Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 2.1.1–2.2.2

He begins, however, with the feeling of one who wonders and, as it were, pities:

Verse 1. — “The word of the Lord that came to Joel son of Pethuel.” “This office of teaching,” he says, “or rather of censure, the eternal teacher laid on his servant.” By the name “word” he indicated at once the whole teaching he was about to see. The prophet’s father is mentioned not without reason: since, whenever not only the virtues but also the ancestors of men strong in holiness are named, they are made equal in dignity with their parents, so that those too are judged either just, or prophets, or priests. This reason for praising the root in the shoot is shown to be both honorable and weighty. But the fact that some commentators have pursued even the etymologies of names, gathering seeds of praise from them (that is, Joel, which we can translate archomenos, “beginning,” Pethuel “breadth of God,” and so on), is childish and silly, and seems to involve more trouble than profit.

Verse 2. — “Hear this, you elders, and give ear, all inhabitants of the land, whether this has happened in your days or in the days of your fathers.” He enters in the manner of a preacher, about to narrate the greatness of the calamity that befell the Israelites. “See,” he says, “I anticipate the voice of your weeping, and I am the first to declare what your complaint would have uttered to stir reproach: that you have not lain under one or another blow only, but that calamities, roused like foaming waves, have always driven on earlier miseries with new ones. Gather, then, all you inhabitants, to listen: both you who in the old age of this life have collected very many dangers, and you who, though you have fewer years, can still hold in a vigorous memory whether you have received from your parents anything like what has flowed together into the present age. Indeed, what shall I say? Let us consult the annals alone, as if seeking the comfort of examples, since I judge that the miseries of our nation have risen to such a heap that nothing like it could exist even among those to come.” Both elders, then, and inhabitants of the land, who are commanded to take in with their ears or to hear, do not mark different deserts or pursuits; they are simply commanded to hear. It is like this: “Hear these things, all nations; give ear, all who inhabit the world, all the earthborn and the sons of men, rich and poor together.” In many ways he certainly signified nothing other than the men he summons to judgment. I have noted this briefly because some believed there was much difference in these words, and on this they spent a great many useless words. But let us hear what the prophet brings with such display of wonder.

Verse 4. — “What the caterpillar left the locust has eaten, and what the locust left the cankerworm has eaten, and what the cankerworm left the blight has eaten.” He includes the various kinds of calamities which he laments were brought on the Jewish people; each of these, when it falls, so consumes the fruits and the hope of the year that it crushes the hearts of farmers with hardship and fear alike. That these troubles befell them not once but at many times we gather both from the prophet we are discussing and from the warning of Deuteronomy. Hence we also refute the opinion of those who think all these things were said of enemies. For they thought that the caterpillar, the locust, the cankerworm, and the blight were meant to signify the Assyrian, the Chaldean, the Macedonian, and the Roman peoples, by whose forces the Jewish commonwealth was worn down, believing that the succession of enemies was made known under the description of locusts. They would seem to have suspected this with some consistency if the Jews had suffered no calamities except from enemies. But since they are shown to have suffered a most severe famine, a portentous drought as in the times of blessed Elijah, sudden death, and various plagues, what need was there to apply also this scarcity, though he mentioned locusts and cankerworms, to the inroads of nations? Understanding the prophetic words simply, then, rather than transferring them to whatever else we please, let us take locusts and caterpillars to be not mailed horsemen or shielded infantry, but small crawling worms and tiny winged creatures, which then followed one another so as to torment the profaned nation that they carefully kept their turns of doing harm, and whatever was left by those before was wholly consumed by those that followed. Holy Joel looks with prophetic sight on this ruin as impending rather than already brought on; and so, while those concerned lie numb in pitiable security, he himself, as if kind and dismayed by such a spectacle, cries out:

Verse 5. — “Wake up, you drunkards, and weep, and wail, all you who drink wine for sweetness, for it has perished from your mouth.” The complaint begins in an entirely moral way, addressing first, in a common calamity, those whom we are told will bear it more heavily than the rest. For want bites harder on those used to luxuries, and to the luxurious not only poverty but frugality itself is a torment. So, about to narrate the troubles of want, he began with the moderate, and touched only the loss of luxuries, which can be grievous not to all in common but only to gluttons; and he values them so cheaply as to declare that they wished to live for pleasure alone. And as the state of such people deserves, he adds that they should [weep] and wake up, at least when the loss threatens of those things in whose company they had been eager to doze. “No care for pursuits,” he says, “has held you busy until now, nor has the consciousness of such great crimes roused the goad of compunction; but you have served all your desires as if you were free from justice. The patience of the eternal judge has been overcome by the impudence and obstinacy of sinners; he has decided to subjugate you with weakening blows and first to take away these instruments of the luxuries you misuse. Although the progress of this want will reach the moderate and the poor too, yet the very beginnings will torment you. You, then, whom the discipline of justice has taught nothing, let the goad of fear at least begin to try you; give to your vices the tears you did not give to your duties; and you who never grieved at wounded innocence, weep at last for your drunkenness left destitute.” “Wake up, you drunkards, and weep; wail, all you who drink wine for sweetness, for it has perished from your mouth. You provided the causes of the gravest offense,” he says, “by pursuing luxury; not content with lavish and early banquets or simple drunkenness, you spoiled wine by mixing in sweet things, and contrived by art a stimulant for your feasts, so that the whole span of life perished between wantonness and drunkenness. See, now the time has come for such vengeance, which by laying waste the fruits of the earth takes away above all the instruments of luxuries. This hardship,” he says, “will trouble you first, since for those ignorant of frugality the shrinking of abundance becomes the experience of punishment. And since, forgetful of reason, you have made yourselves like beasts, at least on the very couches and beds on which you lie, wail, all you who drink wine for sweetness, for it has perished from your mouth.” When the censor’s reproach is mingled with the prophetic announcement, it shows that man placed in honor did not understand, and is therefore compared with the brutes, to which he has made himself like; for, as we have said, he reckons the loss of drink as the damage of life, so that luxury, which wakes with difficulty even under the very crash of vengeance, since it does not know how to weep, may at least wail: as in the psalm, “They shall suffer hunger like dogs, and go round the city.” “Reason ought rather to have stirred you with the goad of compunction than hardship to have roused you with the bites of pain; but since by excessive [drinking] you have lost your judgment, so that you can no longer foresee but only feel, wail when struck, you who did not fear when warned.” And what is the cause of such tears?

Verses 6–8. — “For a nation has come up upon my land, strong and without number; its teeth are like the teeth of lions, its molars like a lion’s whelp. It has made my vine a desert, and stripped the bark of my fig tree; it has stripped it bare and cast it away; its branches have become white. Mourn like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth.” In the times contained in the title of blessed Hosea, frequent inroads of the Assyrians are also told; but since the Creator of things afflicted the violators of his law not in one way only, we gather that among the enemy devastations these plagues too, which the prophet announces, befell them. He spends much effort intently describing them, plainly with the counsel and art of a physician, so as to stir in the hearts of his hearers that saving fear which forces them to shudder at allurements; and not to run through the goads of the terror announced with the brevity of a mere notice, but to teach the hearer, for whose amendment this whole display of blows was being prepared, to dwell on the consideration of events. Not content to have described them, he goes on to increase by the weight of his words what he had done. So he gave the swarm of locusts the name of a nation, marching, as it were, by troops and companies, whose novelty was no less fearful than its size. If you consider its effectiveness rather than its limbs, you will see that its teeth are to be compared to lions’ whelps, indeed to lions themselves, skilled in plunder: for shoots are laid waste by these no less easily than herds by those. And as much as flocks are less useful for the food of mortals than crops, so much more harmful is the ravager of crops than of flocks, and than the throats of beasts gaping for blood. Moreover, the raging locust consumes the very milk of crops and grasses, and so kills even cattle that it does not chew. It strips all the woods of their green, and imitates, as it were, the condition of nature itself by the force of the disaster: as when the sun has sunk low in winter the sap of trees is driven inward, and, having laid aside the honor of their leaves, the oaks stand bare, so that one ignorant of farming who sees them despairs that they can grow green again; so this column, whose coming I lament, will consume not only the tender grasses but the ripe vineyards too, nor will it spare the vintage whitening with fruit; it will lay waste the sweet figs with bitter tooth, and pursue so deliberately the whole bark, through which the life-giving sap could flow in, that a white forest is seen instead of a green one. Since, then, the earth does not return the grain entrusted to it, nor does the branch bend with spontaneous fruit, nor does the year supply the comfort of fruits to the sick farmers, what remains, our people, but that you pursue your calamity with weeping, but with tears as streaming and abundant as those of women whom the grief of widowhood has crushed, deprived of the company of the husbands to whom they had been joined from the time of their maidenhood?

Verse 9. — “Mourn like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth: sacrifice and libation have perished from the house of God.” The speech passes opportunely to the region: for since he had said that the mourning of widowhood should be matched by the laments of the whole nation, he explained why he brought forward this likeness by mentioning the region. For as often elsewhere, so also in blessed Hosea, our God declares that he took the synagogue to himself in the place of a wife, as it were, but that she, in the manner of adulteresses, violated the covenant of this union and subjected herself to the worship of various gods. Since, then, here too he went on at great length from the beginning of the impending calamity, and after the losses of what was, as it were, the first drunkenness, which he marked as grievous to the luxurious, the hardship of want was brought on most fully, laying waste cultivated lands and wild haunts alike, so that not only the common food but not even what was to be offered according to religion remained; therefore he addresses them as in the likeness of a widowed woman, since she seems tormented by her husband’s departure in this, that she has lost the instruments of offering and ceremonies by which she believed she pleased God and clung to him through the daily sacrifices.

Verses 10–12. — “The priests, the ministers of the Lord, have mourned. The region is laid waste, the ground has mourned, for the wheat is destroyed, the wine is confounded, and the oil has languished. The farmers are confounded, the vinedressers have wailed over the wheat and barley, because the harvest of the field has perished. The vine is confounded, and the fig tree has languished; the pomegranate and the palm and the apple tree and all the trees of the field have withered, because joy is confounded from the sons of men.” It had come so far into public want, as the locust, the cankerworm, and the blight laid waste, that a lack of sacrificial victims followed too, and the loaves of the Presence were not set on the altar; consequently the priests and Levites mourned first, while the rest of the people, as if rejected by its eternal husband, groaned like widows (as we have said), because the land itself too, having lost all ornament of green and fertility, was covered with mourning squalor. For in this sad devastation the reaper did not carry off the grain, nor did the vine bring its fertility, with which it had stood laden, to sweet must; but it deceived the cultivators with such frustration that it seems to blush at its own lie. A like malice struck the olives, the pomegranates languished with the figs, nor could any kind of fruit survive in better condition; but with the joys and hopes of mortals both shoots and grasses perished. “It is not a time to hide grief; all of you, take up the bearing and mind of mourners: for the foulest kind of destruction hangs over those for whom the hope of the year is as much to be lamented as its reality.”

Verses 13–14. — “Gird yourselves and lament, you priests; wail, you ministers of the altar; go in, lie in sackcloth, ministers of my God, for sacrifice and libation have perished from the house of your God. Sanctify a fast, call an assembly, gather the elders, all the inhabitants of the land, into the house of your God, and cry to the Lord.” Having set out the greatness of the calamity, he had described weeping as hanging over all peoples; but since to be moved only by the spectacle of tears is the office of one who pities rather than of one who teaches, while the prophet, clothed in the mind of a parent, urges nothing except for their benefit, now too he leads them to lamentation in order, so that they do not spend the time in empty weeping, pursuing their miseries with mournful words (which would hardly befit religious and strong minds), but, ordering the very offerings of tears according to the rules of the holy law, may prepare a harvest of joys, and indulge the hardships of the mind only as much as suffices, grieving at the indignation and offense of the judge rather than at the loss of goods. “You, then,” he says, “O priests, changing soft garments for rough ones, take up the bearing and the mind of mourners, but plead also what pertains specially to your charge, namely that you lack the means of serving divine worship.” As for the people: “Sanctify a fast,” that is, proclaim it under such a warning that anyone who perhaps despises it may be charged as having violated holy things. This is what he says, “Sanctify a fast.” “At the same time,” he says, “call all, that is, not only those strong in age, but also those whom infancy or old age makes weak, to share the duty according to the greatness of the danger.” For it follows that the affliction of all should repel the calamity that was going to rage against all in common. But a subtle point of understanding should not slip away from us: a fast is commanded of all in common. “Call,” he says, “the elders, all the inhabitants of the land, into the house of your God.” Yet if the want described above held the region in all its borders, so that not even the solemn sacrifice could be offered, how is a fast commanded again to the same peoples with a display of great sanctification, when for people in such want it would be harder to prepare food than to continue fasting? We ought therefore to notice that to be hungry is one thing, to fast another: the latter concerns the exercise of virtue, the former the anguish of mortality. So it is not the affliction of the guilty but the correction of the penitent that appeases the Lord; and those to be cured need not wasting but compunction. For the filth of luxury is driven out not by a hardship common to good and bad, but only by discipline, which is a friend to noble minds. “And therefore I ask for a fast,” he says, “that comes from duty, not the hunger that often comes from punishment: or, I say, join fasting to your hunger, so that devotion may make fruitful what want had made painful.” But we have said these things for the edification of our hearers. The sequence can, however, be claimed for the prophetic sentences more briefly. For in prophecy he announces the calamity as impending rather than already rushing in, and warns the priests in advance to call the people to fasts and to meet with lawful supplications the calamities they hear are imminent. Then follows: [Verses 15–18.] — “Ah, ah, ah, for the day! For the day of the Lord is near, and it will come like devastation from the mighty one. Has not food perished before your eyes, joy and gladness from the house of your God? The beasts have rotted in their dung, the granaries are destroyed, the storehouses scattered, for the wheat is confounded. Why has the animal groaned, the herds of cattle lowed? Because they have no pasture; and even the flocks of sheep have perished.” After the prophet had arranged the bearing of mourners, that they should gather covered with sackcloth, that is, clothed in haircloth, he now adds what prayer they ought to use, and by doubling and tripling the cry of one in grief he expressed, as it were, the force of the strokes by which the blows are struck: surely for no other reason than that the display of the announced calamity might stir fear and compunction in the hearts of the hearers; as if he said: “Believe my eyes, believe my senses, which with prophetic sight see not only what has been brought on but also what is to come: the weight of a calamity that cannot be borne is pressing, at each of whose blows we collapse as if our bowels were torn. For the caterpillar and the locust, the cankerworm and the blight will so succeed one another that the cessation of the earlier trouble, which seemed to promise some breathing space, will bring heavier torments to the wretches. And that day of the Lord, on which he has determined to punish the guilty, will be terrible not with slight vexation, but will bring such devastation as the most powerful avenger would inflict, against whose strength neither the boldness of resisters could stand nor the cunning of hiders withdraw anything.” As for his saying, “Devastation will come from the mighty one,” either take it as a comparison set down, so that we may know that the chastisement will be no less forceful than if the victory of some most powerful king were about to rage (of which manner of speech there is also that in the psalm: “The Lord was roused as one asleep, as a mighty man drunk with wine,” and, “He struck his enemies in the hinder parts; he gave them everlasting reproach”); or else let us understand the mention of the mighty one made not by way of example but for singularity, as of one who accomplishes not one or two things but all he wills without difficulty, so that “mighty” seems to express the Almighty. “For the day of the Lord is near, and devastation will come from the mighty one. Has not food perished before your eyes? It is not a time,” he says, “for you to fear a moderate hindrance, or for the calamity to be brought only on fruits still to be gathered and not on those already gathered; but under your very eyes, when you trust in food already stored, and not only in private houses but even in the treasury of the temple, I foretell that want hangs over you, so that joy, indeed all consolation, perishes. Nor, when the crops are taken away, will the cattle supply food in turn, since the grazed-bare mountains and the consumption of green will show their ruin too.” The prophet shows that he is struck by these approaching evils, which serves either the judgment of the spiritual senses, which reach far beyond these bodily ones, or the display (as we have said) of the description, stirring the feeling of fear in the hearts of the peoples. So he took on the form of one questioning, saying, “Why has the animal groaned, the herds of cattle lowed?”, so as to add as from one answering, “Because they have no pasture. And even the flocks of sheep have perished.” “Therefore, since unbearable affliction surrounds me on every side, I lift up hands, voice, and prayers to you, the one Lord, and, prostrate in mind and body, I implore you to look now favorably, now gently, on the calamities of the land. For see [Verse 19], the flame has consumed the beautiful places of the wilderness.” Here the careful hearer may ask what beauty of fields is proclaimed in the wilderness, which this new and hateful burning has consumed, especially since no complaint of fire had come before. The sequence of the reading shows, then, that leafy woods and glad pastures are here called the beauty of the fields. He praised the pleasant places not of cultivated but of wild country because he had mentioned herds and flocks: since they rejoice in groves and pastures, when these are spoiled by some disaster they too are subjected to exile. He put “fire” for the devastation that the locust and cankerworm brought, as we also read in the psalm: “He made their rains hail, a burning fire in their land, and struck their vines and broke every tree of their borders.” So, since the locust and cankerworm so consumed the green of all woods and grasses that they seem not gnawed but burnt, consequently even the wild beasts came into the danger of famine, and, taught by the teaching of nature, look up to you alone, that, propitiated, you may bring a remedy to the danger. For the holy songs testify with truth and sweetness: “All look to you, to give them food in season. When you give, they gather; when you open your hand, all will be filled with gladness; but when you turn away your face, they will be troubled. For you will take away their spirit, and they will fail and return to their dust.” So from you the herds of wild beasts too beg a remedy, though lacking clear voices, with the various sounds of their throats, just as the threshing floor of the earth, fitted to receive seeds, waits for dew or rain to bring forth shoots. If you consider it well, our hearer, you will see that there is weight in the example: he compared the thirst of souls to the appetite of the natural elements, which is certainly much more vehement. But let us see the rest too.

Verses 1–2. — “Blow the trumpet in Zion, wail on my holy mountain; let all the inhabitants of the land be troubled, for the day of the Lord is coming, for it is near: a day of darkness and gloom, a day of cloud and whirlwind, like the morning spread over the mountains.” “When the time of great devastation draws near,” he says, “let the inhabitants of city and fields gather, and anticipate with prayers and weeping the time of the calamity announced. If I could explain its bitterness in words before the very experience of events, the darkness of anguish seems to me likely to be such as if blackness were doubled, as when mist and darkness make the night denser; or rather, as if you joined dense clouds and whirlwinds twice over, so that, with the comfort of the stars wholly shut out, the terror of lightning flashes through the blind air.” These images, however, labored to indicate only the quality of the evil, while its bitterness is increased still more by its quantity. For the force of the evil we are speaking of so filled all the spaces of our region, as if its limits were spread out, that it was as though the bright morning, that is, the reddening dawn, had flooded all the mountains and hills at once. He compared one and the same thing both to night and to light, not to bring in something contradictory, but to express its spread and its bitterness by the diversity of comparison. “A great and strong people: there has not been its like from the beginning, nor will there be after it to the years of generation and generation.” That the narrative is about locusts rather than enemies the course of the speech shows. For he now likened the very swarm of locusts and cankerworms, whose invasion is described as having produced manifold calamity, to an armed and roaring army; which he certainly could not bring in by way of comparison if the description had been about soldiers. So he goes on, I say, to explain the effect of the evil through various images, and says what the face of the land was like when it came and what it left when it went away. “Our forefathers’ age saw nothing like it,” he says, “and the age of [our descendants] will see nothing like it.”

Verse 3. — “Before its face a devouring fire, and behind it a burning flame; the land before it like a garden of delight, and behind it the solitude of a desert; there is none who escapes it.” By “before its face” he meant to indicate the very attack of the locusts: not, certainly, that another fire would destroy the land before the locusts and they would afterward spoil the burnt fields, but, he says, their attack will so lay waste their whole regions that it will have consumed them no less than fire. And because the effectiveness of a fire is shown not in that it usually consumes light things, such as leaves, stalks, and chaff, quickly and completely with crackling and flying flames, but in that it overcomes materials of greater firmness by a longer burning, he therefore declares that the flame is strong both before and after. Keeping skillfully the order of amplification, after comparing the locust to fire he says that the region laid waste could have been compared to pleasant and well-watered lands: “The land before it like a garden of delight, and behind it the solitude of a desert; there is none who escapes it.” So that the force of the raging evil may then appear, in that it has consumed things that were exceedingly pleasant.