Charles Ellicott Commentary Joel 1:7

"He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig-tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white." — Joel 1:7 (ASV)

My vine. —This expression might well captivate the Jewish ear. God appropriates to Himself this land on which the trouble was, by His providence, to fall, and in wrath remembers mercy. It is “my vine,” “my fig-tree,” the people of God’s own choice, that were afflicted; and the affliction, however fully deserved, was, to speak as a man, painful to the Lord, who does not afflict willingly. Yet the devastation was to be complete. God’s pleasant vine was doomed, and the fig-tree was to be cut down.