Joel 1:2-12

The Voice

² Hear this, elders and leaders.
    All who live in the land should pay close attention.
Has anything like this ever happened?
    No, not in your lifetimes or your fathers’.
³ So be sure to tell this story to your sons and daughters.
    Your sons should tell their sons and so on, for generations.

⁴ We have been invaded!
What the cutting locusts left,
    the swarming locusts consumed;
What the swarming locusts left,
    the creeping locusts consumed;
What the creeping locusts left,
    the stripping locusts finished off.^[a]

⁵ All you drunks, get up and cry!
    Weep and wail, all of you wine drinkers.
Your sweet wine
    has been snatched from your mouths.

⁶ Eternal One: For a people invaded My land.
        Their army is strong; their numbers cannot be counted.
    They attack with teeth as sharp as a lion’s;
        they bare their fangs like a lioness.
⁷     My vines are ruined.
        My fig trees are reduced to stumps now.
    These enemy insects have stripped off the bark and tossed My trees aside like refuse.
        The branches lie bare, broken and white.

⁸ Wail like a bride dressed in sackcloth instead of her gown, as a virgin
    mourning the death of the groom she’d long been betrothed to.
⁹ Those who serve the Eternal One,
    His priests, are in mourning too—
Because no one is able to bring grain or wine to offer
    in the Eternal’s temple.

¹⁰ The fields lie desolate.
    The earth herself mourns the loss,
For her golden grain is ruined.
    The fruits of her vines have withered.
Her gift of oil has dried up.

¹¹ Wilt in shame, you farmers. Wail with screams, you vinedressers.
    Grieve for the wheat and the barley;
Grieve, for the crops in the field are ruined.
¹² The grapevines have withered and died.
    The fig trees have dried up.
The pomegranate, the date-palm, the apple tree—
    indeed all the trees of the field—have dried up.
Joy has withered on the branches of the people and turned to shame.