Joel 1:1-12 - An Invasion Of Locusts

¹ The word of the Lord which came to Joel, the son of Pethuel.

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. ⁸ Make sounds of grief like a virgin dressed in haircloth for the husband of her early years. ⁹ The meal offering and the drink offering have been cut off from the house of the Lord; the priests, the Lord's servants, are sorrowing. ¹⁰ The fields are wasted, the land has become dry; for the grain is wasted, the new wine is kept back, the oil is poor. ¹¹ The farmers are shamed, the workers in the vine-gardens give cries of grief, for the wheat and the barley; for the produce of the fields has come to destruction. ¹² The vine has become dry and the fig-tree is feeble; the pomegranate and the palm-tree and the apple-tree, even all the trees of the field, are dry: because joy has gone from the sons of men.