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Joel 1:5–12, King James Version
Italic words were supplied in the English translation for clarity.
Joel 1:5–12
Vine, Field, Worship, Work, and Joy Wither Together
Appetite, altar, and orchard fail on the same day
Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because the new wine is cut off from your mouth. The first vocative is not the priest. It is the person whose habit notices absence at the lip. A nation is come up upon my land, strong and without number, with the teeth of a lion. Calling the swarm a nation intensifies its organized hunger. The image does not identify a human army, and it does not name a modern people.
He hath laid my vine waste and barked my fig tree: clean bare, cast away, branches made white. Then the meat offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the LORD, and the priests, the LORD's ministers, mourn. Grain, new wine, and oil fail together. Temple service is not a separate spiritual layer floating above farms. When the field is wasted, worship's ordinary materials stop.
The land is told to lament like a young widow
Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth. The simile gives the community the speech of a future torn in half. It is not a biography of an unnamed woman, and it does not invite speculation about her body. Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for wheat and barley, because the harvest of the field is perished. Shame here is shattered expectation among workers, not a verdict that every sufferer is guilty or spiritually numb.
The vine, fig, pomegranate, palm, and apple wither, even all the trees of the field, because joy is withered away from the sons of men. Joy is listed with the orchard, not as a mood someone should manufacture. The poem keeps moving through drinkers, priests, soil, farmers, trees, and emotion so that no one group owns the grief and no one group escapes it.
How this should shape us
When food systems fail, listen to workers, worship leaders, households, animals, and the land together. Provide relief and room to lament before offering explanations, and do not treat disaster victims as proof of hidden sin.
Teach it back
Explain Joel 1:5–12 in your own words. Include the scene's movement, one source-supported detail, one material uncertainty, and one misuse the context rules out.
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Go deeper
The explanation above is meant to stand on its own. Open these notes only if you want language, history, disagreements, or source locations.
Where careful interpreters disagreeThe strongest options and their difficulties
Where do careful interpreters disagree?
Best judgment: Readers differ on the swarm's literal or metaphorical identity, the feminine lamenter's referent, the precise crops and trees, and whether punishment for unnamed sin should be inferred. The shared agricultural, cultic, and emotional devastation is explicit; individual blame is not.
How certain? probableResearch trail and exact locationsThe source record behind this section
Supports: Exact reader-facing KJV wording and complete verse coverage for this thought unit.
Joel 1:5–12, pinned eng-kjv2006 USFM corpus
Supports: Hebrew forms, morphology, repeated roots, clause relationships, names, and the base wording behind translation discussion.
Open Scriptures MorphHB v.2.2, commit 6a5db284c715c18b239422e57bb89684e6a19f00, wlc/Joel.xml, Masoretic words and morphology for 1:5–12
Supports: Material lexical, grammatical, textual, numbering, historical, Day-of-the-LORD, Spirit, judgment, and restoration notes within the unit.
NET Bible Joel PDF, printed pp. 1696–1697, translation and translator notes on 1:5–12
Supports: A full-article theological and structural reading of chapter 1, communal lament, creation, land, and scriptural traditions; its reconstruction is method-specific and not treated as consensus.
Redelinghuys, 'An investigation into the use of Israel's historical traditions in Joel 1:2–20,' printed pp. 569–588, especially pp. 576–585 on lament, creation, land, Exodus, and communal response
Supports: Only the exposed abstract claim that land, animals, and people participate in Joel's crisis and restoration; no uninspected page-level detail is attributed.
Braaten, 'Earth Community in Joel 1–2: A Call to Identify with the Rest of Creation,' DOI 10.1163/019590806X156082, abstract and journal metadata only, Horizons in Biblical Theology 28.2 (2006), pp. 113–129
Sources for This Section
These records identify the source, the claim it supports, and the exact location used. A source remains evidence to evaluate; it does not replace the biblical text.
Biblical text
King James (Authorized) Version — eng-kjv2006
eBible.org and CrossWire Bible Society
USFM archive eng-kjv2006_usfm.zip; source files dated 2026-08-19; downloaded 2026-08-24; archive SHA-256 aec1b3b26c622fd3d963d2bbac963016b9513246ffbfa20da00bb100372ea007; normalized corpus SHA-256 09aef51d90488aa7b9722b3fd9a93f4b25f6bf2064c5fd798fb39673c300ddf2.
Supports: Exact reader-facing KJV wording and complete verse coverage for this thought unit.
Exact location: Joel 1:5–12, pinned eng-kjv2006 USFM corpus
Open source ↗hebrew text and morphology
Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible: Joel
Open Scriptures
Open Scriptures, release 2.2
Supports: Hebrew forms, morphology, repeated roots, clause relationships, names, and the base wording behind translation discussion.
Exact location: Open Scriptures MorphHB v.2.2, commit 6a5db284c715c18b239422e57bb89684e6a19f00, wlc/Joel.xml, Masoretic words and morphology for 1:5–12
Open source ↗translation and translator notes
NET Bible: Joel with translators' notes
Biblical Studies Press
Biblical Studies Press, 2006
Supports: Material lexical, grammatical, textual, numbering, historical, Day-of-the-LORD, Spirit, judgment, and restoration notes within the unit.
Exact location: NET Bible Joel PDF, printed pp. 1696–1697, translation and translator notes on 1:5–12
Open source ↗peer reviewed open access article
An investigation into the use of Israel's historical traditions in Joel 1:2-20
C. J. Redelinghuys
Stellenbosch Theological Journal 1.2, 2015
Supports: A full-article theological and structural reading of chapter 1, communal lament, creation, land, and scriptural traditions; its reconstruction is method-specific and not treated as consensus.
Exact location: Redelinghuys, 'An investigation into the use of Israel's historical traditions in Joel 1:2–20,' printed pp. 569–588, especially pp. 576–585 on lament, creation, land, Exodus, and communal response
Open source ↗peer reviewed article abstract
Earth Community in Joel 1-2: A Call to Identify with the Rest of Creation
Laurie J. Braaten
Horizons in Biblical Theology 28.2, Brill, 2006
Supports: Only the exposed abstract claim that land, animals, and people participate in Joel's crisis and restoration; no uninspected page-level detail is attributed.
Exact location: Braaten, 'Earth Community in Joel 1–2: A Call to Identify with the Rest of Creation,' DOI 10.1163/019590806X156082, abstract and journal metadata only, Horizons in Biblical Theology 28.2 (2006), pp. 113–129
Open source ↗