The position which has been assigned to Joel in the collection of the Minor Prophets, furnishes an external argument for the determination of the time at which Joel wrote. There cannot be any doubt that the Collectors were guided by a consideration of the chronology. The circumstance, that they placed the prophecies of Joel just between the two prophets who, according to the inscriptions and contents of their prophecies, belonged to the time of Jeroboam and Uzziah, is thus equivalent to an express testimony that he also lived, and exercised his ministry, during that time. By this testimony we have, in the meanwhile, obtained a firm standing-point; and it must remain firm, as long as it is not overthrown by other unquestionable facts, and the Collectors are not convicted of an historical error. But, as regards the latter point, there is the greater room for caution, because all the other statements which they have made are, upon a careful examination, found to stand the test; for none of the other Minor Prophets is found to occupy a place to which he is not entitled. But no such facts are to be found; on the contrary, everything serves to confirm their testimony. It will not be possible to assign the prophecies of Joel to a later period; for Amos places at the head of one of his prophecies one of the utterances of Joel (compare Amos i. 2 with Joel iv. 16 [iii. 16]), as the text, as it were, on which he is to comment. That we are not thereby precluded from considering the two prophets as contemporaneous, is shown by the altogether similar case of Isaiah, in his relation to Micah. Isaiah, too, borrows, in chap. xiii. 6, a sentence from Joel i. 15, the peculiarity of which proves that the coincidence is not accidental. Such verbal repetitions must not be, by any means, considered as unintentional reminiscences. They served to exhibit that the prophets acknowledged one another as the organs of the Holy Spirit,--to testify the ἀκριβῆ διαδοχήν, the want of which in the times after Ezra and Nehemiah is mentioned by Josephus as one of the reasons why none of the writings of [Pg 292]that period could be acknowledged as sacred. (See the Author's _Dissertations on the Genuineness of Daniel_, p. 199.) _Further_,--The description of the threatening judgment in chap. i. and ii. is, in Joel, kept just in that very same generality in which we find it in the oldest prophecies that have been preserved to us, viz., in Amos, in the first chapters of Isaiah and of Hosea; whilst in later times, the threatening is, throughout, particularized by the express mention of the instruments who were, in the first instance, to serve for its fulfilment, viz., the Assyrians and Babylonians. That which Judah had to suffer from the former was so severe, that Joel, in chap. iv. 4 ff.--where he mentions, although, as it were, only in the way of example, nations with which Judah had hitherto already come into hostile contact--would scarcely have passed