moral ideas, which, if on the one hand they give a dangerous intensity to patriotism, yet raise it on the other out of mere national selfishness, are the spirit and song of the Prophet Joel. We may apply his better words, in often recurring parallel, or in ever growing germination, to the out-pouring of the fresh breath of freedom in the first rebellion of the followers of Jesus against too sacerdotal literalism and formalism; or to the fervent mystics, Dolcino, St. Francis, Thomas-à-Kempis, of the Middle Ages; or to the recognition of the human rights of the slave of dark skin in our own time; but the words were spoken by the Prophet after the measure of his own age, with its limitation of horizon and of feeling.

What was that age? It was after the kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been separated, for the Ten Tribes are nowhere mentioned. It was after Edom had revolted from Judah, for Edom appears as a hostile kingdom, threatened with destruction. Therefore it was later than the reign of Jehoshaphat's son Joram, under whom the revolt was accomplished (2 Kings viii. 20). But it was earlier than the expedition of Sennacherib against Judah, B.C. 713, and earlier than those of Tiglath Pileser and Shalmaneser, whether generals representing, or kings preceding, King Sargon, B.C. 745 and 723, for Assyria has no place among the border nations on whom retaliation is threatened. This ignorance of Assyria is the principal reason for giving Joel an earlier date than Amos or Hosea, who may have been his younger contemporaries. An allusion may be detected in chap. iv. 6, to the disaster which befell Judah from an incursion of Arabians, with whom the chronicler associates Philistines, in the reign of Jehoram (2 Chron. xxi. 16). A similar allusion to the successful expedition of Amaziah, when he slew of Edom in the Valley of Salt ten thousand (2 Kings xiv. 7; Psalms xlvii. lx. ?) may be traced by doubtful conjecture. More

apparently we may find in the anticipation of triumph in the valley of Jehoshaphat, or of Jehovah's judgment, a recollection of the victory of the king of that name in the Valley of Blessing (2 Chron. xx.), although the details of the battle are doubted by critics, who, having little faith in the chronicler, observe them apparently not known to the writer of the Book of Kings. Again, the drought, with attendant famine, remind us of that in the days of Ahab and Elijah, but answer better to the one threatened by Elisha, from which the Shunammite sought refuge in the land of the Philistines-compare 2 Kings vi. 27, and viii. 1, with Joel i. 10, iii. 7. So the polemical aspect towards Tyre suggests the reign of Ahab, but answers as well to a later date. The terms of enmity in which Egypt is mentioned might imply recollection of Shishac, and favour those who place the book as early as the reign of Asa, B.C. 945; but are as naturally associated with the threatening aspect of the kingdom at a later date. A nearer approximation is suggested by the spoiling of the sacred things of the Temple to pacify Hazael the Syrian in the reign of Joash, grandson of Jehoshaphat, which corresponds exactly to the complaint in chap. iv. 5. (Compare 2 Kings xii. 18, and 2 Chron. xxiv. 24.) It is but a step farther to observe Amaziah's victory over Edom, which may have prompted the anticipation with which the book closes; while the fervid triumph of the Prophet may have assumed in the vain-glorious mind of the King a tone of presumptuous confidence. (Compare 2 Kings xiv. 7—10.) If this observation, leading us tɔ place the book of Joel in the reign of Amaziah, about B.C. 814, should be thought conjectural, we shall not err in naming the reign of Jehoram, about B.C. 880, as the earliest, and the reign of Uzziah, about 780, as the latest period at which it can have been written; while the reigns of Joash and Amaziah, from B.C. 868 to B.C. 799, approach most nearly the centre of probability. All

the phenomena of the book answer to the date here assigned. The air of dim antiquity, the unbroken reverence for Jehovah's priesthood, the conscious authority of the Prophet's language, and the obedience paid to him, together with the simple fervour, which turns for refuge from natural calamity to the Author of Nature, savour of an age, which the political relations with surrounding countries have enabled us still more clearly to define.

Any reader who mistrusts the best evidence of a writer's mind and circumstances furnished by his works, and prefers reliance upon traditions which were originally but conjectures, and those uncritically formed, may read in Rosenmüller, how the Jewish Rabbis identified our Prophet, the son of Pethuel, with Joel the unworthy son of Samuel; how traditional rumour placed his origin in Reuben, and his tomb at Beth-horon, though the book clearly connects him with Jerusalem; or how Jerome received an idle fancy that Prophets whose titles ascribe them to no definite reigns, may be placed under the kings mentioned in the titles of preceding Prophets.

It may also be read in Dr. Pusey's Introduction, that the just inference of the great critic Vitringa, from silence in the Book of Joel respecting Assyrians and Babylonians, of a date anterior to Assyrian pressure upon Judah, is an “assumption which originated in unbelief;" and that "there can really be no question, that by the "Northern army" (this word army not being in the text), Joel" means the Assyrian." One who uses such language must identify his own opinions with Divine Revelation, and can have little reason for them, even as opinions.

Referring the lovers of such things to books in which they may be found, it suffices, in a translation of the Prophet's own words, to remark, that the earliest editors of our book appear not to have ventured to conjecture, in their title, the kings under whom the author flourished.

JOEL.

THE WORD OF THE ETERNAL, WHICH WAS TO JOEL, THE SON OF PETHUEL.

1. Hear this, old men, and give ear, all dwellers of the land. Has there been this in your days, or [say] if in the days of your fathers?

2. Tell of it to your sons, and your sons to their sons, and their sons to the generation that shall be1 after.

3. What was left of the young locust, the old locust has eaten; and what was left of the old locust, the fledged locust has eaten, and what was left of the fledged locust, the canker-fly has eaten.

After, or other, according to the vowel points, and context.

'Whatever names are given to the kinds of locusts, belong to the great swarm, whose infliction the Prophet describes. Hence not palmerworm and caterpillar, still less mildew; but whether various species or different ages are meant, may be disputed.

Vv. 1, 2, 3. Locusts, known in Egypt, and common in the East, (Plin. Hist. Nat. xi. 29; Ludolf, Hist. Æth. I. xiii. 16; Bochart in h. 1.) with drought and famine as in the days of Elijah and Elisha, came as a visitation severe enough for record, as in Psalm lxxviii. 4. Gazam the grub, Arbeh the numerous, Yelek the licker, and Chasil the consumer (though the names may have had a non-Hebraic origin) were to Ephrem Syrus symbols of the Assyrians (who are unknown to Joel), and to some Jews, contemporaries of Jerome, represented the four great Empires, as in the later imagery of Daniel. More generally by the Jews, and by Jerome in his saner moments, hordes of locusts varying in age or species were understood. Theodoret, and perhaps Cyril, tried to en

4. Awake, drinkers, and weep; and howl, all winedrinkers, over the new wine, because it is cut off from your mouth.

5. For a nation is gone up over my land, strong, and with no numbering of him; his teeth are a lion's teeth, and he has the grinders of a great3 lion.

6. He has made my vine a desolation, and my fig-tree bareness*; utterly has he stript her, and cast away, so that her branches are grown white.

Laviah, Vulg. a lion's whelp (catuli leonis), Angl. an old lion, Bochart, &c., a lioness. Probably the generic word for lion, akin to Græco-Latin, Leo, and to the onomatopeic lowing, used in English of oxen: therefore not to be traced to a Hebrew root; but if to any, to a word of ravening. Certainly it has a masculine plural, and there is no good reason to make it feminine. Comp. Gen. xlix. 9. Nahum ii. 12. Psalm lvii.

• Or brokenness, for the reasons given in Bochart.

graft the figurative upon the literal in a combination not appropriate to passages of this kind, though tolerable in cases where typical ideas have recurrent instances. Degenerating from the abler Jews, Aben Ezra and Jarchi, the later Abarbanel adopts the mystical view of the four Empires. Thus the historical and the mystical interpretations are by no means Jewish and Christian divergencies, but are critical methods, dependent on clearness of vision and the hermeneutical power of an age. Bochart powerfully re-establishes the natural meaning. He was a firm believer in Holy Writ, and has been followed by many believers.

5. As tribes of cranes with Homer, the "nation of the bees" with Virgil, the locusts are called a nation. Proverbs XXX. 25, 26. Maurer quotes a chronicler of the ninth century who describes locusts with teeth ("habebant dentes lapide duriores"), and more credible authors describe their ravages by gnawing, (" etiam amaros cortices atque arida ligna perrosissent," says Pliny,) so that poetry might ascribe to them teeth, and more so as emphasising Nature.