1 THE WORD of the Lord that came to 1 Joel the son of Pethuel.
2 Hear this, you aged men, and give ear, all you inhabitants of the land! Has such a thing as this occurred in your days or even in the days of your fathers? 3 Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.
4 What the crawling locust left, the swarming locust has eaten; and what the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten; and what the hopping locust left, the stripping locust has eaten.
5 Awake, you drunkards, and weep; wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the [fresh] sweet juice [of the grape], for it is cut off and removed from your mouth. 6 For a [heathen and hostile] nation [of locusts, illustrative of a human foe] has invaded My land, mighty and without number; its teeth are the teeth of a lion, and it has the jaw teeth of a lioness. 7 It has laid waste My vine [symbol of God's people] and barked and broken My fig tree; it has made them completely bare and thrown them down; their branches are made white.
8 Lament like a virgin [bride] girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth [who has died]. 9 The meal or cereal offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the Lord; the priests, the Lord's ministers, mourn. 10 The field is laid waste, the ground mourns; for the grain is destroyed, the new juice [of the grape] is dried up, the oil fails.
11 Be ashamed, O you tillers of the soil; wail, O you vinedressers, for the wheat and for the barley, because the harvest of the field has perished. 12 The vine is dried up and the fig tree fails; the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple or quince tree, even all the trees of the field are withered, so that joy has withered and fled away from the sons of men.