Albert Barnes Commentary Joel 2:20

"but I will remove far off from you the northern [army], and will drive it into a land barren and desolate, its forepart into the eastern sea, and its hinder part into the western sea; and its stench shall come up, and its ill savor shall come up, because it hath done great things." — Joel 2:20 (ASV)

And I will remove far from you the northern army - God speaks of the human agent under the figure of the locusts, which perish in the sea, yet in such a way as to show at once that He did not intend the locust itself, nor to describe the method by which He would overthrow the human oppressor. He is not speaking of the locust itself, because the "Northern" is not a name for the locust that infested Palestine, since it came from the south. Nor would the destruction of the locust be in two opposite seas, since they are uniformly driven by the wind into the sea, upon whose waves they alight and perish; but the wind would not carry them into two opposite seas. Nor would the locust perish in a “barren and desolate” land, but would fly further. Nor would it be said of the locust that it was destroyed, Because he had done great things.

But He represents to us how this enemy would be driven completely out of the bounds of His people, so that he would not trouble them any longer, but perish.

The imagery is from the holy land.

The “East sea” is the Dead Sea, once the fertile “valley of Siddim” (Genesis 14:3), “in which sea were formerly Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, until God overthrew them.” This, in the Pentateuch, is called “the salt sea” (Genesis 14:3; Numbers 34:3, 12), or “the sea of the plain,” or “desert” (Deuteronomy 3:17; Deuteronomy 4:49; Joshua 3:16; Joshua 12:3; Joshua 15:25; Joshua 18:19; also in 2 Kings 14:25), explained in Deuteronomy and Joshua to be “the salt sea” (Deuteronomy 3:0; Joshua 3:0; Joshua 12:0). Ezekiel calls it “the East sea” (Ezekiel 47:18), and in Numbers it is said of it, your south border shall be the salt sea eastward (Numbers 34:3).

The “utmost,” or rather, the “hinder sea” (Deuteronomy 11:24; Deuteronomy 34:2) (that is, that which is behind one who is looking toward the east, whose Hebrew name is from “fronting” you) is the Mediterranean, “on whose shores are Gaza, Ascalon, Azotus, Joppa, and Caesarea.” The “land barren and desolate,” lying between, is the desert of Arabia, the southern boundary of the holy land.

The picture then seems to be that the “Northern” foes filled the whole of Judea, in numbers like the locust, and that God drove them violently out, all along the bounds of the holy land, into the desert, the Dead Sea, and the Mediterranean.

Jerome relates a mercy of God in his own time which illustrates the image. However, he writes so much in the language of Holy Scripture that perhaps he only means that the locusts were driven into the sea, not into both seas: “In our times too we have seen hosts of locusts cover Judea, which afterward, by the mercy of the Lord, when the priests and people, between the porch and the altar (that is, between the place of the Cross and the Resurrection) prayed to the Lord and said, spare Your people, a wind arose and carried them headlong ‘into the Eastern sea, and the utmost sea.’”

Alvarez relates how, when priests and people joined in litanies to God, He delivered them from a severe plague of locusts, which covered 24 English miles, just as He delivered Egypt of old at the prayer of Moses. “When we knew of this plague being so near, most of the clergy of the place came to me, asking me to tell them some remedy against it.

I answered them that I knew of no remedy except to commend themselves to God and to pray Him to drive the plague out of the land. I went to the Ambassador and told him that it seemed good to me that we should make a procession with the people of the land, and that it might please our Lord God to hear us. This also seemed good to the Ambassador. On the morning of the next day, we gathered the people of the place and all the Clergy. We took our altar-stone, and those of the place theirs, and our Cross and theirs. Singing our litany, we went out from the Church, accompanied by all the Portuguese and the greater part of the people of the place.

I told them that they should not keep silent, but should, like us, cry aloud, saying in their tongue, ‘Zio marinos’ (that is, in ours, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us’).

And with this cry and litany, we went through open wheat country for about a third of a league. It pleased our Lord to hear the sinners. As we were turning back—because their (the locusts’) path was toward the sea from where they had come—so many flew after us that it seemed as if they sought to break our ribs and heads with blows like stones, such were the blows they dealt us. At this time a great thunderstorm arose from the direction of the sea, which met them head-on with rain and hail, lasting a full three hours. The river and brooks swelled greatly. When their advance stopped, it was a matter of amazement that the dead locusts on the bank of the great river measured two cubits high; and likewise, by the rivulets, there was a great multitude of dead ones on their banks.

The next morning, there was not even one live locust in the whole land.”

And his stink shall come up - The image is still from the locust. It, being such a fearful scourge of God—every individual full of activity and life, repeated countlessly in the innumerable host—is, at God’s will and in His time, cast by His word into the sea. When thrown up by the waves on the shore, it becomes in a few hours one indistinguishable, putrefying, heaving mass.

Such do human malice, ambition, and pride become as soon as God casts aside the sinful instrument of His chastisement. Just now, a world to conquer could not satisfy it; it deems itself superior to man and independent of God. He takes away its breath; it is a putrid carcass.

Such was Sennacherib’s army: in the evening inspiring terror, yet before the morning, he is not (Isaiah 17:14). They were all dead corpses (Isaiah 37:36).

The likeness stops here, for the punishment is at an end. The wicked and the persecutors of God’s people are cut off; the severance has taken place. On one side, there is the putrefying mass; on the other, the jubilee of thanksgiving. The gulf is fixed between them. The offensive smell of the corruption ascends; as Isaiah closes his prophecy, “the carcases” of the wicked, the perpetual prey of the “worm and the fire, shall be an abhorring to all flesh.” The righteous behold it, but it does not reach them to hurt them.

In actual life, the putrid exhalations have at times, among those on the seashore, produced a pestilence—a second visitation of God, more destructive than the first. This, however, has seldom happened. Yet what a mass of decay it must have been, from creatures so slight, to produce a wide-wasting pestilence! What an image of the numbers of those who perish, and of the fetidness of sin!

Augustine, in answer to the pagan who imputed all the calamities of the later Roman Empire to the displeasure of the gods because the world had become Christian, says, “They themselves have recorded that the multitude of locusts was, even in Africa, a sort of prodigy while it was a Roman province. They say that after the locusts had consumed the fruits and leaves of trees, they were cast into the sea in a vast, incalculable cloud; these, having died and been cast back on the shores, and the air being infected by them, caused such a pestilence that in the realm of Masinissa alone 800,000 men perished, and many more in the lands on the coasts.

Then at Utica, out of 30,000 men in the prime of life who were there, they assert that only 10 remained.”

Jerome says of the locusts of Palestine: “When the shores of both seas were filled with heaps of dead locusts which the waters had cast up, their stench and putrefaction was so noxious as to corrupt the air, so that a pestilence was produced among both beasts and men.”

Modern writers offer similar accounts. One says: “The locusts not only produce a famine, but in districts near the sea where they have been drowned, they have occasioned a pestilence from the putrid effluvia of the immense numbers blown upon the coast or thrown up by the tides.”

Another observes: “We observed, in May and June, a number of these insects coming from the south, directing their course to the northern shore; they darken the sky like a thick cloud, but scarcely have they quitted the shore before they who, a moment before, ravaged and ruined the country, cover the surface of the sea with their dead bodies, to the great distress of the Franks near the harbor, on account of the stench from such a number of dead insects, driven by the winds close to the very houses.”

A further writer details: “All the full-grown insects were driven into the sea by a tempestuous northwest wind and were afterward cast upon the beach, where, it is said, they formed a bank 3 or 4 feet high, extending a distance of nearly 50 English miles. It is asserted that when this mass became putrid and the wind was southeast, the stench was noticeably felt in several parts of Sneuwberg. The column passed the houses of two of our party, who asserted that it continued without any interruption for more than a month.”

And another confirms: “The south and east winds drive the clouds of locusts with violence into the Mediterranean and drown them in such quantities that when their dead are cast on the shore, they infect the air to a great distance.”

This presents a wonderful image of the instantaneous ease, and completeness of the destruction of God’s enemies: a mass of active life exchanged, in a moment, into a mass of death.

Because he has done great things - Literally (as in the English margin), “because he has magnified to do,” that is, as used of man, “has done proudly.” To “do greatly” (Joel 2:21; Psalms 126:2–3; 1 Samuel 12:24), or to “magnify Himself” (Ezekiel 38:23), when used of God, is to display His essential greatness, in goodness to His people, or in vengeance on their enemies.

Man’s great deeds are mostly deeds of great ambition, great violence, great pride, and great iniquity. And so, concerning him, the words “he magnified himself” (Isaiah 10:15; Daniel 11:36–37) or “he did greatly” (Lamentations 1:9; Zephaniah 2:8; Daniel 8:4, 8, 11, 25) mean that he acted ambitiously and proudly, and so offended God.

Similarly, “great doings,” when used of God, are His great works of good; but of man, they are his great works of evil. As one writer puts it: “Man has great deserts, but evil.” “To speak great things” (Psalms 12:3; Daniel 7:8, 11, 20) is to speak proud things; “greatness of heart” (Isaiah 9:9; Isaiah 10:12) is pride of heart.

He is speaking, then, of man who was God’s instrument in chastening His people. For concerning irrational, irresponsible creatures, a term involving moral fault would not have been used, nor would a moral fault have been set down as the reason God destroyed them.

The destruction of Sennacherib or Holofernes has been suggested as the fulfillment of this prophecy. They were part of its fulfillment and illustrate the great law of God which it declares: that instruments He employs, which then exceed the office He assigns them or accomplish it for their own ends, He casts away and destroys.