III.  The Prophecy of Joel.  For a brief moment the clear light of contemporary prophecy is turned upon the Judean community by the little book of Joel.  The immediate occasion was the invasion of a great swarm of locusts which swept into Judea either from the desert or from the mountains in the north.  It contains in 3:6 the first Old Testament reference to the Greeks.  From 3:2 it is evident that the Jewish race has already been widely scattered.  In 3:2 the hope is expressed that the time will soon come when strangers shall no longer pass through Jerusalem.  The temple, however, and the city walls (2:9) have already been rebuilt, indicating that the prophecy followed the work of Nehemiah.  The priests are exceedingly prominent in the life of the community, and Joel, though a prophet, places great emphasis upon the importance of the ritual.  When the community is threatened by the swarms of locusts, whose advance he describes with dramatic imagery, he calls upon the people to sanctify a fast and to summon an assembly, and commands the priests to cry aloud to Jehovah for deliverance.

IV.  Hopes of the Jews.  In his prophecy Joel has given a very complete description of the hopes which the people entertained regarding the coming day of Jehovah.  It is the same day of Jehovah that Zephaniah described (Section LXXXI:v) and yet the portrait is very different.  A divine judgment is to be pronounced, not upon Jehovah’s people, but upon their foes.  Here Joel reveals the influence of Ezekiel’s graphic descriptions found in the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters of his prophecy.  Vividly he describes the advance of Israel’s hereditary foes.  With Full panoply of war they are pictured as advancing to the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the valley of judgment (popularly identified with the Kidron), where Jehovah is to pass sentence upon them.  Then suddenly, as the harvester puts the sickle in the grain, they shall be cut down and utterly destroyed.  Also in the prophet’s imagination above this carnage rises Jerusalem, an impregnable fortress for the people of Israel, holy and no longer polluted by the presence of heathen invaders.  Peace and prosperity shall then be the lot of Jehovah’s people.  Above all he will pour out his purifying, enlightening spirit upon all classes, so that young and old, slave and free, shall be inspired by the consciousness of his message and presence in their hearts.

V. Rule of the High Priests.  The few facts that have been preserved regarding the external history of the Judean community during the last century of the Persian rule are in striking contrast to the inner life and hopes of the people.  At their head were the high priests, whose names we know, Eliashib, Johanan, and Jaddua.  They constituted a hereditary aristocracy intrenched in the temple, which controlled not only the religious but also the civil life of the Jews.  Like all hierarchies it lacked the corrective influence of a superior civil authority.  The one safeguard of popular liberties, however, was the written law, which was fast becoming the absolute authority in the life of the community.  To it the people could appeal even against the decisions of the priests.  It therefore kept alive that inherited democratic spirit which had been the priceless possession of Israel through all its history.