contains a description of a present or a future judgment. If we observe, first of all, that the statement in Joe 2:18 and Joe 2:19, by which the promise is introduced, is expressed in four successive imperfects with Vav. consec. (the standing form for historical narratives), there can be no doubt whatever that this remark contains a historical announcement of what has taken place on the part of the Lord in consequence of the penitential cry of the people. And if this be established, it follows still further that the first half of our book cannot contain the prediction of a strictly future judgment, but must describe a calamity which has at any rate in part already begun. This is confirmed by the fact that the prophet from the very outset (Joe 1:2-4) described the devastation of the land by locusts as a present calamity, on the ground of which he summons the people to repentance. As Joel begins with an appeal to the old men, to see whether such things have happened in their own days, or the days of their fathers, and to relate them to their children and children's children, and then describes the thing itself with simple perfects, יתר הגּזם אכל וגו, it is perfectly obvious that he is not speaking of something that is to take place in the future, but of a divine judgment that has been inflicted already.[1]
It is true that the prophets frequently employ preterites in their description of future events, but there is no analogous example that can be found of such a use of them as we find here in Joe 1:2-4; and the remark made by Hengstenberg, to the effect that we find the preterites employed in exactly the same manner in ch. 3, is simply incorrect. But if Joel had an existing calamity before his eye, and depicts it in Joe 1:2., the question in dispute from time immemorial, whether the description is to be understood allegorically or literally, is settled in favour of the literal view. “An allegory must contain some significant marks of its being so. Where these are wanting, it is arbitrary to assume that it is an allegory at all.” And we have no such marks here, as we shall show in our exposition in detail. “As it is a fact established by the
- ↑ “Some imagine,” as Calvin well observes, “that a punishment is here threatened, which is to fall at some future time; but the context shows clearly enough that they are mistaken and mar the prophet's true meaning. He is rather reproving the hardness of the people, because they do not feel their plagues.”
