Joel 2:19

"And Jehovah answered and said unto his people, Behold, I will send you grain, and new wine, and oil, and ye shall be satisfied therewith; and I will no more make you a reproach among the nations; but I will remove far off from you the northern army, and will drive it into a land barren and desolate, its forepart into the eastern sea, and its hinder part into the western sea; and its stench shall come up, and its savor shall come up, because it hath done great things.

"I will remove far off from you the northern army ..."

This is a prophetic double entendre, rather than a problem."[30] Not only did the worst locust plagues usually descend on Jerusalem from the north,[31] but, "It was also true that Israel's main invaders: Aram, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome all attacked from the north."[32] What is evidently in view in this passage is that the summary end of the locust plague which resulted from their being carried by strong winds into the seas, is cited as a pledge that the greater judgment of invasion has also been averted. The use of the military words "the northern army" precludes the limitation of this to the locust scourge. Even the expressions "forepart" and "hinder part" are "more applicable to a human army's van and rear, than to locusts."[33]

"Stench shall come up ... savor ..." "One of the most refreshing things about the Bible is its frankness; a bad smell is still a bad smell, even in scripture."[34] As in other things in these verses, the words here have a double meaning, applying first to the bad odor resulting from the drowning death of millions of locusts, and secondly to the terrible odor of a battlefield with its unburied corpses of men and horses.

It should be pointed out that many eminent Biblical commentators insist on seeing nothing in these verses of Joel 2, except a recapitulation of the prophet's very thorough description of the locusts in Joel 1. Deane, for example, said, "The army of this verse we still hold to be the tribes of locusts";[35] but even he admitted that, "The Assyrian enemies of Judah who advanced from the north are in a subsidiary sense represented."[36] Despite the disagreement of many, however, it seems to us that the quality of the language in this chapter, coupled with the fact that there was no necessity whatever for any re-hash of the very adequate depiction of the locusts in chapter 1, compels the view which has been adopted here.