Joel 1:8-10 Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth.… The poets of all nations give nature a voice, and make her share man's feeling, as man shares her plenty or calamity. The Hebrew preacher shews the sanctity of life by mourning the dearth of Jehovah's altar. Instead of the abandoned license which in Florence, London, etc., great calamities produce, or the bloody offerings which the Phoenicians and earliest Greeks practised, he calls for prayer and solemnity. In all ages, when human effort is at an end, an irrepressible instinct bids us cry to God. We may be tempted to doubt whether unblest seasons are the "days of the Lord" (ver. 14), or are shortcomings of nature, bound by wider necessity than the law of our convenience; and such doubts are not useless in bidding us exhaust the range of human effort, while the preacher joins the philosopher in bidding us not appease God with cruelty or wrong; yet the instinct remains unreproved by anything we know of the Divine government; and our own prayers (ver. 18), justified by reason, seem joined by the instinctive cries (ver. 19) of brute creatures in distress. (Rowland Williams, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth.WEB: Mourn like a virgin dressed in sackcloth for the husband of her youth! |
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