Priests Gather the Land, and the Prophet Cries with Creation

Sackcloth is assigned to the ministers first

Gird yourselves, and lament, ye priests: howl, ye ministers of the altar: come, lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God. The leaders are not told to diagnose the people from a safe distance. Offerings have been withholden from the house of their God, so they spend the night in the same cloth of grief. Sanctify ye a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the LORD your God, and cry unto the LORD.

The assembly is consecrated appeal, not a technique for forcing heaven and not a warrant to coerce fasting, punish reluctant sufferers, or replace food, water, and care with ritual. Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come. Present hunger and approaching reckoning sit in one lament. The phrase does not date a modern catastrophe or hand leaders a license to declare why named victims were struck.

The prophet's cry joins the cattle and the dried streams

Is not the meat cut off before our eyes, yea, joy and gladness from the house of our God? Seed, garners, and barns collapse with the corn. How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture; the flocks of sheep are made desolate. Animals enter the prayer not as scenery but as fellow sufferers.

O LORD, to thee will I cry: for the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field. The beasts of the field cry also unto thee, because the rivers of waters are dried up. Fire here may be drought's look, literal burn, or poetic intensification; Joel is not issuing a weather report. The movement is from commanded gathering to a first-person cry that will not leave cattle, water, or wild pasture outside the house of God.