Of this alternative modern criticism at first preferred the earlier solution, and dated Joel before Amos. So Credner in his Commentary in 1831, and following him Hitzig, Bleek, Ewald, Delitzsch, Keil, Kuenen (up to 1864),[1073] Pusey and others. So, too, at first some living critics of the first rank, who, like Kuenen, have since changed their opinion. And so, even still, Kirkpatrick (on the whole), Von Orelli, Robertson,[1074] Stanley Leathes and Sinker.[1075] The reasons which these scholars have given for the early date of Joel are roughly as follows.[1076] His book occurs among the earliest of the Twelve: while it is recognised that the order of these is not strictly chronological, it is alleged that there is a division between the pre-exilic and post-exilic prophets, and that Joel is found among the former. The vagueness of his representations in general, and of his pictures of the Day of Jehovah in particular, is attributed to the simplicity of the earlier religion of Israel, and to the want of that analysis of its leading conceptions which was the work of later prophets.[1077] His horror of the interruption of the daily offerings in the Temple, caused by the plague of locusts,[1078] is ascribed to a fear which pervaded the primitive ages of all peoples.[1079] In Joel’s attitude towards other nations, whom he condemns to judgment, Ewald saw “the old unsubdued warlike spirit of the times of Deborah and David.” The prophet’s absorption in the ravages of the locusts is held to reflect the feeling of a purely agricultural community, such as Israel was before the eighth century. The absence of the name of Assyria from the book is assigned to the same unwillingness to give the name as we see in Amos and the earlier prophecies of Isaiah, and it is thought by some that, though not named, the Assyrians are symbolised by the locusts. The absence of all mention of the Law is also held by some to prove an early date: though other critics, who believe that the Levitical legislation was extant in Israel from the earliest times, find proof of this in Joel’s insistence upon the daily offering. The absence of all mention of a king and the prominence given to the priests are explained by assigning the prophecy to the minority of King Joash of Judah, when Jehoyada the priest was regent;[1080] the charge against Egypt and Edom of spilling innocent blood by Shishak’s invasion of Judah,[1081] and by the revolt of the Edomites under Jehoram;[1082] the charge against the Philistines and Phœnicians by the Chronicler’s account of Philistine raids[1083] in the reign of Jehoram of Judah, and by the oracles of Amos against both nations;[1084] and the mention of the Vale of Jehoshaphat by that king’s defeat of Moab, Ammon and Edom in the Vale of Berakhah.[1085] These allusions being recognised, it was deduced from them that the parallels between Joel and Amos were due to Amos having quoted from Joel.[1086]
These reasons are not all equally cogent,[1087] and even the strongest of them do not prove more than the possibility of an early date for Joel.[1088] Nor do they meet every historical difficulty. The minority of Joash, upon which they converge, fell at a time when Aram was not only prominent to the thoughts of Israel, but had already been felt to be an enemy as powerful as the Philistines or Edomites. But the Book of Joel does not mention Aram. It mentions the Greeks,[1089] and, although we have no right to say that such a notice was impossible in Israel in the ninth century, it was not only improbable, but no other Hebrew document from before the Exile speaks of Greece, and in particular Amos does not when describing the Phœnicians as slave-traders.[1090] The argument that the Book of Joel must be early because it was placed among the first six of the Twelve Prophets by the arrangers of the Prophetic Canon, who could not have forgotten Joel’s date had he lived after 450, loses all force from the fact that in the same group of pre-exilic prophets we find the exilic Obadiah and the post-exilic Jonah, both of them in precedence to Micah.
The argument for the early date of Joel is, therefore, not conclusive. But there are besides serious objections to it, which make for the other solution of the alternative we started from, and lead us to place Joel after the establishment of the Law by Ezra and Nehemiah in 444 B.C.
A post-exilic date was first proposed by Vatke,[1091] and then defended by Hilgenfeld,[1092] and by Duhm in 1875.[1093] From this time the theory made rapid way, winning over many who had previously held the early date of Joel, like Oort,[1094] Kuenen,[1095] A. B. Davidson,[1096] Driver and Cheyne,[1097] perhaps also Wellhausen,[1098] and finding acceptance and new proofs from a gradually increasing majority of younger critics, Merx,[1099] Robertson Smith,[1100] Stade,[1101] Matthes and Scholz,[1102] Holzinger,[1103] Farrar,[1104] Kautzsch,[1105] Cornill,[1106] Wildeboer,[1107] G. B. Gray[1108] and Nowack.[1109] The reasons which have led to this formidable change of opinion in favour of the late date of the Book of Joel are as follows.
In the first place, the Exile of Judah appears in it as already past. This is proved, not by the ambiguous phrase, when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,[1110] but by the plain statement that the heathen have scattered Israel among the nations and divided their land.[1111] The plunder of the Temple seems also to be implied.[1112] Moreover, no great world-power is pictured as either threatening or actually persecuting God’s people; but Israel’s active enemies and enslavers are represented as her own neighbours, Edomites, Philistines and Phœnicians, and the last are represented as selling Jewish captives to the Greeks. All this suits, if it does not absolutely prove, the Persian age, before the reign of Artaxerxes Ochus, who was the first Persian king to treat the Jews with cruelty.[1113] The Greeks, Javan, do not appear in any Hebrew writer before the Exile;[1114] the form in which their name is given by Joel, B’ne ha-Jevanim, has admittedly a late sound about it,[1115] and we know from other sources that it was in the fifth and fourth centuries that Syrian slaves were in demand in Greece.[1116] Similarly with the internal condition of the Jews as reflected in Joel. No king is mentioned; but the priests are prominent, and the elders are introduced at least once.[1117] It is an agricultural calamity, and that alone, unmixed with any political alarm, which is the omen of the coming Day of the Lord. All this suits the state of Jerusalem under the Persians. Take again the religious temper and emphasis of the book. The latter is laid, as we have seen, very remarkably upon the horror of the interruption by the plague of locusts of the daily meal and drink offerings, and in the later history of Israel the proofs are many of the exceeding importance with which the regularity of this was regarded.[1118] This, says Professor A. B. Davidson, “is very unlike the way in which all other prophets down to Jeremiah speak of the sacrificial service.” The priests, too, are called to take the initiative; and the summons to a solemn and formal fast, without any notice of the particular sins of the people or exhortations to distinct virtues, contrasts with the attitude to fasts of the earlier prophets, and with their insistence upon a change of life as the only acceptable form of penitence.[1119] And another contrast with the earliest prophets is seen in the general apocalyptic atmosphere and colouring of the Book of Joel, as well as in some of the particular figures in which this is expressed, and which are derived from later prophets like Zephaniah and Ezekiel.[1120]
These evidences for a late date are supported, on the whole, by the language of the book. Of this Merx furnishes many details, and by a careful examination, which makes due allowance for the poetic form of the book and for possible glosses, Holzinger has shown that there are symptoms in vocabulary, grammar and syntax which at least are more reconcilable with a late than with an early date.[1121] There are a number of Aramaic words, of Hebrew words used in the sense in which they are used by Aramaic, but by no other Hebrew, writers, and several terms and constructions which appear only in the later books of the Old Testament or very seldom in the early ones.[1122] It is true that these do not stand in a large proportion to the rest of Joel’s vocabulary and grammar, which is classic and suitable to an early period of the literature; but this may be accounted for by the large use which the prophet makes of the very words of earlier writers. Take this large use into account, and the unmistakable Aramaisms of the book become even more emphatic in their proof of a late date.
The literary parallels between Joel and other writers are unusually many for so small a book. They number at least twenty in seventy-two verses. The other books of the Old Testament in which they occur are about twelve. Where one writer has parallels with many, we do not necessarily conclude that he is the borrower, unless we find that some of the phrases common to both are characteristic of the other writers, or that, in his text of them, there are differences from theirs which may reasonably be reckoned to be of a later origin. But that both of these conditions are found in the parallels between Joel and other prophets has been shown by Prof. Driver and Mr. G. B. Gray. “Several of the parallels—either in their entirety or by virtue of certain words which they contain—have their affinities solely or chiefly in the later writings. But the significance [of this] is increased when the very difference between a passage in Joel and its parallel in another book consists in a word or phrase characteristic of the later centuries. That a passage in a writer of the ninth century should differ from its parallel in a subsequent writer by the presence of a word elsewhere confined to the later literature would be strange; a single instance would not, indeed, be inexplicable in view of the scantiness of extant writings; but every additional instance—though itself not very convincing—renders the strangeness greater.” And again, “the variations in some of the parallels as found in Joel have other common peculiarities. This also finds its natural explanation in the fact that Joel quotes: for that the same author even when quoting from different sources should quote with variations of the same character is natural, but that different authors quoting from a common source should follow the same method of quotation is improbable.”[1123] “While in some of the parallels a comparison discloses indications that the phrase in Joel is probably the later, in other cases, even though the expression may in itself be met with earlier, it becomes frequent only in a later age, and the use of it by Joel increases the presumption that he stands by the side of the later writers.”[1124]
In face of so many converging lines of evidence, we shall not wonder that there should have come about so great a change in the opinion of the majority of critics on the date of Joel, and that it should now be assigned by them to a post-exilic date. Some place it in the sixth century before Christ,[1125] some in the first half of the fifth before “Malachi” and Nehemiah,[1126] but the most after the full establishment of the Law by Ezra and Nehemiah in 444 B.C.[1127] It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to decide. Nothing certain can be deduced from the mention of the city wall in chap. ii. 9, from which Robertson Smith and Cornill infer that Nehemiah’s walls were already built. Nor can we be sure that Joel quotes the phrase, before the great and terrible day of Jehovah come, from “Malachi,”[1128] although this is rendered probable by the character of Joel’s other parallels. But the absence of all reference to the prophets as a class, the promise of the rigorous exclusion of foreigners from Jerusalem,[1129] the condemnation to judgment of all the heathen, and the strong apocalyptic character of the book, would incline us to place it after Ezra rather than before. How far after, it is impossible to say, but the absence of feeling against Persia requires a date before the cruelties inflicted by Artaxerxes about 360.[1130]
One solution, which has lately been offered for the problems of date presented by the Book of Joel, deserves some notice. In his German translation of Driver’s Introduction to the Old Testament,[1131] Rothstein questions the integrity of the prophecy, and alleges reasons for dividing it into two sections. Chaps. i. and ii. (Heb.; i.—ii. 27 Eng.) he assigns to an early author, writing in the minority of King Joash, but chaps. iii. and iv. (Heb.; ii. 28—iii. Eng.) to a date after the Exile, while ii. 20, which, it will be remembered, Robertson Smith takes as a gloss, he attributes to the editor who has joined the two sections together. His reasons are that chaps. i. and ii. are entirely taken up with the physical plague of locusts, and no troubles from heathen are mentioned; while chaps. iii. and iv. say nothing of a physical plague, but the evils they deplore for Israel are entirely political, the assaults of enemies. Now it is quite within the bounds of possibility that chaps. iii. and iv. are from another hand than chaps. i. and ii.: we have nothing to disprove that. But, on the other hand, there is nothing to prove it. On the contrary, the possibility of all four chapters being from the same hand is very obvious. Joel mentions no heathen in the first chapter, because he is engrossed with the plague of locusts. But when this has passed, it is quite natural that he should take up the standing problem of Israel’s history—their relation to heathen peoples. There is no discrepancy between the two different subjects, nor between the styles in which they are respectively treated. Rothstein’s arguments for an early date for chaps. i. and ii. have been already answered, and when we come to the exposition of them we shall find still stronger reasons for assigning them to the end of the fifth century before Christ. The assault on the integrity of the prophecy may therefore be said to have failed, though no one who remembers the composite character of the prophetical books can deny that the question is still open.[1132]