Joel 2:18

Joe 2:18 and Joe 2:19 contain the historical statement, that in consequence of the penitential prayer of the priests, the Lord displayed His mercy to His people, and gave them a promise, the first part of which follows in Joe 2:19-27. Joe 2:18, Joe 2:19. "Then Jehovah was jealous for His land, and had compassion upon His people. And Jehovah answered, and said." The grammar requires that we should take the imperfects with Vav consec. in these clauses, as statements of what actually occurred. The passages in which imperfects with Vav cons. are either really or apparently used in a prophetic announcement of the future, are of a different kind; e.g., in Joe 2:23, where we find one in a subordinate clause preceded by perfects. As the verb ויּען describes the promise which follows, as an answer given by Jehovah to His people, we must assume that the priests had really offered the penitential and supplicatory prayer to which the prophet had summoned them in Joe 2:17. The circumstance that this is not expressly mentioned, neither warrants us in rendering the verbs in Joe 2:17 in the present, and taking them as statements of what the priest really did (Hitzig), nor in changing the historical tenses in Joe 2:18, Joe 2:19 into futures. We have rather simply to supply the execution of the prophet's command between Joe 2:17 and Joe 2:18. קנּא with ל, to be jealous for a person, i.e., to show the jealousy of love towards him, as in Exo 39:25; Zac 1:14 (see at Exo 20:5). חמל as in Exo 2:6; Sa1 23:21. In the answer from Jehovah which follows, the three features in the promise are not given according to their chronological order; but in order to add force to the description, we have first of all, in Joe 2:19, a promise of the relief of the distress at which both man and beast had sighed…

See how ready God is to succour and relieve his people, how he waits to be gracious; as soon as ever they humble themselves under this hand, and pray, and seek his face, he immediately meets them with his favours. They prayed that God would spare them, and see here with what good words and comfortable words he answered them; for God's promises are real answers to the prayers of faith, because with him saying and doing are not two things. Now observe, I. Whence this mercy promised shall take rise (Joe 2:18): God will be jealous for his land and pity his people. He will have an eye, 1. To his own honour, and the reputation of his covenant with Israel, by which he had conveyed to them that good land and had given in the value of it very high; now he will not suffer it to be despised nor disparaged, but will be jealous for the credit of his land, and the inhabitants of it, who had been praised as a happy people and therefore must not lie open to reproach as a miserable people. 2. To their distress: He will pity his people, and, in pity to them, he will restore them their forfeited comforts. God's compassion is a great encouragement to those that come humbly to him as penitents and as petitioners. II. What his mercy shall be, in several instances: - 1. The destroying army shall be dispersed and defeated (Joe 2:20): "I will remove far off from you the northern army, that army of locusts and caterpillars that invaded you from the north, brought in upon the wings of a north wind, an army which you could put no stop to the progress of; but, when you have made your peace with God, he will ease you of these soldiers that are quartered upon you and will drive them into a land barren and desolate, into that vast howling wilderness that Israel wandered in, where, after having surfeit…

2:18–3:21 Up to this point, the book of Joel has focused on God’s judgment upon Judah and Jerusalem, but from here on, it describes God’s promise of restoration. If the people sincerely repented, God would respond graciously. 2:18-27 God promised to restore his people’s material lives in the immediate future, replenishing their fields, orchards, vineyards, and flocks. 2:18 Since both people and land suffered from God’s judgment, both would be the objects of his zealous compassion.