Albert Barnes Commentary Joel 2:6

"At their presence the peoples are in anguish; all faces are waxed pale." — Joel 2:6 (ASV)

Before their face the people shall be much pained - The locust being such a scourge of God, people have good reason to be terrified at their approach; and those who have most felt the affliction are most terrified.

In Abyssinia, where some provinces were desolated every year, one person relates: “When the locusts travel, the people know of it a day before, not because they see them, but because they see the sun yellow and the ground yellow, from the shadow they cast on it (their wings being yellow). Immediately, the people become as dead, saying, ‘We are lost, for the Ambadas (as they call them) are coming.’

“I will say what I have seen three times; the first was at Barva. During three years that we were in this land, we often heard them say, ‘Such a realm, such a land, is destroyed by locusts.’ And when it was so, we saw this sign: the sun was yellow, and the shadow on the earth the same, and the whole people became as dead.”

He also recounts: “The Captain of the place called Coiberia came to me with men, Clerks, and Brothers (Monks) to ask me, for the love of God, to help them, saying they were all lost because of the locusts.”

The same narrator continues: “There were men, women, and children, sitting among these locusts, the young brood, as if stupefied. I said to them, ‘Why do you stay there, dying? Why do you not kill these animals, and avenge yourselves for the evil their parents have done to you? And at least when dead, they will do you no more harm.’

“They answered that they had no courage to resist a plague that God gave them for their sins. We found the roads full of men, women, and children (some of these on foot, some carried in arms), their bundles of clothes on their heads, moving to some land where they might find provisions. It was pitiful to see them.”

Burkhardt writes about South Arabia: “The Bedouins who occupy the peninsula of Sinai are frequently driven to despair by the multitudes of locusts, which constitute a land-plague. They remain there generally for forty or fifty days, and then disappear for the rest of the year.”

Pliny describes their approach: “They overshadow the sun, the nations looking up with anxiety, lest they should cover their lands. For their strength is sufficient, and as if it were too small a feat to have crossed seas, they traverse immense tracts and cover them with a cloud, fatal to the harvest.”

All faces shall gather blackness - Others, of high authority, have rendered this phrase as meaning that faces shall “withdraw (their) beauty.”

But the word signifies to collect together, so that what is collected may be present, not absent; and so it is very different from another saying, the stars shall withdraw their shining (Joel 2:10; Joel 3:15). (The word “their” would also have needed to be expressed in that case.)

The prophet expresses how faces contract a livid color from anxiety and fear, as Jeremiah says of the Nazarites, Their visage is darker than blackness (Lamentations 4:8, see Margin).

As one scholar puts it: “The faces are clothed with the lurid hue of coming death; hence they not only grow pale, but are blackened.” A slight fear drives the fresh hue from the cheek; the livid hue comes only with the deepest terror.

So Isaiah says, they look amazed one to the other; faces of flame are their faces (Isaiah 13:8).