Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 2.2.11–3.0.1

Verses 30, 31. — “I will give wonders in heaven and on earth, blood and fire and vapor of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes; and everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” So in that whole sequence he hastens to persuade them that, since the day of the Lord, that is, the time of the last judgment, will come with such power and crash that, as the stars tremble and are struck, this frame of the world will burst apart as if burnt, and faith alone will protect the columns of the godly as the world collapses, they ought to believe the Gospel if they wish to come to salvation. Since blessed Peter had undertaken not the explanation of the prophet but the preaching of the Gospel, he took from his words only as much as served his purpose; and by this he certainly did not abolish the explanation that the context of the prophetic work produces. We point this out briefly so that the boldness of those may be rejected who rashly and unskillfully contend that the prophet indicated only the time of which the apostle Peter spoke; whereas, I say, the whole fabric of the work teaches that it embraces first the times of the Jewish people and then ours as their fullest measure. Just as it does not hinder the prophetic meaning, in being transferred to the affairs of the Gospel, that the whole book follows Jewish history, so too, and much more, at least for a learned reader, consistency never allows faith to be denied if any proclamation can also be applied to the affairs of believers from the Gentiles. Let us see, then, how the course of the quasi-historical explanation proceeds. We gather that holy Joel prophesied under blessed Hezekiah, in whose reign there were both heavy struggles and great miracles. Among the other disasters by which the ten tribes are read to have been afflicted up to their deportation, some cities of the lots of Judah and Benjamin also fell; and we find that the Jews suffered disease and want as well. Then, when Rabshakeh addressed the besieged and announced their destruction unless they surrendered at once to the Assyrian king, he also promised them the evils of hunger and thirst to be endured. For this reason, then, the merciful Lord promises them that, when sorrows are turned into joys, the losses of want will also be made good. But let us hear what sequence of events and times he made. “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. And even on my servants and handmaids in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and I will give wonders in heaven above.” A promise furnished by a prophetic mouth indeed. For after running through the benefits of the present life, he joined spiritual honors, in which the people of God gloried above all. Consequently he promises that, besides these bodily goods, as we have said, they would also receive the ornaments of revelations and obtain an abundance of spiritual gifts. So what he says, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,” signified both sexes and every age. Then follows: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions”: by various kinds of revelations, that is, they will see what is to come. “And even on servants and handmaids I will pour out my Spirit”: that is, as no age, so no condition that is thought base will be excluded from these marks of holiness; but this holy flood will flow even into slaves if they are found capable of such gifts. All this is said to be fulfilled in the times of blessed Hezekiah, at least as a first step. For since he was pressed into grave straits by the dangers that broke in, and, against the expectation of the neighboring nations, was defended by religion alone, the prophet describes that very time with great display and in a like figure, to express the power of God, by whose help the city could emerge from so great a flood. In this sense our seer’s speech ran on in good order. For besides the consolation of returning abundance, he also promised the gifts of the Spirit, that is, the honors of revelations, by which that people would be shown to belong especially to God, and therefore ought to be confident amid adversities, since one who was dear and even precious to God could not perish basely. From the testimony of the very prophet we are discussing, we gather that something was also shown by dreams, as by lesser and more familiar oracles, that served for consolation. On the occasion of this passage it seems we must distinguish what we read in Deuteronomy, that we should not believe dreams. For how are dreams now referred to the gifts of the Holy Spirit if all faith in them was there believed to be abolished? Hence it appears that, since both sentences are of equal authority, a distinction must be applied by reason: if the person of the dreamer fitted the cause, so that as the one is revered for his merits, so the other is valued by its own weight, we should understand that some help came through dreams. But if there is no testimony that the time or the person deserves, the images of dreams are to be despised by the authority of the law. But let us hear what we said he added at length. “I will give,” he says, “wonders in heaven and on earth, blood and fire and vapor of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes; and everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” It is a prophetic custom that whenever God is announced as rising in indignation either to defend or to punish, the changed face of the heavens and the trembling elements themselves are described. Such is that in blessed David, who, describing the approach and bearing of the heavenly defender, says, “Smoke went up in his wrath, and fire blazed from his face; coals were kindled by him; he bowed the heavens and came down,” and the rest. In this way, then, which comes, as we have said, from the custom of the law, the prophet now too, at the time of punishment to be brought from heaven, sets forth that the elements will be pervaded by fires and the stars clothed with smoke or with blood. Not that these things were done as they are said, but either because such an apparatus befitted the Ruler of the heavens, or because his sentence would bring about its effect so easily, as if a dismayed world and rushing elements carried it out; or, finally, because such anxiety would seize the minds of the guilty as if the frame of the heavens were dissolving, the moon turning to blood, the earth to ashes, the stars to black. So what happened to minds to be feared is narrated as if it happened to the elements themselves; for that last and single convulsion is believed to be brought on the lands and the stars at the very end of the world. In the time of the prophet we are discussing, however, such disturbance befell, as I said above, not the heaven and earth but only the minds of the guilty. Since we have grasped its kind and manner, let us also trace the sequence of the narrative. He declares, then, all those things that are read to have been fulfilled in the times of blessed Hezekiah. For when the ten tribes had already been carried off to the fields of the Medes, the Assyrian army broke into the borders of Judah; and while Sennacherib besieged other cities, he sent a certain Rabshakeh with a great part of his forces to Jerusalem, to entice the peoples (as we had begun to say above) to surrender in the Hebrew language, in which he was skilled. Those in charge of the walls began earnestly to ask him to speak in Syrian and not in Hebrew. Then Rabshakeh added a weight of the greatest terror, asserting that he had brought disasters and the greatest ruin not on a few families but on the whole nation unless it accepted his rule. By these threats blessed Hezekiah and the rest of his people were so crushed that they turned to the prophet Isaiah with all the display of tears, saying, “The children have come to the birth, and there is no strength to bring forth”: that is, they had come into such straits of spirit as children would feel at the time of birth if there were no strength in the one giving birth. With Hezekiah and the Jews placed in that surge of imminent danger, the sun indeed seemed to be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord came, which transferred that mass of savage destruction from the Jewish people and turned it on the Assyrians with sudden power. He called the day of the Lord terrible and great, then, not because it was sad for the faithful but because it was to be revered for the majesty of the work. Then follows [Verse 32]: “And it shall be: everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be salvation.” “On that mountain, I say, for which, a little before, the wearing down of its strength promised almost no defense; in that city, I say, which had conceived its peoples for freedom as a weak mother conceives children to be brought into this world, indeed, which, deprived of the strength to bring forth, threatened certain death to its offspring: there suddenly appeared so glorious a defense that apart from it there was nowhere sure salvation.” “And it shall be: everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be salvation, as the Lord says, and among the remnant whom the Lord shall call.” All these things, carried out with the highest praise of our God as defender, are shown to have been fulfilled more fully in spiritual gifts at the time of the Lord’s incarnation, so that the very miracles that went before in the times of the fathers seem to have had not only historical but also prophetic force, serving to signify things that would be rendered long after. For so, at the time of the Lord’s passion, when the Author of life entered the bitterest death, an unforeseen night took away the middle of the day: “From the sixth hour,” it says, “there was darkness until the ninth hour”; so that the star, laying aside the glory of its inborn splendor with a dark face, seemed to take on the office of one mourning or fearing, because it did not wish to look on the insult to the Creator or the crime of the Jews, before the great and terrible day of the Lord came: that is, before the glory of the resurrection shone forth. Or else it is that day which our Lord set out in the Gospel in a kind of double narrative. For when he was handing on the signs of the last time, he first described the destruction of Jerusalem and the calamities with which the region of the Jews would be filled. As there he joined the end of the world to the overthrow of Jerusalem, so also all this shaking of the elements and stars in the prophet will be fully carried out at the end of the world, when, as blessed Peter says, “the heavens, burning, will pass away with a great rush, and the elements will be melted by the heat of fire” (2 Pet 3:10). For then faith alone will protect its own, and “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be salvation, as the Lord has said, and among the remnant whom the Lord shall call.” “To the citizenship of the heavenly Jerusalem,” he says, “which is the mother of the godly, all who pass to eternal joys will be enrolled”; yet all of us are called the remnant, because many are called but few are chosen.

Verses 1–3. — “For see, in those days and at that time, when I turn back the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and bring them into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and I will contend with them there over my people and my inheritance Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and they have divided my land. And over my people they have cast lots, and they have put a boy in a brothel and sold a girl for wine, to drink.” Having ended the excursion into that meaning which had gone on at length, he returns to the times with which the prophecy began, and dwells on what he sees will soon be fulfilled: either to confirm by testing these the faith in those things he promised would come long afterward, or to show that he had not laid aside his zeal for giving counsel by taking up the impulse of a prophet; as if he said: “Let those things which will come long hence be left to the reckonings of their own time; now let us pursue what presses and threatens. Already the ten tribes have been carried off by the Assyrian; a hostile army is laying waste the lot of Judah; and no hope of strength to resist remains. I announce, then, that now above all the defender will come to meet us, drive away the captivity of his people, that is, of Judah, which already seemed to gape for them, and, after they had despaired of safety, bestow the glory of a vengeance to be celebrated through the whole world.” “For when the Assyrian multitude has gathered to besiege the people of Jerusalem, we will make them lie under vengeance in such a way,” he says, “that they seem not so much roused to war as brought before a tribunal. When, then, I begin to conduct the case in the valley of Jehoshaphat, I will repay the Assyrians and the various enemies what they deserve, so that the ruin sent will consume the nobles, and the nation left behind will lie under the evils of captivity; and those who sold the children of my people into slavery or shame will themselves suffer the will of traders, and feel what the fruits of their earlier boldness are, as they suffer the bitterest dividers of their own fields because they lately overran mine.”

Verses 4–8. — “But what are you to me, Tyre and Sidon, and every border of the Philistines? Are you paying me back, and avenging yourselves against me? Swiftly and quickly I will return your recompense on your own head. For you have taken my silver and gold, and carried my desirable and most beautiful things into your shrines. And you have sold the children of Judah and the children of Jerusalem to the sons of the Greeks, to remove them far from their borders. See, I will rouse them from the place where you sold them, and I will turn your recompense on your own head. And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hands of the children of Judah, and they will sell them to the Sabaeans, a distant nation; for the Lord has spoken.” Even a slight occasion often uncovered the iniquity and hatred of the neighbors by whom the Jews were surrounded. Since they could not attack the Jews by their own strength, they joined the columns of greater enemies. The song accuses this crime of theirs, saying: “The tent of the Edomites and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagarenes, Gebal and Ammon and Amalek, and the foreigners with the inhabitants of Tyre; for Assyria too came with them; they became a help to the sons of Lot.” In this manner, then, when the neighboring nations had mixed their forces with the Assyrians to overthrow Zion, the censure of the divine word addresses them and, as it were, demands of them the cause of such an injury. Then he answers for the part of those convicted and silent, lest perhaps they had taken up the memory of an old grievance: namely, when the children of Israel, coming out of Egypt under the leadership of Joshua son of Nun, entered the land of promise and possessed it, handed over to them in fixed measures. “Are you preparing,” he says, “to avenge that time with a rebellious spirit, and striving, as if you had found an opportunity, to recover the lands that were occupied? But if such a thought has roused you, the vengeance rushing on you will convict both your weakness and your profanity. For not only will you be able to change nothing of the ancient decrees, but you will stand under the power of those whom you think you are crushing by your conspiracies.” He lists three kinds of the evils of captivity, which are inflicted at the will of the guilty. So when he had said that they had carried off gold and silver with the greed of plunderers, he added, “and you carried my desirable and most beautiful things into your shrines,” to mark either the remaining furniture or various necklaces. “Together with these ornaments of houses you also sold the pledges of the wretched, the children: what grief this causes bereaved parents you will feel by the infliction of recompense. For when he whose judgments you try to overturn takes vengeance, the time will come when the Jews will not only gain the joys of liberation, but we shall also feed on the pleasure of vengeance, and they will sell your sons not to neighboring nations (from which they could hope to return), but to the peoples of Saba, which Gentile writings have called Meroë.” All this seems to have been fulfilled either immediately after the destruction of the Assyrians, or after the return from the Babylonian captivity, in the times of the Maccabees. It should be noted, however, that not everything done in those times is transferred, with probability, to a spiritual understanding, that is, to signify the gift of the Gospel, as are the other things we spoke of a little before, the shaking of the stars, the greatness of the wonders, the outpouring of gifts, which both happened in those times and are believed to have been, and to be, fulfilled more fully in the Lord’s passion or his last judgment. Not in that way, then, I say, are all the things the prophet added here joined to a spiritual understanding. For what Tyrians or Sidonians, or others living around the borders of the Philistines, shall we suppose, besides the simple understanding, so as to imagine that they sold the children of the faithful? Even if we imagine that they sold them because they lured them into vices, how will he threaten them with the same recompense, that we should hand over their children to Sabaean traders? So that rule of understanding must be held: while the speech runs on in a simple course, things that can also fit future mysteries may sound in now and then through digressions suited to prophecy; but when that office is done, the matter is brought back to the purpose of its own time, and proceeds in the sequence of threat or exhortation. Hence blessed Joel too, after he had indicated with the impulse of prophecy, but briefly, things that would come in the last ages, returns to the reckoning of his own time; and, having threatened destruction to the neighboring enemies, goes on to explain the joys he had seen already approaching, so that what he announces will soon be shown may give credence to what will come long after, and may flood with the joy to be received those for whom he prepares consolation. He adds a display, as he had begun, to what is to be announced.

Verses 9–12. — “Proclaim this among the nations; sanctify war, rouse the strong; let all the men of war draw near and come up. Beat your plowshares into swords and your hoes into spears. Let the weak say, I am strong. Break out and come, all you nations round about, and gather yourselves together: there the Lord will make your strong ones fall. And let the nations rise and come up into the valley of Jehoshaphat.” By the image of this exhortation, which contains the force of a judgment, he expressed with what lust for war they came up to overthrow Judah. “Every cultivator of the fields,” he says, “seized arms; they changed their sickles into swords and their plowshares into javelins. Some, refusing military business because of bodily weakness or the disability of old age, nevertheless ran to battle of their own accord, supposing, because of the multitude of forces which both the Assyrian chief of the war and the other petty neighboring enemies were bringing, that they would gain an undoubted victory: you who [did not] know the deep counsel of our defender. For when your whole multitude has gathered with proud and savage spirit at the valley of Jehoshaphat, that is, to besiege Jerusalem, then just ruin will turn back on you. And since you directed insults at me as you were accustomed to hurl spears at those in your way, you will tremble, that is, feel destruction, from where you could by no means suspect it. That is, no battle lines will labor to bring standards against you, nor will any shout of fighters resound; but you will all fall in one night as the angel strikes, and, as if unfit for a great contest, with a kind of contempt and mockery, the rest of the night, pleasant before, will hand you over, deceived, to eternal sleep.”

Verses 13–16. — “Peoples, peoples, in the valley of cutting down: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of cutting down. The sun and moon are darkened, and the stars have withdrawn their brightness. And the Lord will roar from Zion and utter his voice from Jerusalem, and heaven and earth will be shaken; and the Lord is the hope of his people and the strength of the children of Israel.” “Rightly,” he says, “is the valley of Jehoshaphat called the place of cutting down: for, as the enemies thought, there the cutting down of the Jews would take place. But since their profane hope failed them, and the sentence of vengeance was directed against them, this will be named the valley of cutting down, but of the Assyrians.” When the enemy forces first gathered there, such anxiety and fear pervaded those shut up in Jerusalem that not even the great stars shone for them. But when the almighty defender took up the work of vengeance, that darkness which anguish of mind had created fell on the minds and eyes of the barbarians; and our God sprang forth to punish with such majesty that he seemed to utter not only a shout like a commander in battle but a kind of roaring and growling, whose force and greatness not only the hearts of men but not even the elements could bear. For he says: “The Lord will roar from Zion and utter his voice from Jerusalem, and heaven and earth will be shaken; and the Lord is the hope of his people and the strength of the children of Jerusalem.” The reversal will come about, then, as we have said: the darkness, which sat not on the stars but on the hearts of those who feared, and which the nation of the Jews felt first, the crowd of enemies will suffer afterward in such a way that the stars seem to grow black and the elements to totter. Strength, then, will come to the children of Israel, and, taught by the dangers of events, they will know that their God is Lord of all the earth, who nevertheless deigns, out of his great mercy, to dwell on Mount Zion.

Verses 17, 18. — “And Jerusalem shall be holy, and strangers shall no longer pass through her. And it shall be in that day, the mountains shall drip sweetness, and the hills shall flow with milk, and through all the streams of Judah waters shall go.” “The face of the whole region,” he says, “will be changed from sorrow to joy. And since it is the special mark of our nation to be called holy, the wonder at its prosperity will make not only the temple but even the whole walls of the city so revered that no profane person will be thought able to approach it. Lavish abundance will follow sweet freedom, so that honey seems to flow down not only from hives or trees but from the mountains themselves, and all torrents are changed into the grace of spring-fed streams, so that they do not lose their abundance of continuous flow.” “This new happiness of the springs,” he says, “they will obtain from that fountain which breaks out from the sanctuary of the house of God.” All this is said either by way of exaggeration, or because peoples rejoicing in recovered safety experience such feelings: so that, just as above, when they were in sorrow and in the last danger, the stars seemed to darken and the elements to tremble, so again, in the outpouring of joy, to those drunk with it milk seems to flow from rocks, honey from mountains, torrents to be swelled by springs, and not only meadows but even rocks to bloom with various flowers; and a fountain seems to come out of the house of God that waters the torrent of thorns, that is, makes places occupied by brambles fit for cultivation by supplying an unfailing course of irrigation. This passage, in which the happiness of Jerusalem is proclaimed, can now also contain the mysteries of the Church, which suffered the attack of the adverse power and of Jews and Gentiles alike, but, as all of them melted away like water, grew strong in a wonderful manner; the vine spread and went out to the ends of the earth, and, having crushed the profanity of idols, grew strong and sat in august dignity on a kind of throne of the dominion it had received; and as regards the rules of its institution, it is so fortified by the holiness of the commandments that no stranger, that is, no profane and criminal person, can pass through it. Why not, since Christ gave himself up for it, to present to himself a church having no spot or wrinkle, but standing holy and immaculate? This virgin, then, dedicated to the partnership of the eternal king, as in the present she is separated from all the wicked by the instruction of virtues, so in the age to come she is separated by the happiness of rewards too, so that no one rests in those tents except one who enters without stain and works justice. Whoever has obtained the eternal happiness of that citizenship will be so drunk with the abundance of the house of God that he will be given to drink from a kind of torrent of holy pleasure, and will feel that grief and sorrow have fled together. As this blessedness will be given in full at the time of the resurrection, so in this life too the apostles and their disciples claimed the greatest part of it. For when beaten by persecutors they rejoiced that they had been counted worthy to suffer insult for the name of Christ. From these lofty mountains of saving teaching, then, we see that honey flowed. For, as the prophet testifies, the words of God are sweet to the throats of the godly, above the sweetness of honey and the comb. From the hearts of the apostles, I say, life-giving streams flowed to the world, and they turned the thickets into which they had fallen into fields painted with flowers and laden with crops. Why not, when they received abundance from that fountain of which whoever drank thirsted no more, but rivers of living water flowed from his belly? To those made conspicuous by these increases of gifts he promises, as the crown of their happiness, the sweetness of vengeance. Verse 19. — “Egypt,” he says, “shall be a desolation, and Edom a desert of destruction, because they acted wickedly against the children of Judah and shed innocent blood in their land.” The prophet closed his discourse with the prophecy of his own time. And as above he announced a recompense of calamity to the Tyrians and Sidonians, so now he threatens the Egyptians and Edomites for the same crimes. We shall be able to transfer this to the affair of the Church if we name cruel and darkened minds Edomites and Egyptians. Verses 20, 21. — “And Judea shall be inhabited forever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation. And I will cleanse their blood, which I had not cleansed; and the Lord will dwell in Zion.” “When the Assyrians and the other peoples who had joined arms with them have been destroyed by a wonderful vengeance,” he says, “the inhabitants of Zion will be increased in all their hopes and deeds, will take up the care of religion, and will become conspicuous under my protection.” As we read that this was partly accomplished under Hezekiah, so we proclaim that it was fulfilled more fully under the Mediator of God and men. For he “died for our offenses and rose for our justification,” so that, “justified by faith, we may have peace with God”; and he promised to dwell in the midst of the city of Zion, saying, “See, I am with you all days, to the end of the age.”

Having completed the explanation of holy Joel as far as our capacity, with God’s help, brought it forth, we are called by the very order of the task to the third prophet, who is called Amos, a man glorying no less in the lowliness of his family than in the eminence of his virtue. For, propped up by no distinctions of ancestry, he obtained by his merits alone a place in the number of the prophets: of the prophets, I say, who provided not only the teaching of the synagogue but also the foundation of the Church, as the teacher of the Gentiles testifies, who declares that the Church is built on the teaching of the apostles and prophets (Eph 2). To that assembly radiant with starry light, then, he advanced, though with no help of more distinguished birth, yet, as we have said, by his conduct and the whole of his holy life; he would abundantly prove by his example alone, even if he had taught nothing by word, that for taking hold of the true glory of happiness piety and devotion of mind suffice, since neither poverty nor obscurity could create an obstacle for him. And since we have learned how much he deserved, let us hear what he taught.