A Note on the Chronology of the Book of Joel

zutot 14 (2017) 3-5 ZUTOT: Perspectives on Jewish Culture brill.com/zuto brill.com/zuto

Israel Netanel Rubin Jerusalem

Abstract

This short note points to a Talmudic source that supports modern research that locates the prophet Joel in the Second Temple period, contrary to the common orthodox tradition that Joel prophesied in the First Temple period.

Keywords

Joel – chronology – Bible

One of the books of the Bible that is chronologically problematic is the Book of Joel. The book itself does not provide any information on his lifetime, neither at the beginning of the book as is customary, nor elsewhere in the text. The rab- binic tradition tried to fill this gap and offered some suggestions, which Rashi and Radak cite at the start of their commentaries to the book: ‘Some say that this prophet prophesied in the days of Joram son of Ahab, as he states: he pre- dicted there would be famine in the land, as he said: for the Lord hath called for a famine (…) and Seder Olam said that he prophesied in the days of Manasseh, saying: Joel, Nahum and Habakkuk prophesied in the days of Manasseh, and because Manasseh was not honest they were not named after him.’1 Both suggestions position Joel in the First Temple period, and the first one even puts him ahead of the first writing prophets known to us. This convention was accepted also by Maimonides in his introduction to his Mishneh Torah, where he places Yoel in his tradition-chain after Isaiah, between Michah and Nahum:

1 Radak, Joel 1, 1 and similarly at Rashi, Joel 1, 1. Chaim Milikowsky tried to explain what moti- vated the Sages and the commentators to these specific speculation; See Ch. Milikowsky, Seder ʿolam: Critical Edition, Commentary and Introduction (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem 2013), vol. 2, 322–323.

‘Michah received it from Isaiah and his court, Yoel received it from Michah and his court, Nahum received it from Yoel and his court.’ Ibn Ezra, on the other hand, writes simply in the beginning of his commentary to Joel that ‘we have no way of knowing his generation.’ Indeed, the modern study of the Bible is almost unanimous that Joel prophesied during the Second Temple period. In his entry on the book of Joel M.D. Cassuto summa- rizes: ‘Most scholars believe that the book is of a later date, after the Babylonian exile and the return to Zion (…) Though there are still those who try to defend the antiquity of the book, for instance Thiele (1937) and Kaufmann (1948), it seems more likely that it belongs to the Second Temple period (…) as its his- torical, geographical and ideological background can only point to the Second Temple period.’2 Ostensibly, this is more a dispute between traditional and modern Biblical critics, but in this case I found indirect evidence that at least one Talmudic sage, unlike those cited above, was of the same opinion as modern-day scholars that Joel belongs to the Second Temple period. This becomes evident from the legend in bSukkah,3 regarding the names of the evil inclination:

Rav Avira, or, as some say, Rabbi Joshua son of Levi, made the following exposition: The Evil Inclination has seven names. The Holy One, blessed be He, called it ‘Evil,’ as it is said: ‘For the imagi- nation of man’s heart is evil from his youth.’ Moses called it ‘the Uncircumcised,’ as it is said: ‘Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart.’ David called it ‘Unclean,’ as it is said: ‘Create in me a clean heart, O Lord’ – which implies that there is an unclean one. Solomon called it ‘the Enemy,’ as it is said: ‘If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink, for thou wilt heap coals of fire upon his head, and the Lord will reward thee’ – read not ‘will reward thee’ but ‘will cause it to be at peace with thee.’ Isaiah called it ‘the Stumbling-Block,’ as it is said: ‘Cast ye up, Cast ye up, clear the way, take up the stumbling-block out of the way of my people.’ Ezekiel called it ‘Stone,’ as it is said: ‘And I will take away the heart of stone out of your flesh and I will give you a heart of flesh.’ Joel called it ‘the Hidden One,’ as it is said: ‘But I will remove far off from you the hidden one.’

2 M.D. Cassuto, ‘Joel, Book of Joel,’ Entziqlopedia miqra‌ʾit (Jerusalem 1958) vol. 3, 577. 3 bSukkah 52a.

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It is clear that the legend’s narrator, either Rav Avira or Rabbi Joshua son of Levi, listed the seven names of the ‘callers’ in a chronological order,4 so that by his locating the Book of Joel after Ezekiel it is understood he believed, as most modern scholars do, that Joel prophesied after Ezekiel, that is, in the Second Temple period. Apparently, one could argue that the order of the ‘callers’ is not chronological, but merely reflecting the interior order of the Bible; there are few variations of this order but in all of them the Book of Ezekiel precedes the Minor Prophets. If that were the case, the quotes from Isaiah, Ezekiel and Joel should have preceded those from David and Solomon, which are taken from Psalms and Proverbs that according to the interior order of Bible are located after the Prophets. It therefore appears that this legend’s narrator arranged the seven names in a chronological order, from which we can derive that he believed Joel was the last and prophesied in the Second Temple period.5 It should be mentioned that Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, in the piska of Nahamu, indeed speaks clearly about ‘eight prophets who prophesied after the destruction of the Temple, and these are: Joel, Amos, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, Ezekiel and Jeremiah.’ But by including Amos and Zephaniah Pesikta denies conclusions about its opinion about Joel. It seems probably, however, that Pesikta has in mind the prophecies of destruction that appear in those books and applies them to the destruction of the Temple, regardless the lifetime of the prophet himself. However, the evidence provided in bSukkah, although indirect, is quite strong in my opinion.

4 Most Talmudical lists of this type are arranged in a chronological order, and the Talmud itself notes about deviation from this order; see bTa‌ʾanit 23a: ‘Let us see, Did not Jonah live after David and Solomon, why then is he placed first?’ See also N. Elyakim, ‘Matters in Talmud That Were Not Brought by a Chronological Order or Not as Their Order in the Bible,’ Shmaʿatin 45, no. 170 (2007), 75–99. 5 As one of the reviewers of this article kindly pointed out bTaʾanit‌ 5a provides additional evidence that according to the Talmudists Joel lived in the Second Temple period: ‘This verse was fulfilled in the days of Joel, the son of Petuʾel, That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten (…) To that generation was applied the scriptural verses, “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy” ’; but the verse ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy’ is from Ps 126:4, the chapter that relates, according to Taʾanit‌ itself, to the generation of the return to Zion after the Babylonian exile (see there bTa‌ʾanit 23a: ‘A Song of Ascents, When the Lord brought back those that returned to Zion, we were like unto them that dream. Is it possible for a man to dream continuously for seventy years?,’ and Rashi interprets: ‘We were like unto them that dream – Babylonian exile, which has lasted seventy years, seemed like a dream’). I agree that this addition provides credible evidence for our purpose, but I would not start just with that proof by itself, since ‘to that generation was applied the scriptural verses’ might also be inter- preted in the sense of: this verse can in retrospect be applied to the events of that generation; in other words the verse may not speak of real-time events.

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