Joel 1:15

Alas for the day! for the day of the Lord [is] at hand,.... A time of severer and heavier judgments than these of the locusts, caterpillars, c.

Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.

This verse and the three next may be looked upon either as a particular declaration of the grounds of this fast, or as a direction how to manage the fast, a suggesting to the people what they should spread before the Lord, or else as the words of the priests, bewailing the calamitous state of the land. Alas! it is a very pathetical bemoaning themselves, which speaks their sense of the evil they suffered. For the day; the day of trouble, sorrow, and great distress. For the day of the Lord: this explains the former; it is a day of greater troubles than yet they felt, troubles which God will heap upon them, a day in which God will be judge, and punish by the locusts, by the drought, and by Babylonians, unless you repent. Is at hand; great calamities were now upon them, and greater were approaching to them: if the prophet aim at the captivity of the two tribes, it was one hundred and eighty years off; if of the ten tribes, it was about sixty years off, for he prophesieth about the latter end of Jeroboam the Second; it is likely therefore he aimeth at some other calamities. As a destruction; a total overthrow of the kingdom, the worship of God, and all your labours in your land. From the Almighty; whose displeasure, as a consuming fire, can and will burn up all before it; his power and hand will do it, and then nothing can resist it. Shall it come; most certainly and speedily, nothing can retard or divert it, unless fasting, prayers, and tears, and amendment do it.

Joe 1:15 Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD [is] at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.Ver. 15. Alas, for the day, &c.] Gr. Alas, Alas, Alas; the Vulgate Latin A, A, A, which a Lapide makes much ado about, to little purpose. For the day of the Lord] That is, the day of the greatest evils and miseries that ever hitherto they had suffered, if repentance prevent not. That they had suffered much already appeareth Joe 2:25, but those were but the beginnings of their sorrows, if they yet went on in their sins. For as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come] An elegant alliteration there is in the original; together with an allusion to that tremendis title of God, Shaddai. The Jews (probably) boasted much and bare themselves overly bold upon their interest in God Almighty. The prophet therefore tells them that God’ s greatest power should be little to their profit while impenitent; for that it should be put forth and exercised for their utter destruction. Aben Ezra interpreteth Shaddai a conqueror, others a destroyer, which a conqueror must needs be. And hereto this text and that Isaiah 13:6, do allude, when they say Shod shall come from Shaddai, Destruction from the Almighty. Here, also, we may learn when we are under affliction to ascend to the first cause thereof, Amos 3:6, as David did in that three years’ famine, 2 Samuel 21:1. See James 3:3-8.

(15) Alas.—The exclamation is repeated three times in the LXX. and Vulg., thus giving occasion to Jeremy Taylor’s comment: “When the prophet Joel was describing the formidable accidents in the day of the Lord’s judgment, and the fearful sentence of an angry judge, he was not able to express it, but stammered like a child, or an amazed imperfect person, A. A. A. diei, quia prope est Dies Domini” (“Christ’s Adv. to Judgment,” Serm. iii., pt. 3). Almighty.—Shaddai. A title signifying the omnipotence of God, especially with reference, as here, to His power to destroy. The Hebrew preserves the alliteration, Shod Mishaddai, destruction from the destroyer. The Almighty was the general title of God. “I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by the name of God , but by My name JEHOVAH was I not known unto them.” (See Note on Genesis 17)

Verse 15. Alas for the day!] The Syriac repeats this, the Vulgate, Septuagint, and Arabic, thrice: "Alas, alas, alas, for the day!" As a destruction from the Almighty] The destruction that is now coming is no ordinary calamity; it is as a signal judgment immediately inflicted by the Almighty.

15. The prophet states more distinctly the ground for the exhortations of Joe 1:13-14. The present calamity is viewed by him as the harbinger of a far sorer calamity to come, even of the great “Day of Jehovah” itself; and he gives expression to the alarm which the prospect of its approach naturally creates. Alas for the day] cf. Ezekiel 30:2 (where the Heb. is all but the same,—δָ ?δּ for ΰֲ ?δָ ?δּ). For the day of Jehovah is at hand (or near)] The same words as Joe 3:14; Zephaniah 1:7; Obadiah 1:15; Isaiah 13:6 : comp. ch. Joe 2:1; Zephaniah 1:14; Ezekiel 30:3. On the ‘Day of Jehovah’ comp. A. B. Davidson on Zephaniah 1:7; and below, on Amos 5:18. It is the Day, when Jehovah is conceived as manifesting Himself in His fulness, striking down wrongdoing and illusion, and giving the final victory to righteousness and truth. The origin of the conception as applied by the prophets, is to be found in Amos’ transformation of a popular idea (see on Amos 5:18). The presentiment of the approach of Jehovah’s Day was often awakened in the minds of the prophets by the prospect of some great political movement among the nations of the earth. In the case of Joel the presentiment is awakened by an extraordinary visitation of Providence. In Joel also the Day of Jehovah is invested, more distinctly than is the case in the earlier prophets, with an eschatological significance: see esp. Joe 2:31, Joe 3:1-2; Joe 3:9-17; and comp. above, p. 33. as devastation from the Almighty (Heb. Shaddai) shall it come] The phrase is borrowed verbatim from Isaiah 13:6 (in the announcement of the doom approaching upon Babylon in b.c. 538) “Howl ye: for the day of Jehovah is at hand; as devastation from the Almighty shall it come.” In the original there is an effective assonance between devastation (shτd), and Almighty (Shaddai), which might perhaps be preserved, though not with the force and compactness of the Hebrew, by the rendering, as an overpowering from the Over-powerer shall it come[31]. See further, on the divine title Shaddai, the Additional Note, p. 81. For ‘devastation,’ as sent by Jehovah, comp. also Jeremiah 25:36; Jeremiah 47:4; Jeremiah 51:53; Jeremiah 51:55 (A.V. spoil), Amos 5:9. The ‘as’ (λ) is here an example of what is termed by some grammarians the “Caph veritatis”: the coming visitation will be what a devastation proceeding from the Almighty might be expected to be, it will realize what the term implies, it will be a veritable “overpowering from the Over-powerer.” [31] Ewald, wie Gewalt vom Allgewaltigen: Wellhausen, wie Vergewaltigung vom Allgewaltigen.Additional Note on Chap. Joe 1:15 (Shaddai)Shaddai is a Divine title, occurring (a) as an adj.

Alas for the day! for the Day of the Lord is at hand - The judgment of God, then, which they were to deprecate, was still to come. : “All times and all days are God’s.

15-20. Not a petition which the prophet puts into the mouths of the priests, but the prophet’s own words, explaining the seriousness of the calamity and thus presenting the reason for the appeal in 13, 14.