל, used in the O.T. only in Deut. xxviii. 38,
_to devour_; but in post-biblical Hebrew _to utterly destroy_, _bring
to an end_. _Talmud Jerus._: Taanith III. 66_d_, “Why is the locust
called חסיל? Because it brings everything to an end.”
[1200] A.V. _cheek-teeth_, R.V. _jaw-teeth_, or _eye-teeth_. “Possibly
(from the Arabic) _projectors_”: Driver.
[1201] Heb. text inserts _elders_, which may be taken as vocative, or
with the LXX. as accusative, but after the latter we should expect
_and_. Wellhausen suggests its deletion, and Nowack regards it as an
intrusion. For אספו Wellhausen reads האספו, _be ye gathered_.
[1202] Keshōdh mishshaddhai (Isa. xiii. 6); Driver, _as overpowering
from the Overpowerer_.
[1203] A.V. _clods_. מגרפותיהם: the meaning is doubtful, but the
corresponding Arabic word means _besom_ or _shovel_ or (_P.E.F.Q._,
1891, p. 111, with plate) _hoe_, and the Aram. _shovel_. See Driver’s
note.
[1204] Reading, after the LXX. τί ἀποθήσομεν ἑαυτοῖς (probably an error
for ἐν αὐτοῖς), מה נניחה בהם for the Massoretic מה נאנחה בהמה _How the
beasts sob!_ to which A.V. and Driver adhere.
[1205] Lit. _press themselves_ in perplexity.
[1206] Reading, with Wellhausen and Nowack (“perhaps rightly,” Driver)
נשמו for נאשמו, _are guilty_ or _punished_.
[1207] מדבר, usually rendered _wilderness_ or _desert_, but
literally _place where the sheep are driven_, land not cultivated. See
_Hist. Geog._, p. 656.
[1208] See on Amos iii. 6: Vol. I., p. 82.
[1209] Zeph. i. 15. See above, p. 58.
[1210] פרשׂ in Qal _to spread abroad_, but the passive is here to
be taken in the same sense as the Ni. in Ezek. xvii. 21, _dispersed_.
The figure is of dawn crushed by and struggling with a mass of cloud
and mist, and expresses the gleams of white which so often break
through a locust cloud. See above, p. 404.
[1211] So travellers have described the effect of locusts. See above,
p. 403.
[1212] Ezek. xxxvi. 35.
[1213] Heb. _in his own ways_.
[1214] יעבטון, an impossible metaphor, so that most read יעבתון, a
root found only in Micah vii. 3 (see Vol. I., p. 428), _to twist_ or
_tangle_; but Wellhausen reads יְעַוְּתוּן, _twist_, Eccles. vii. 13.
[1215] Heb. _highroad_, as if defined and heaped up for him alone.
[1216] See above, p. 401.
[1217] Zeph. i. 14; “Mal.” iii. 2.
[1218] So (and not _elders_) in contrast to children.
[1219] _Canopy_ or _pavilion_, bridal tent.
[1220] למשל בם, which may mean either _rule over them_ or _mock
them_, but the parallelism decides for the latter.