“An Enormous Horde Arrayed for Battle” - The BAS Library

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1.

In 1959, during a major locust plague in Ethiopia that lasted six weeks, it was conservatively estimated by Stanley Baron in “The Locust War,” World Health January 1979), pp. 10–15, that the locusts consumed enough food to feed one million people for a year.

2.

All quotations from the Book of Joel in the text of this article are from the New Jewish Publication Society translation.

3.

Of the vines.

4.

See Ziony Zevit, “Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues,” BR 06:03.

5.

Although Joel 2:16 does not say “all,” the specifics of the call indicate that everybody is included, and a parallel passage (Joel 1:14) explicitly says “all.”

6.

Excluding newlywed husbands. See Deuteronomy 24:5.

Endnotes

1.

John D. Whiting, “Jerusalem’s Locust Plague,” The National Geographic Magazine 28/6 (December 1915), pp. 511–550.

2.

The exact meaning of these four Hebrew words has been questioned, but little doubt remains that they refer to four developmental stages of the locust rather than four different types of insect. See Hans W. Wolff, Joel and Amos (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), p. 27.

3.

Maria Leach, ed., Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1972), p. 641.

4.

Leach, Standard Dictionary, p. 641.

5.

Leach, Standard Dictionary, p. 641.

6.

Shin-Yi Hsu, “The Cultural Ecology of the Locust Cult in Traditional China,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (December 1969), pp 731–752.

7.

Stephen F. Winward, A Guide to the Prophets (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1969), p. 227.