Commentary on Hosea, Joel and Amos 2.2.3–2.2.10

Verses 4–11. — “Their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like horsemen so they will run. Like the sound of chariots on the tops of the mountains they will leap, like the sound of a flame of fire devouring stubble, like a strong people prepared for battle. Before its face all peoples will be in anguish; faces will be turned into a pot. Like mighty men they will run, like men of war they will climb the wall; men will go on in their ways and not turn aside from their paths. No one will press on his brother; each will walk in his own path; and they will fall through the windows and not be destroyed. They will enter the city, run on the wall, climb up into the houses, enter through the windows like a thief. Before its face the earth has trembled, the heavens are moved, the sun and moon are darkened, and the stars have withdrawn their brightness. And the Lord has given his voice before the face of his army, for his camps are exceedingly many, for his words are strong and effective. For great is the day of the Lord and very terrible; and who will endure it?” I pointed out a little before that it would appear more and more, as the speech went on, that the narrative was set out simply about cankerworms and locusts, not about armed battle lines, as some have thought. To mark their force and effect, he gathered likenesses of armed men and horsemen. Following not only the ambition of narrative but also the learning of comparison, he unfolded what he had undertaken as elegantly as grandly: comparing the very course of the rushing locusts to the gait of galloping horses, and their sound to the crackling that fire usually makes in stubble. Since he saw that these images were fittingly taken, he lingered on them with much industry: he not only likened their whirring and onrush to fires and cavalry, but also carefully marked that they went not in a scattered but in an ordered column and at full pace, plainly like legions marching under standards and centurions (for the cause of terror required this). “Like a people,” he says, “prepared for battle; before its face all peoples will be in anguish; faces will be turned into a pot.” “If,” he says, “military discipline also orders the force of troops, so that they advance to war not straggling and like robbers but arranged in squadrons and battle lines, steady in spirit and ranks, the enemy is easily undone by fear itself before the battle comes, so that their faces are often clothed with the pallor of coming death. So,” he says, “the columns of our nation will not be able to bear even the sight of the oncoming calamity, but like a pot blackened by smoke they will not only grow pale but be wholly drawn; since no help of strength in the field nor of walls in the cities will come to their aid. For the columns of locusts, which I announce are coming, performing the office of devastation, will run out like the most warlike men wherever indignation or desire calls them. They will not only lay waste the fields but will penetrate within the roofs of cities. No multitude of resisters will hinder them; no obstacle will delay their onrush; the victorious crowd will march on unhindered paths.” For he says this: “No one will press on his brother; each will walk in his own path; and they will fall through the windows and not be destroyed.” “Not only,” he says, “will they rush into the buildings of the cities, as if content with public fear, but they will enter the inner rooms of private houses like thieves. And so [lamentable] anxiety will seize all the inhabitants of this region, so that the heavens seem to them to move and the earth to tremble, the stars to withdraw their brightness, the sun and moon to be clothed in palpable darkness. Yet I would by no means doubt that all this will come with so great a heap of evils, since the Almighty leader himself directs these columns, uses such an army for the ruin of the guilty, himself raises the signal of command by which they are roused, and supplies them with strength to carry out the sentence. For great is the day of the Lord, to be feared for the very pomp and display of vengeance; and its first appearance shows that its crushing ruin cannot be borne.” We can, however, also transfer these complaints that blessed Joel composes, though they are effective for edification even with the very crash of their severity, to figures of souls by a subtler understanding, so that by the description of calamities which he announces hang over whole regions to torment sinners, he may be believed to have marked the squalor of criminal minds. For the judgment of a wise man thinks those no less wretched whom it sees subjugated to vices than those subjugated to hardships. According to this rule, he rebukes, now with pity, now with indignation, the state of a most profane nation abstaining from no crimes whatever, declaring first that he neither remembers past nor believes future things such as he sees happened in his own times: namely, that worms tiny in bulk, which scarcely deserve the name of animals, brought such force, following one another continuously like waves, that they destroyed the whole furnishing and face of the region. “For 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.” If, then, you look into human souls with discernment and consider vices not yet punished, you will surely find in them such a state as a pitiable plague had brought on the regions. For he brought in four kinds of corruption bringing harm, joined by a certain kinship: the caterpillar, the locust, the cankerworm, and the blight. We can fittingly apply these to the four passions of the soul: hope, joy, fear, and grief. For from these four affections, which flow from one origin of movement (that by which we are affected), all evils and various harms are born. Let us mark them with this division: the caterpillar, which pursues only the green leaves of trees, and the locust, which advances by leaps rather than steps, we refer to hope and joy, which sin with a kind of leaping of their own; on the other side, the cankerworm and the blight, which consume by settling and clinging without any eagerness of work, we assign to fear and grief. When, then, we see someone sinning through what are called joyful things, as one estranged from modesty and shame, who, after spoiling the ornaments of honor, also hands over his patrimony and his livelihood to outrages, we may cry out: “What the caterpillar left the locust has eaten.” But when, on the contrary, you see another so servile to cowardly feelings that he thinks freedom no honor, but, although he exults in no garment of serious dignity, if the wickedness of some superior catches him even while he wishes to lie hidden and demands him as helper or minister of its crimes, or at least threatens some evil or harm if he tries to refuse, and you see him at once ready to serve even greater crimes than you had thought, say with the prophet: “What the locust left the cankerworm has eaten, and what the cankerworm left the blight has eaten.” If, according to this rule, we direct our gaze keenly on the whole life of mortals, we come upon occasions, in various affairs indeed but in almost all their pursuits and times, where we may fittingly use these cries of the prophet. For by such a multiplication of vices it has come about that not only the grasses and shoots, the nobility of nature, as it were, perish, but even the fruits and trunks of the vines, olives, and figs, which had been planted by the gifts of religion, are spoiled. When, then, you see even those, I say, who are placed under the Christian name and rejoice in the adoption of the sacraments, yet have no care for virtues, and indeed see even the ministers of the altar serving only ambition and luxury, cry out with pity and indignation: “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; the wine is confounded, the oil has languished, the farmers are confounded, because the harvest of the field has perished.” This state of the churches, such as we see it above all in this storm, kindles that indignation of God at which the prophet trembled: “Great is the day of the Lord, and very terrible, and who will endure it?” Let us hear with what escort the one who cannot be endured comes forth.

Verses 12–14. — “Now therefore, says the Lord: Return to me with your whole heart, in fasting, and in weeping, and in lamentation. And rend your hearts and not your garments, and return to the Lord your God; for he is kind and merciful, patient and abounding in mercy, and ready to relent over evil. Who knows whether he will turn and forgive, and leave a blessing behind him, a sacrifice and libation for the Lord your God?” “So, as you consider the display of severity with which the eternal Lord is escorted when he goes out to punish, keep your minds from despair, and with the effect of a better hope know that he has terrified you out of a desire not to rage but to spare. For it was not because he had forgotten his kindness that he sounded with such manifold crash of roused punishment, but to stir in you the feeling of fear. Then by the very voice of events he urges you to bring your sick hearts to him at last, and, binding his medicine to you by lasting virtues, to fulfill not only the bearing of mourners but the whole feeling, and to rend your hearts rather than your garments.” While he heightened this, he also elegantly advised: since it is the custom of those who lament to pull their garments away from their breasts, he urged them, as if their hands were applied to their breasts, to press in more deeply, and to rend, if possible, not only their clothes but their very insides. He also found a word most suited to the matter in hand: “Rend your hearts and not your garments.” This, besides the display of the mourner, seems also to enjoin the discernment of good and evil and separation from the outrages in whose mixture they had become filthy. “Change your purpose for the better, then, or weep for what was done badly before, since your case is with a Lord kind and merciful and ready to relent over evil”: that is, one who gladly grants remission of the calamity he calls evil if he sees those compunct whom he had roused by threatening. From the usage of the Scriptures he took on the form of one doubting, saying, “Who knows whether he will turn and forgive, and leave a blessing behind him?” This is inserted out of pious reverence for the judge, whose terror he wishes to be so great that even safe things are feared. “Leave a blessing behind him,” he says, because he had said above that such great force of want would be brought on as the locusts laid waste that after their passing the land would remain like the solitude of a desert. So now he says, “Offer tears, offer groans. Perhaps the force of punishment announced will be gladdened by such victims, so that, if it diminishes abundance, it may not also take away food.” “And leave a blessing behind him, a sacrifice and libation for the Lord our God.” He answered in order to what had been said before. For above he had said that the greatness of want would go so far that sacrifice and libation would perish from the house of the Lord; so here, claiming a hope of comfort for the corrected and penitent, he added that he would leave a blessing, which serves the libations and the altar.

Verses 15–17. — “Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call an assembly. Gather the people, sanctify the church, bring together the elders, gather the little ones and those who suck the breasts; let the bridegroom go out of his chamber and the bride out of her bridal room. Between the porch and the altar the priests, the ministers of the Lord, shall weep and say: Spare, O Lord, spare your people, and do not give your inheritance to reproach, that the nations should rule over it. Why should they say among the peoples, Where is their God?” It is familiar to the prophets not to keep carefully the tenses, or what are called the moods of verbs, in their inflection; but, content to have expressed the sense, they use whatever expressions come to hand. So now, when he had said, “Let the bridegroom go out of his chamber and the bride out of her bridal room,” he added, “Between the porch and the altar the priests shall weep,” instead of saying, “let the priests weep.” Content with the office of a censor, he was not curious about moods; or else, to show that his exhortation had been effective, he said they would do what he had commanded them to do. “Between the porch and the altar, then,” he says, “let the gathering of mourners resound; and you, chief priests, to whom the keeping of the holy rites is entrusted, your faces wet with tears, cry out: Spare, O Lord, spare your people, and do not let these, whom you decreed to possess by right of inheritance, now be made an object of cursing and contempt to the profane nations that surround us; and if nothing else, let at least this plead for us before your mercy, that we cannot perish without insult to you. You who willed that we should be believed and called your servants and children, not only by creating but also by adopting us, do not let the nations say, Where is their God?” in whom, that is, they used to rejoice as their defender. Having set this out in the office of a teacher, he at once promises with the confidence of a prophet that the prayers of the people were effective, and that the Lord of things, as if spurred by zeal, took up the defense of the faithful.

Verse 18. — “The Lord,” he says, “was zealous for his land, and spared his people.” Seeing that it concerned his own dignity that the nation which was counted by his own name should not perish as if lacking a defender, he both kept it from despair and filled it with hope of gladness. From his answer, then, there is added:

Verses 19, 20. — “See, I will send you grain, wine, and oil, and you shall be filled with it, and I will no longer make you a reproach among the nations. And the one from the north I will remove far from you, and I will drive him into a land pathless and desert, his face toward the eastern sea and his rear toward the farthest sea; and his stench shall go up, and his rottenness shall go up.” Blessed Jeremiah and other prophets say that the Assyrians and Chaldeans will come from the north. Here too, then, the Assyrian could be understood, were it not, as I noted above, established that other plagues too were brought on the profaned people, according to what he had decreed in Deuteronomy. So, following the order we have adopted, let us take it of the locusts and cankerworms, whose removal the appeased Lord promises. He added this to the grace and sweetness of the liberation: that he commanded those columns to fall in the desert, so that the great stench rising from their corpses should not cause disease for the inhabitants. “His stench and rottenness shall go up there, because he acted proudly”: in declaring that he acted proudly he expressed not a vice of mind but the greatness of the calamity.

Verses 21–23. — “Do not fear, O land; exult and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things. Do not fear, you animals of the region, for the beautiful places of the desert have sprouted, for the tree has borne its fruit, and the fig and the vine have given their strength. And you, children of Zion, exult and rejoice in the Lord your God, for he has given you a teacher of righteousness.” Consequently the speech is directed, as it were, to the whole region, to promise renewed fertility to the land to which devastation had been announced. The speech runs through the same images through which it had passed in adversity. So he says that the mountains will be clothed with pastures, that the leafy face will return to the woods, that the figs and vines will offer the gifts of their fruitfulness. This is what he called their strength; and since all these are made to serve the use of men, he rightly added: “And you, children of Zion, exult and rejoice in the Lord your God, for he has given you a teacher of righteousness.” He crowned the preceding warnings with a sentence full of learning, which marked that after the driving away of hardships and the most desired successes of prosperity, the people should take joys, but from the part from which they ought most of all: not from seeking things to enjoy, but from having found a teacher of righteousness. “And you, children of Zion,” he says, “exult and rejoice in the Lord your God, for he has given you a teacher of righteousness. He is indeed merciful, and by one power of help drives away sorrows and grants prosperity; but you, my people, ought to exult above all in that in which you surpass the other nations: that you have received teachers of just conduct, by whose formation you might live both modestly and happily.” Like that in another prophet: “Happy are we, Israel, for the things that please God are known to us.”

Verses 24, 25. — “And he will make the morning and the evening rain come down on you in the beginning. And so the granaries will be filled with grain, and the presses will overflow with wine and oil. And I will restore to you the years that the locust, the cankerworm, the blight, and the caterpillar have eaten: my great strength, which I sent among you.” Through various images he carries out what he began, and describes the future change from sorrow to joy. About to promise fruitfulness, he foretold the falling of timely and late rain, saying, “He will make the morning and the evening rain come down in the beginning.” The Seventy translated this not “in the beginning” but “as at the beginning,” to make the sense that, the offenses by which the seasonableness of the year’s times had been disturbed being removed, the year would return to its custom, so that the fields would be watered by timely or late rains according to the difference of seeds. These rains will create such fertility that both your granaries and your jars will be overrun. What he said, “timely and late rain in the beginning,” can be understood so that he seems to have marked the order of benefits, and there is no contradiction in the meanings, as if one asked how a rain could be said to be “in the beginning” that is also called “late”; but so that the rain is said to come before the fruitfulness of the fruits, and the sense is: “I will send rain first, and afterward the gladness of the crops will follow.” When this has filled its cultivators with joys and strength, let it pour in forgetfulness of the earlier want and go on to blot out the traces of hardship, so that not only does the trouble of scarcity cease, but the losses that came before are also made good. For this is what he said: “I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten”: not that the moments of time, but that the fruitfulness of the years would be restored. It should also be noted that God called the caterpillar and the locust his strength, and great: not, certainly, that such worms are in any way referred to the coeternal power of God, but that by their service and devastation they fulfilled the office of vengeance in afflicting the guilty. So the very smallness of caterpillars and locusts shows the power both of the Creator and of the avenger, who, when he has decided to wear down peoples, uses neither the teeth of beasts nor poisons, but consumes kingdoms lately opulent through the cankerworm and the blight. And so what has carried out his sentence like a vigorous lictor is called the strength of God. “When, then, the longed-for fertility,” he says, “has corrected the losses of these times, [Verses 26, 27] you shall eat and be satisfied, and you shall praise the name of the Lord your God, who has done wonders for you; and my people shall not be put to shame forever. And you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and I am the Lord your God, and there is no other; and my people shall not be put to shame forever.” It comes from prophetic custom that whenever they promise joyful things they also declare that they will remain forever. We ought to take this either under the condition celebrated in the Scriptures, namely, “if they persist in the pursuits of uprightness, then prosperity too will remain”; or else because the prophet always joins to his office something of the part of one who prays. But a sense can be brought in to which the course of the speech itself alludes. For he had said above, “Children of Zion, exult and rejoice in the Lord your God, for he has given you a teacher of righteousness.” Although this can be understood in many ways, as far as the reckoning of times goes it seems properly to point to blessed Hezekiah, who, as the faithfulness of the annals shows, burned with great zeal for the worship of God, and whose royal person, as the prophet Isaiah especially shows, seems chosen to signify a greater matter. Let us transfer, then, what was done through Hezekiah to the works of our Redeemer, so that, fulfilled modestly at that time, they may be seen to have gained great increase under the Gospel. For the true teacher of righteousness is he in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, who “was handed over for our offenses and rose for our justification,” so that, “justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” we might be freed from old errors and made subject to righteousness alone; and, driving away all the past want of saving things by a new fertility, we might be filled with teaching and abundance, as the Gospel promises: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added and given to you.” So the people of his possession, which leans on the Redeemer’s sentence, “See, I am with you all days, to the end of the age,” will not be put to shame forever. With that leader dwelling in their midst, the columns of the faithful always stand secure and eager; and whatever adversities they have borne in their struggles they will feel so made obsolete by the prosperity that follows that they seem to have come forth only to commend the joys.

Verses 28, 29. — “And it shall be after these things: 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.” Blessed Peter recalls this passage in the Acts of the Apostles, saying that this prophecy was fulfilled at the time when the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles. It should be noted, therefore, that from the context of the prophetic speech the apostle took only what fitted his own time, namely: “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.” For since the apostles had obtained the knowledge of tongues by a miracle, the teacher of the Church showed this to be the foretold outpouring of the Spirit, and called the knowledge of tongues prophecy: which, though it spoke not of future things but of the recent mysteries of the Lord’s incarnation, could nevertheless have come about only by the power of the Holy Spirit. Not content to mention only the gifts, he also adds what pertains to the display of terror.