2 Give ear to this, you old men, and take note, you people of the land. Has this ever been in your days, or in the days of your fathers? 3 Give the story of it to your children, and let them give it to their children, and their children to another generation. 4 What the worm did not make a meal of, has been taken by the locust; and what the locust did not take, has been food for the plant-worm; and what the plant-worm did not take, has been food for the field-fly. 5 Come out of your sleep, you who are overcome with wine, and give yourselves to weeping; give cries of sorrow, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine; for it has been cut off from your mouths. 6 For a nation has come up over my land, strong and without number; his teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he has the back teeth of a great lion. 7 By him my vine is made waste and my fig-tree broken: he has taken all its fruit and sent it down to the earth; its branches are made white.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on Joel 1:2-7
Commentary on Joel 1:1-7
(Read Joel 1:1-7)
The most aged could not remember such calamities as were about to take place. Armies of insects were coming upon the land to eat the fruits of it. It is expressed so as to apply also to the destruction of the country by a foreign enemy, and seems to refer to the devastations of the Chaldeans. God is Lord of hosts, has every creature at his command, and, when he pleases, can humble and mortify a proud, rebellious people, by the weakest and most contemptible creatures. It is just with God to take away the comforts which are abused to luxury and excess; and the more men place their happiness in the gratifications of sense, the more severe temporal afflictions are upon them. The more earthly delights we make needful to satisfy us, the more we expose ourselves to trouble.