Exposition on Joel -26- Verses 16-17

In v. 16 Joel rubs it in. He had already pointed out in v. 12 that their food had disappeared; they were all going to starve and there wasn’t even any food left for their offerings. So not only were they going to starve to death but, in the meantime, God’s wrath would be perpetuated because they couldn’t make any offerings. Again he correlates the deprivation of food and joy. It seems quite obvious but their hardness required repetition. Joel continues the imagery of drought and desolation. Lest the people forget, the invasion of this army had left them with nothing and famine was left in the wake of its destruction. Naturally there was no need for buildings to store food when there was none to store, so the image of God’s people tearing down the empty granaries, perhaps to use their materials elsewhere, would be a depressing sight indeed—one that would hopefully drive the people to repeat. Some suggest that the shriveling seed and the withering grain indicate an all together “Supernatural” cause for the famished Land, one not mediated through the natural means mentioned earlier, the army and the swarm. Whatever means God used to judge His people—army of locust, army of men, or drought conditions, we can say with certainty that God brought this judgment down on the people. He was not to blame for their mourning, but He was to be given credit for it; they were His creatures and He has done with them as He pleased. One additional observation here: from the wording in the ESV one could see in the first part of v. 17 an ironic metaphor of sorts. God promised to bless Abraham through his Seed, which we know to be Christ, but who was illustrated by the nation Israel so in the small sense they too are Abraham’s seed. Is it possible that here the people would have been provoked to think of themselves, the people of God as the seed under the clod of the foreign invader? Maybe, but not necessarily, this verse in Joel’s oracle has been met with a great deal of difficulty. So difficult is the translation of this phrase that, more times than not, translation teams were forced to some sore of dynamic equivalence. In its translation, being so hard to understand at face value, speculative commentary understandably creeps in, just like we see of the insects in v. 4.