Joel 1
New Catholic Bible
Mourning and Repentance in Judea
Chapter 1
The Countryside Is Ravaged.[a] 1 This is the word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel:
2 Hear this, you elders!
Listen to me, all you inhabitants of the land!
Has anything like this ever happened in your days
or in the days of your ancestors?
3 Tell your children about it,
and let them relate it to their children,
and their children to the next generation.
4 What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten.
And what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten.
5 Wake up, you drunkards, and weep!
Lament, all you winedrinkers!
For the juice of the grape
will be snatched from your mouth.
6 For a nation has invaded my land,
powerful and too vast to count,
possessing teeth like those of a lion,
and the fangs of a lioness.
7 It has laid waste my vines
and destroyed my fig trees,
stripping off their bark
and leaving their branches white.
8 Lament like a virgin garbed in sackcloth
grieving for the betrothed of her youth.
9 Grain offerings and drink offerings are cut off
from the house of the Lord.
The priests, the ministers of the Lord,
are in mourning.
10 The fields are destroyed;
the earth mourns.
The grain has been ruined;
the wine has dried up;
the oil has failed.
11 Despair, you farmers,
and wail, you vinedressers,
over the wheat and the barley;
the harvest of the fields is lost.
12 The vine has withered;
the fig tree droops.
The pomegranate, the palm, and the apple tree—
all the trees of the field have dried up.
And the joy of the people
has also withered away.
Announce a Holy Fast; Proclaim a Solemn Assembly[b]
13 Put on sackcloth and lament, you priests!
Wail, you ministers of the altar!
Come, pass the entire night in sackcloth,
you ministers of my God!
For the house of your God is deprived
of grain offerings and libations.
14 Announce a holy fast;
proclaim a solemn assembly.
Summon the elders
and all the inhabitants of the land
to the house of the Lord, your God,
and cry out to the Lord.
15 Woe to us on that day!
For the day of the Lord[c] is near,
coming as destruction from the Almighty.
16 Has not the food been cut off
before our very eyes?
Have not joy and gladness disappeared
from the house of our God?
17 The seed has shriveled under the clods;
the storehouses are empty,
and the granaries are deserted
because the grain has dried up.
18 How loudly the cattle groan!
The herds of oxen are bewildered
because they have no pasture;
even the flocks of sheep are wasting away.
19 To you, O Lord, I cry,
for fire has consumed the open pastures
and flames have destroyed every tree in the countryside.
20 Even the beasts of the field
cry out to you.
For the streams of water have dried up,
and fire has devoured the open pastures.
Footnotes
- Joel 1:1 The prophet convokes the ancients, the chiefs of the villages. In some harrowing images, he evokes the disaster without compare: an invasion of locusts, which wreaks more devastation than an invasion by an army.
- Joel 1:13 In the midst of stupor and distress, one turns toward God; for in the eyes of the prophet and his contemporaries, suffering a calamity was a sign of heaven’s wrath. May everyone take part in a grand liturgy: mourning, fasting, and praying must prepare hearts for a true conversion.
- Joel 1:15 The day of the Lord is that of a judgment: which one often imagines under the form of a general catastrophe preceding the reestablishment of the reign of God. Almighty: i.e., an ancient biblical name for God (El-shaddai) used here because of its play on words in Hebrew.
