Joel 2:20

But I will remove far off from you the northern [army],.... The army of the locusts, which came from the northern corner, as Aben Ezra and Kimchi; and is the first sense Jarchi makes mention of;

But I will remove far off from you the northern army, and will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hinder part toward the utmost sea, and his stink

But, Heb. And, I will remove far off from you the northern army; that part of these numerous locusts which are towards the north shall be removed far from you, no more to annoy you on that quarter: some say this refers to the dissipation of Sennacherib’ s army, which came up from the parts which lay somewhat northerly from Jerusalem and Judea. And will drive him; some other part of this locust army shall be driven away into the southern deserts, here described by a barren and desolate land. His face; the van of this army, here called the face, shall be driven into the east sea; the sea of Tiberias, or the Salt Sea, or the Dead Sea, east of Jerusalem. His hinder part, the rear of this army of insects, shall be driven into the great, the west sea, here called the utmost sea, in the letter and history. The total destruction of this army of insects is here foretold, which no doubt came to pass. If Sennacherib’ s army and its dissipation were here shadowed out, it is fairly accommodable to this place, when upon his death and the rout of his army from heaven, his forces retired out of Judea on all quarters with loss of men, as is ever the fate of an invading army beaten in the heart of the invaded country. His ill savour shall come up; the stench of these locusts destroyed and lying putrefied on the face of the earth, or the corpses of the Assyrians slain and unburied. Because he hath done great things: some refer this to the locusts, and those whom they signified; he, i.e. this army of locusts or Assyrians: others refer it to God, thus, for he will do great things; as indeed the utter destroying of this devouring army, and removal of this dreadful famine, was a great work and marvellous, and it was an answer to their fasting and praying; though it was not all done which is contained in this conditional promise, for that this people never performed the condition.

Joe 2:20 But I will remove far off from you the northern [army], and will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hinder part toward the utmost sea, and his stink shall come up, and his ill savour shall come up, because he hath done great things.Ver. 20. But I will remove far off from you the northern army] sc. of vermin, of those destroying creatures that came from the north. Ab Aquilone nihil boni was a proverb among this people. God promiseth here to free them of that mischief, and to disimpest the country of those noisome insects. Gratiae privativae plures sunt quam positivae, saith Gerson, God’ s privative favours to us are more than his positive; hence man’ s happiness is usually called salvation, which properly betokeneth the privative part thereof. Little do we consider or understand from how many deaths and dangers we are daily and hourly delivered. It is good to keep a catalogue of God’ s providences, and to transmit them to posterity, such as was that of the gunpowder plot; and before that, of the Reformation begun by Henry VIII, and carried on by his son, to the ridding of the land of those popish locusts; which Reformation, how imperfect soever, to be done by so weak and simple means, yea, by casual and cross means, against the force of so puissant and political an adversary, is that miracle, which we are in these times to look for. An outlander speaketh thus of it, Ecclesiae Anglicanae reformationem desperasset aetas praeterita, admiratur praesens, obstupescet futura (Scultet.). This was the Lord’ s own work, and it is marvellous in our eyes. Oh that the same Lord would be both author and finisher! and as he hath in good part cut off the names of the idols out of the land, so that they shall be no more remembered; so he would cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land, that he would send all false doctrine and heresy packing to hell from whence they came. Fiat, Fiat. Do it, do it! And will drive him into a land barren and desolate] Or, dry and forlorn, where he shall perish for want of food. The body of this army shall be driven into the wilderness, the vanguard into the lake of Sodom toward the east; and the rearward into the Mediterranean Sea, toward the west; for the Western Ocean was hardly known to the Hebrews; as neither was it to the Romans, till the days of Julius Caesar. And his stink shall come up, and his ill savour, &c.] se. by reason of their dead carcases covering the earth, and infecting the air. The old Hebrews understood this text concerning the destruction of the devil in the days of the Messiah.

(20) The northern army.—Literally, him of the north. “This is an exception to the usual direction of the flight of locusts” (Stanley, Jewish Church), but it may be literally applied to the Assyrian hordes, whom the Jews generally spoke of as dwelling in the north. In Jeremiah 1:13 the symbolical caldron is represented as pouring its contents (the Chaldæan army) southwards from the face of the north. And even though the wind might be conceived as capriciously blowing the locusts from the north, yet the addition of the patronymic syllable to the Hebrew word indicates a native of the north, which excludes a reference to locusts. Under the image of the destruction of the locusts, the prophet points to the deliverance from the northern invaders. The east sea is the Dead Sea; the utmost or hinder sea is the Mediterranean; the desolate land is the southern desert. The northern invader shall be expelled all along the coasts of Palestine. His stink shall come up. In the eighth plague of Egypt, when on the repentance of Pharaoh the locusts were removed, they were cast into the Red Sea, and there remained not one locust in all the coasts of Egypt (Exodus 10:19). In the present instance there is the result stated in the case of the decomposition of the bodies of the locusts left on the land: the air was infected with a horrible pestilence. There are various allusions to this terrible result of their putrefaction in the writers who describe the horrors of a plague of locusts. St. Jerome tells of the awful sufferings inflicted on man and beast through this cause; and St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, iii. 31) relates that eight hundred thousand men perished from this reason in the kingdom of Masinissa alone, besides many more near the coast. Thus Joel declares the complete destruction of the enemies of Israel, who having completed the purpose of vengeance for which they were summoned, and, like the Assyrians under the walls of Jerusalem, having exalted themselves against the Lord, perish miserably under the stroke of His power.

Verse 20. I will remove far off from you the northern army] "That is, the locusts; which might enter Judea by the north, as Circassia and Mingrelia abound with them. Or the locusts may be thus called, because they spread terror like the Assyrian armies, which entered Judea by the north. See Zephaniah 2:13." - Newcome. Syria, which was northward of Judea, was infested with them; and it must have been a northern wind that brought them into Judea, in the time of Joel; as God promises to change this wind, and carry them into a barren and desolate land, Arabia Deserta. "And his face toward the east sea," i.e., the Dead Sea, which lay eastward of Jerusalem. "His hinder part toward the utmost sea," the western sea, i.e., the Mediterranean. And his stink shall come up] After having been drowned by millions in the Mediterranean, the reflux of the tide has often brought them back, and thrown there in heaps upon the shore, where they putrefied in such a manner as to infect the air and produce pestilence, by which both men and cattle have died in great multitudes. See Bochart, Hieroz., vol. ii., p. 481. Livy, and St. Augustine after him, relate that there was such an immense crowd of locusts in Africa that, having eaten up every green thing, a wind arose that carried them into the sea, where they perished; but being cast upon the shore, they putrefied, and bred such a pestilence, that eighty thousand men died of it in the kingdom of Massinissa, and thirty thousand in the garrison of Utica, in which only ten remained alive. See Calmet and Livy, lib. xc., and August. De Civitate Dei, lib. iv., c. 31. We have many testimonies of a similar kind. Because he hath done great things] Or, כי ki, although he have done great things, or, after he has done them, i.e., in almost destroying the whole country.

20. from you] lit. from upon you, from being a burden on you; a delicate Hebrew idiom which cannot generally be represented without stiffness in English: comp. on Amos 5:23; and see Exodus 10:17 (‘remove from upon me,’—also of locusts). the northern army] lit. the northern one. The reference, as seems evident both from the context and also from the words following (which exactly describe the fate of a swarm of locusts), can be only to the locusts: although it is true that locusts generally invade Palestine from the S. or S. E., there is not sufficient ground for supposing this rule to be a universal one: they are not indigenous in Palestine, but are brought thither by the wind from their breeding-ground; and instances are on record of their being seen in the Syrian desert—Niebuhr, for instance (Credner, p. 271), saw a large tract of country between Mosul and Nisibis covered with young locusts—whence a N.E. wind would readily bear them towards Judah, in which case the epithet Northern would very naturally be applied to them (the Chaldaeans, though Babylon is in reality almost due East of Palestine, are often spoken of as coming from the North, on account of that being the usual direction of their approach; Jeremiah 13:20; Jeremiah 47:2, &c.). into a dry land, and a waste] i.e. into the desert, on the S.E. or S. of Judah. his forepart (or van: lit. face) into the east sea] lit. the front sea, i.e. the Dead Sea (Ezekiel 47:18; Zechariah 14:8). and his rear (lit. end) into the west sea] lit. the hinder sea, i.e. the Mediterranean Sea (Deuteronomy 11:24; Deuteronomy 34:2; Zechariah 14:8). The Hebrews, like other ancient nations, in fixing the points of the compass, faced Eastwards; hence in front or before is often used for the East, behind for the West, the right hand for the South (cf. the Arab. Yemen, i.e. the South part of Arabia). The description of the removal of the locusts is naturally not to be understood with prosaic literalness: it is intended rather as an imaginative representation of their rapid and complete destruction, though a wind rising first in the N.W., and afterwards gradually veering round to the N.E., would produce approximately the effects indicated. Rear (ρεσ) is properly an Aramaic word (Daniel 4:8, &c.), occurring otherwise only in late Hebrew, 2 Chronicles 20:16; Ecclesiastes 3:11; Ecclesiastes 7:2; Ecclesiastes 12:13. [and his stink shall come up,] that his foulness may come up] The tautology, and especially the tense and construction (εְ ?ϊַ ?ςַ ?μ) of the second clause make it probable that the first clause (here bracketed) is a gloss, based upon Isaiah 34:3 (cf. Amos 4:10), designed for the purpose of explaining the rare word (found only here) rendered foulness[43]. The reference is to the decaying carcases of the locusts, which often (see below) have been known to produce putrid exhalations. [43] The meaning is fixed by the Aramaic (see Payne Smith, Thes. Syr. col. 3393–4).because he hath done great things] lit. hath shewn greatness in doing.

And I will remove far off from you the northern army - God speaks of the human agent under the figure of the locusts, which perish in the sea; yet so as to show at once, that He did not intend the

19. The jealousy and pity bring about a change in the purpose of God, which change is indicated in the reply to the petitions. The things needed immediately will be restored at once.