NORTHERNER (הַצְּפﯴנִ֞י, the northerner or the northern one).

The expression, “the northerner,” occurs only in Joel 2:20 in a context describing a locust plague and generally is taken to refer to that plague. However, because such swarms of locusts generally come from the S, some assert that this is Joel’s picturesque way of describing the invading foe from the N mentioned so often in Jeremiah particularly. The mention of the “day of the Lord” in 1:15 and 2:1 (from the section on the plague) lends credence to this view. Some believe that Joel had both in purview and that he looked upon the locusts as a type of the eschatological day of the Lord. See The National Geographic Magazine, Dec., 1915, for a report of a locust plague in Pal. which originated in the N.