[1048] See Gesenius and Ewald for Arabic analogies for the use of clothing = wife.
[1051] Heb. עֵר וְעֹנֶה, _caller and answerer_. But LXX. read עד, _witness_ (see iii. 5), though it pointed it differently.
[1052] 13_a_, _But secondly ye do this_, is the obvious addition of the editor in order to connect his intrusion with what follows.
[1054] Delete _silver_: the longer LXX. text shows how easily it was added.
[1055] _Made an end of_, reading the verb as Piel (Orelli). LXX. _refrain from_. _Your sins_ are understood, the sins which have always characterised the people. LXX. connects the opening of the next verse with this, and with a different reading of the first word translates _from the sins of your fathers_.
[1056] Heb. קבע, only here and Prov. xxii. 32. LXX. read עקב, _supplant_, _cheat_, which Wellhausen adopts.
[1057] תְּרוּמָה, _the heave offering_, the tax or tribute given to the sanctuary or priests and associates with the tithes, as here in Deut. xii. 11, to be eaten by the offerer (_ib._ 17), but in Ezekiel by the priests (xliv. 30); taken by the people and the Levites to the Temple treasury for the priests (Neh. x. 38, xii. 44): corn, wine and oil. In the Priestly Writing it signifies the part of each sacrifice which was the priests’ due. Ezekiel also uses it of the part of the Holy Land that fell to the prince and priests.
[1058] טֵרֶף in its later meaning: cf. Job xxiv. 5; Prov. xxxi. 15.
[1060] _A dew of lights._ See _Isaiah i.—xxxix._ (Expositor’s Bible), pp. 448 f.
[1063] חשב, _to think_, _plan_, has much the same meaning as here in Isa. xiii. 17, xxxiii. 8, liii. 3.
[1064] Heb. _when I am doing_; but in the sense in which the word is used of Jehovah’s decisive and final doing, Psalms xx., xxxii., etc.
[1066] See note to Amos vi. 4: Vol. I., p. 174, n. 3.
_The Day of Jehovah is great and very awful, and who may abide it?_
_But now the oracle of Jehovah—Turn ye to Me with all your heart, and with fasting and with weeping and with mourning. And rend your hearts and not your garments, and turn to Jehovah your God, for gracious and merciful is He, long-suffering and abounding in love._
In the criticism of the Book of Joel there exist differences of opinion—upon its date, the exact reference of its statements and its relation to parallel passages in other prophets—as wide as even those by which the Book of Obadiah has been assigned to every century between the tenth and the fourth before Christ.[1068] As in the case of Obadiah, the problem is not entangled with any doctrinal issue or question of accuracy; but while we saw that Obadiah was not involved in the central controversy of the Old Testament, the date of the Law, not a little in Joel turns upon the latter. And, besides, certain descriptions raise the large question between a literal and an allegorical interpretation. Thus the Book of Joel carries the student further into the problems of Old Testament Criticism, and forms an even more excellent introduction to the latter, than does the Book of Obadiah.