John Calvin Commentary Joel 1:6-7

"For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number; his teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the jaw-teeth of a lioness. 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 1:6-7 (ASV)

I repeat, I do not approve of what some think, that punishment not yet inflicted is proclaimed here against the people. On the contrary, in my view, the Prophet records another judgment of God to show that God had not only warned the Jews of their sins in one way, so that He might restore them to a right mind, but that He had tried all means to bring them to the right way, though they proved to be irreclaimable.

After having spoken of the barrenness of the fields and of other calamities, he now adds that the Jews had been visited with war. Surely famine should have touched them, especially when they saw that evils following evils had happened for several years, contrary to the normal course of events, so that they could not be attributed to chance.

But when God brought war upon them, when they were already worn out by famine, must they not have been worse than insane to have remained stupefied by God’s judgments and not repented? So the Prophet's meaning is that God had tried by every means possible to see if the Jews were healable and had given them every opportunity to repent, but they were completely perverse and untamable.

Then he says, Verily a nation came up. The particle ki is not to be taken as causative, but only as explanatory: Verily, or surely, he says, a nation came up. An inference is also not out of place if it is drawn from the beginning of the verse: ‘Hear, you old men, and tell your children;’ what shall we tell? Even this: that a nation, etc. But in this form also, ki would be exegetical, and the sense would be the same. So much for the meaning of the passage.

A nation, then, came up over my land. God here justly claims the land of Canaan as His own heritage, and does so intentionally, so that the Jews might more clearly know that He was angry with them. For their condition would not have been worse than that of other nations if God had not resolved to punish them for their sins.

There is here then an implied comparison between Judea and other countries, as if the Prophet said, “How is it that your land is wasted by wars and many other calamities, while other countries are at rest? This land is no doubt sacred to God, for He has chosen it for Himself, so that He might rule in it; He has His own habitation here. It must then be that there is some cause for God’s wrath, as your land is so miserably wasted, while other lands enjoy tranquillity.” We now understand what the Prophet means.

A nation, he says, came up upon my land, and what then? God could surely have prevented this; He could have defended His own land, of which He was the keeper and which was under His protection. How then did it happen that enemies inundated this land with impunity, marching into it and utterly laying it waste, unless it had been forsaken by the Lord Himself?

A nation, he says, came up upon my land, strong and without number; and further, who had the teeth of a lion, the jaw-bones of a young lion. The nations had no strength that God could not have broken down in an instant, nor did He need mighty auxiliaries, for He could with only a nod have reduced to nothing whatever men might have attempted. Therefore, when the Assyrians so impetuously assailed the Jews, they were necessarily exposed to the malice of their enemies, for they were unworthy of being protected, as previously, by God's hand.

He afterwards adds that his vine had been exposed to desolation and waste, his fig-tree to the stripping of the bark. God is not speaking here of His own vine, as in some other places where He designates His Church by this term; but He calls everything on earth His own, just as He calls the whole race of Abraham His children. He thus reproaches the Jews for having brought such wretchedness upon themselves through their own fault. For they would never have been plundered by their enemies if God, who was accustomed to defend them, had not previously rejected them. There was nothing in their land that He did not claim as His own; as He had chosen the people, so He had consecrated the land to Himself. Whatever, then, existed in Judea was, as it were, sacred to God. Now when both the vines and the fig trees were exposed to the depredations of the unbelievers, it was certain that God no longer ruled there. How so? Simply because the Jews had expelled Him.

He later expands on the same subject. For what follows, By denuding he has denuded it and cast it away, is not merely a narrative. The Prophet here is not simply declaring what had taken place; but, as we have already said, brings forward more proof and tries to awaken the drowsy senses of the people, indeed, to arouse them from the lethargy that had seized all their minds. This is why he uses so many expressions in his teaching. This is the reason he says that the vine and the fig tree had been denuded, the leaves taken away, and the branches made bare and white, so that neither produce nor growth remained.

Many interpreters connect these three verses with the former ones, as if the Prophet were now expressing what he had previously said about the palmerworm, the chafer, and the locust. For they think that he spoke allegorically when he said that all the fruits of the land had been consumed by the locusts and the chafers. They therefore add that these locusts, or chafers, or palmerworms were the Assyrians, as well as the Persians, the Greeks (that is, Alexander of Macedon), and the Romans. But this is an entirely strained view, so there is no need for a long argument. Anyone can easily perceive that the Prophet is mentioning another kind of punishment, so that he might in every way make the Jews inexcusable, who were not roused by such multiplied judgments but still remained obstinate in their vices.