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Warnings and Descriptions of the Locust Plague

Hear this, you elders.
    Listen, all of you who live in the land.
    Has anything like this ever happened in your days
    or in the days of your fathers?
Tell it to your children,
    and let your children tell it to their children,
    and their children to the next generation.
        What the grasshoppers have left, the swarming locusts have eaten.
        What the swarming locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten.
        What the young locusts have left, the mature locusts have eaten.[a]

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Footnotes

  1. Joel 1:4 The precise distinctions between the four Hebrew terms for locusts are not certain. The terms may refer to types of locusts or to different stages of the locusts’ life cycle (though the terms do not occur in the same order in 1:4 and 2:25). Etymologically the four terms seem to refer to gnawers, swarmers, hoppers, and destroyers. In any case, the point of the heaping up of terms is total destruction.