Joel 1:7

"He hath laid my vine waste, and hath barked my fig-tree: he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white."

"Barked" may also be translated "splintered"; and some commentators have viewed this as hyperbole. "The locusts could not splinter the fig-tree";[20] but such a view is due to a failure to take into consideration what would happen to a soft and brittle branch of a fig-tree when overloaded with an incredibly large swarm of locusts which would literally break it off. Certainly the devastation of locusts is too widely known in the East to make possible any claim of exaggeration on Joel's part, even for the sake of emphasis.