King James Version · The Persian return
Joel 1
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The word of that came to the son of . Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land. Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers? Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation. That which the palmerworm hath left hath the eaten; and that which the hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten. Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of , because of the ; for it is your . For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion. He hath laid my waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it clean , and cast it away; the thereof are made white. like a virgin girded with for the husband of her youth. The meat and the drink is the ; the priests, ’s ministers, mourn. The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the is dried up, the oil languisheth. Be ye , O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for the wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is . is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of men. Gird yourselves, and , ye priests: howl, ye ministers of the : come, lie all night in , ye ministers of my : for the meat and the drink is withholden from the house of your . ye a , call a solemn , gather the and all the inhabitants of the land into the your , and cry unto , Alas for the day! for is at hand, and as a from shall it come. Is not the meat before our eyes, yea, joy and gladness from the house of our ? The is rotten under their clods, the garners are laid desolate, the barns are broken down; for the corn is withered. How do the groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture; yea, the flocks of sheep are made desolate. O , to thee will I cry: for the hath devoured the pastures of , and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field. The of the field cry also unto thee: for the rivers of waters are dried up, and the hath devoured the pastures of .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · The Persian return, 539 BC to 332 BC ›
Persia takes Babylon and reverses its policy, sending exiled peoples home to rebuild their temples. Judah returns as a small province, rebuilding under imperial permission rather than independence.
- Persia
- The largest empire the world had yet seen, from the Indus to the Aegean, run through provinces, a royal road, and a postal system. Its policy on conquered peoples was to send them home and fund their temples, in exchange for loyalty and prayers for the king. The Cyrus Cylinder states the policy in Cyrus's own words, and Ezra opens with the same policy applied to Judah.
- Judah
- A small, poor province called Yehud, a fraction of the old kingdom, with a rebuilt temple that made the people who remembered the first one weep. No king, and no prospect of one. Leadership passes to priests and scribes, which shapes everything afterward.
- Greece
- Persia and Greece collide at Marathon and Salamis, Persia loses, and Athens spends the following decades on the Parthenon, tragedy, and Socrates. Herodotus writes the first history in order to explain that war. Then Plato and Aristotle, whose vocabulary the church will still be using at Nicaea eight centuries later.
- Further afield
- Rome throws out its kings and becomes a republic. In India and China this is the age of the Buddha's early followers and of Confucian teaching taking hold. More of what the world still thinks with was invented in this era than in almost any other.