Joel 1:9

"The meal-offering and the drink-offering are cut off from the house of Jehovah; the priests, Jehovah's ministers, mourn."

Naturally, with the total destruction of all crops and vegetation, the usual sacrifices in the temple were curtailed and eliminated. Joel's speaking of the priests here in the third person is taken to indicate that he was not of their number. It is incorrect to make Joel's concern for this interruption of the sacrifices as the basis of postulating a late post-exilic date when the congregation in Judah was very small; because the total devastation inflicted by the locusts would have produced a similar effect whenever it might have occurred. The seriousness of this cessation of the daily offerings was inherent in the people's conviction that by the means of those sacrifices their fellowship with God was perpetuated and maintained. "Without those offerings, the people felt loss of contact with the Lord; and the priests, who understood their significance, mourned."[22] In spite of the reluctance of the people to cut off the supplies necessary to the faithful observances of the sacrifices, however, "there was no food left for man or beast[23] No wonder that the priests mourned, for their very livelihood depended upon the offerings out of which they lived.