Restores My Soul

Historical Context

Joel never says when he preached, and two readings of his book compete without a clear winner. One places him early, in the years after the queen mother, Athaliah, seized the throne and killed off the rest of the royal line. A coup led by the priest Jehoiada killed her and put her one surviving grandson, the child Joash, on the throne. Jehoiada ran the country as regent while the king was still a boy. That fits a book where priests lead the response to disaster and no king is ever mentioned. The other reading places Joel after the exile, when Judah had no king because the monarchy itself was gone, and the temple stood at the center of what was left of the community. Neither side has settled the argument.

What both readings share is the disaster itself. Locust swarms went through the fields in successive waves, each kind stripping what the last kind had left standing, and drought followed close behind. For farmers who ate what they grew, that meant no harvest at all that year, not a smaller one. Grain and wine were also what fed the altar: flour mixed with oil, and wine poured out beside it, both came from that same crop. When the crop failed, the priests had nothing left to bring. A ruined harvest was also how a farmer went into debt: he pledged his cloak or his millstone against a loan, counting on next year’s crop to pay it off.

Reflection

The years themselves do not come back. Nobody relives a season once it is gone. What is promised instead is what grows next: a harvest as full as if the locusts had never touched the field. Most people are carrying some version of eaten years: time, health, or a chance that a bad stretch took and never gave back. The promise is not that those years return. It is that what comes after them does not have to be smaller because of it.