A post-exilic date was first proposed by Vatke,[1091] and then defended by Hilgenfeld,[1092] and by Duhm in 1875.[1093] From this time the theory made rapid way, winning over many who had previously held the early date of Joel, like Oort,[1094] Kuenen,[1095] A. B. Davidson,[1096] Driver and Cheyne,[1097] perhaps also Wellhausen,[1098] and finding acceptance and new proofs from a gradually increasing majority of younger critics, Merx,[1099] Robertson Smith,[1100] Stade,[1101] Matthes and Scholz,[1102] Holzinger,[1103] Farrar,[1104] Kautzsch,[1105] Cornill,[1106] Wildeboer,[1107] G. B. Gray[1108] and Nowack.[1109] The reasons which have led to this formidable change of opinion in favour of the late date of the Book of Joel are as follows. In the first place, the Exile of Judah appears in it as already past. This is proved, not by the ambiguous phrase, _when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem_,[1110] but by the plain statement that _the heathen have scattered Israel among the nations and divided their land_.[1111] The plunder of the Temple seems also to be implied.[1112] Moreover, no great world-power is pictured as either threatening or actually persecuting God’s people; but Israel’s active enemies and enslavers are represented as her own neighbours, Edomites, Philistines and Phœnicians, and the last are represented as selling Jewish captives to the Greeks. All this suits, if it does not absolutely prove, the Persian age, before the reign of Artaxerxes Ochus, who was the first Persian king to treat the Jews with cruelty.[1113] The Greeks, Javan, do not appear in any Hebrew writer before the Exile;[1114] the form in which their name is given by Joel, B’ne ha-Jevanim, has admittedly a late sound about it,[1115] and we know from other sources that it was in the fifth and fourth centuries that Syrian slaves were in demand in Greece.[1116] Similarly with the internal condition of the Jews as reflected in Joel. No king is mentioned; but the priests are prominent, and the elders are introduced at least once.[1117] It is an agricultural calamity, and that alone, unmixed with any political alarm, which is the omen of the coming Day of the Lord. All this suits the state of Jerusalem under the Persians. Take again the religious temper and emphasis of the book. The latter is laid, as we have seen, very remarkably upon the horror of the interruption by the plague of locusts of the daily meal and drink offerings, and in the later history of Israel the proofs are many of the exceeding importance with which the regularity of this was regarded.[1118] This, says Professor A. B. Davidson, “is very unlike the way in which all other prophets down to Jeremiah speak of the sacrificial service.” The priests, too, are called to take the initiative; and the summons to a solemn and formal fast, without any notice of the particular sins of the people or exhortations to distinct virtues, contrasts with the attitude to fasts of the earlier prophets,