Joel 2:3

Joel 2:3. A fire devoureth before them, &c. They consume like a general conflagration. “They destroy the ground,” says Sir Hans Sloane, ( Natural History of Jamaica, 1: 29,) “not only for the time, but burn trees for two years after.” “Wheresoever they feed, says Ludolphus, ( History of Ethiopia, lib. 1. c. 13,) “their leavings seem, as it were, parched with fire.” Pliny bears the same testimony, 11:29, Multa contactu adurentes, “Burning things up by the touch.” The land is as the garden of Eden before them, &c. The land of Judea, so famous for its fertility and pleasantness, shall be turned into a desolate wilderness by the ravages they will make. The garden of Eden is a proverbial expression for a place of pleasure and fruitfulness, in which sense we commonly use the word paradise. And nothing shall escape them Namely, which the ground produces. “After devouring the herbage,” says Adanson, as above, “with the fruits and the leaves of the trees, they attacked even the buds and very bark. They did not so much as spare the reeds with which the huts were thatched.” Thus also Ludolphus: “Sometimes they enter the very bark of trees, and then the spring itself cannot repair the damage.” “Omnia morsu erodentes, et fores quoque tectorum,” says Pliny, 11:20. “Consuming all things, even the doors of the houses.” In the Philosophical Transactions, No. 112, A.D. 1686, we have an account of the locusts in Languedoc, being about an inch in length, of a gray colour. “The earth,” it is observed, “in some places, was covered four inches thick with them, in the morning, before the heat of the sun was considerable; but as soon as it began to grow hot they took wing, and fell upon the corn, eating up both leaf and ear; and that with such expedition, by reason of their number, that in three hours they would devour a whole field, after which they again took wing, and their swarms were so thick, that they covered the sun like a cloud, and were whole hours in passing. After having eaten up the corn, they fell upon the vines, the pulse, the willows, and even the hemp, notwithstanding its great bitterness; after this these insects died, and stunk very much.”