Joel 1:4–7

Joel 1:4 — Four waves of total destruction "What the swarming locust has left, the great locust has eaten; what the great locust has left, the hopping locust has eaten; and what the hopping locust has left, the destroying locust has eaten." The quadruple enumeration of locust types — gazam, arbeh, yeleq, and ḥasil in Hebrew — is one of the most debated phrases in the Old Testament. Some exegetes (Jerome among them) identified these as four distinct species; others, including Origen and later critical scholars, read them as four stages in the life cycle of a single locust species. The literary effect, however, is unmistakable regardless of the entomological question: each wave strips what the last has left. There is no remainder, no gleaning, no recovery between assaults. The rhetorical accumulation enacts the devastation it describes — the reader, like the land, is left with nothing. This is not random disaster but total consumption, a comprehensive judgment that leaves the economy of Judah — built on grain, wine, and oil — in ruins.

Joel 1:5 — The call to the drunkards "Wake up, you drunkards, and weep; and wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth." The prophet's first summons to mourning is directed not at priests or elders but at drunkards — those most besotted by the very produce now destroyed. This is rhetorically cutting: the people who loved the vine's gifts most will feel its loss most acutely. Joel is not merely lamenting economic loss; he is using the image of wine-drunkenness as a spiritual metaphor. Those who have become intoxicated by comfort, pleasure, and abundance will be forced to sobriety by catastrophe. The wine "cut off from your mouth" evokes the abrupt ending of liturgical joy — wine is inseparable from Israel's feasts and sacrifices (cf. Num 15:5–10). Its loss is therefore both material and cultic.

Joel 1:6 — A nation without number "For a nation has come up against my land, powerful and beyond number; its teeth are lion's teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness." The shift from agricultural description to military metaphor is sudden and chilling. The locusts are now called a goy — a "nation" — a word used consistently in Hebrew for Gentile peoples, foreign armies, threatening powers. The locust swarm is re-imagined as an invading army with "lion's teeth," recalling Proverbs 30:27 (locusts have no king, yet they advance in ranks) and anticipating Joel 2:2–11, where the locust-army imagery becomes fully eschatological. The lion's jaws evoke both raw destructive power and the imagery of Satan as a "roaring lion" (1 Pet 5:8). Crucially, Joel says the nation has come up against my land — YHWH speaking — reminding the reader that the land of Judah is covenantal property, not merely agricultural territory.

Joel 1:7 — Vine and fig tree stripped bare "It has made my vines a waste and splintered my fig trees; it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down; their branches have turned white." Vine and fig tree together form a classical biblical idiom for covenant prosperity and peace (cf. 1 Kgs 4:25; Mic 4:4; Zech 3:10). Their destruction is thus not merely agricultural — it signals the dissolution of the Davidic shalom, the reversal of blessing. The whitened branches stripped of bark suggest death at the structural level: the tree looks like a bleached bone, like a corpse. The vine, which Joel returns to repeatedly (1:10, 12; 2:22), carries Johannine resonance as the central image of Israel's identity and her covenantal relationship with God (cf. Ps 80:8–16; Isa 5:1–7; Jn 15:1–8).

Typological and spiritual senses The Church Fathers (Joel being one of the most allegorized of the minor prophets) consistently read this fourfold devastation as a figure of spiritual ruin wrought by sin. St. Jerome, in his Commentary on Joel, identifies the four locusts as four kingdoms (Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome), but also reads them as the progressive devastation of the soul by different categories of sin and demonic assault. St. Cyril of Alexandria sees the locusts as demonic powers stripping the soul of virtue. At the anagogical level, total devastation precedes total restoration — the pattern of Joel as a whole — making this passage a type of the soul's purgation before renewal, anticipating Joel 2:25: "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten."

Catholic tradition illuminates this passage through several interlocking lenses that secular or purely historical-critical readings miss.

The Land as Covenantal Sacrament: The Catechism teaches that "the earth is the Lord's" (CCC 2402), and Israel's specific land holds covenantal significance beyond geography. When YHWH says "my land" (v. 6), Catholic theology recognizes the land as a type of the Church and ultimately of the new creation — a sacred trust, not a possession. The devastation of the land is thus a theological statement: sin ruptures the relationship between creature and creation (cf. Gen 3:17–18; CCC 400).

Total Loss as Divine Pedagogy: The Church Fathers and the Catechism affirm that God permits suffering and chastisement as instruments of conversion (CCC 1472; 1 Pet 1:6–7). St. Jerome, commenting on this passage, writes that God "does not punish where he has not first called," meaning the locust plague is mercy in severe dress — a summons before judgment. Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (§37), speaks of the "fire" that purifies: Joel's devastation serves a similar purgative function at the communal level.

The Drunkards as a Type of Spiritual Sloth: St. Thomas Aquinas treats acedia — spiritual sloth or torpor — as a grave vice precisely because it anaesthetizes the soul to its own condition (ST II-II, q. 35). The drunkards of verse 5 are a figure of this: numbed by pleasure, they cannot perceive the urgency of their hour. Joel's cry "Wake up!" anticipates Paul's identical summons in Romans 13:11 and Christ's warnings to the disciples in Gethsemane — the perennial call of the Gospel to spiritual vigilance.

Vine and Eucharist: The vine stripped bare in verse 7 acquires profound depth when read through the lens of John 15 and the Eucharist. The Church Fathers, particularly St. Ambrose and St. Cyril of Alexandria, saw in the destruction of the vine an image of what sin does to the soul's communion with Christ, the True Vine. The Eucharist, celebrated with wine, makes the restoration of the vine a sign of eschatological hope (cf. Joel 2:19; Mk 14:25).

Joel's locusts are eerily legible to contemporary Catholics. We live in an age of cumulative stripping — of faith formation, of sacramental practice, of catechetical depth, of contemplative interiority — where each generation inherits a little less than the last, much like each wave of locusts leaves less than the previous. The call to "wake up" in verse 5 is directed first at those most comfortably numbed: the spiritually comfortable, the culturally Catholic, those for whom faith has become background noise rather than life-organizing reality.

Practically, this passage invites a specific examination of conscience: What has been stripped from my spiritual life through gradual inattention, comfort, or distraction? Joel's logic is that loss can become a summons. The Catholic practice of fasting — especially the rigorous Lenten fast — is precisely this: a voluntary entry into the locust's aftermath, stripping away comfort so that God can be encountered again. Pope Francis, in Laudato Si' (§§29–32), reads ecological devastation in a register close to Joel's: the stripping of creation is both a moral symptom and a spiritual summons. Joel's call is to mourn first — genuinely, concretely — before looking to restoration.