Joel 4:9-21
New American Bible (Revised Edition)
The Nations Destroyed
9 Announce this to the nations:
Proclaim a holy war!
Alert the warriors!
Let all the soldiers
report and march!(A)
10 [a]Beat your plowshares into swords,
and your pruning knives into spears;
let the weakling boast, “I am a warrior!”(B)
11 Hurry and come, all you neighboring peoples,
assemble there!
Bring down, Lord, your warriors!
12 Let the nations rouse themselves and come up
to the Valley of Jehoshaphat;
For there I will sit in judgment
upon all the neighboring nations.
13 Wield the sickle,(C)
for the harvest is ripe;
Come and tread,
for the wine press is full;
The vats overflow,
for their crimes are numerous.[b]
14 Crowds upon crowds
in the Valley of Decision;
For near is the day of the Lord
in the Valley of Decision.(D)
15 Sun and moon are darkened,
and the stars withhold their brightness,(E)
16 The Lord roars from Zion,
and from Jerusalem raises his voice,(F)
The heavens and the earth quake,
but the Lord will be a shelter for his people,
a fortress for the people of Israel.
A Secure Future for Judah
17 Then you will know[c] that I the Lord am your God,(G)
dwelling on Zion, my holy mountain;
Jerusalem will be holy,
and strangers will never again travel through her.
18 [d]On that day
the mountains will drip new wine,
and the hills flow with milk,
All the streams of Judah
will flow with water.
A spring will rise from the house of the Lord,
watering the Valley of Shittim.(H)
19 Egypt will be a waste,
Edom a desolate wilderness,
Because of violence done to the Judahites,
because they shed innocent blood in their land.(I)
20 But Judah will be inhabited forever,
and Jerusalem for all generations.
21 I will avenge their blood,
and I will not acquit the guilt.
The Lord dwells in Zion.
Footnotes
- 4:10 The Lord directs the troops to forge military weapons out of the agricultural tools necessary for life during peacetime. In Is 2:4 and Mi 4:3, both in contexts presuming the defeat of Israel’s enemies, this imagery is reversed.
- 4:13 Their crimes are numerous: the nations are ripe for punishment. Joel uses the vocabulary of the autumn grape harvest to describe the assault of the Lord’s army against these nations. In Is 63:1–6, grape harvest imagery also controls the description of the Lord’s return from Edom with blood-spattered clothing after having trod his enemies into the ground as if they were grapes (cf. Jer 25:30).
- 4:17 Then you will know: this verse further develops the motif of knowledge introduced in 2:27. The Judahites will learn that the Lord is present in their economic prosperity and political autonomy, even though they did not associate God’s presence with their crop failure.
- 4:18 Images of agricultural abundance illustrate the harmony and order Joel expects the Lord to establish in Judah; like 2:18–27, this section reverses the deprivation and drought of chap. 1. A spring…house of the Lord: streams of water flowing from the Temple of an ideal Jerusalem also appear in Ez 47:1. The Valley of Shittim: or “the ravine of the acacia trees”; while there is a Shittim east of the Jordan, the reference here is probably to that rocky part of the Kidron Valley southeast of Jerusalem, an arid region where acacia trees flourished.
Scripture texts, prefaces, introductions, footnotes and cross references used in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.