This also finds its natural explanation in the fact that Joel quotes: for that the _same_ author even when quoting from different sources should quote with variations of the same character is natural, but that _different_ authors quoting from a common source should follow the same method of quotation is improbable.”[1123] “While in some of the parallels a comparison discloses indications that the phrase in Joel is probably the later, in other cases, even though the expression may in itself be met with earlier, it becomes frequent only in a later age, and the use of it by Joel increases the presumption that he stands by the side of the later writers.”[1124] In face of so many converging lines of evidence, we shall not wonder that there should have come about so great a change in the opinion of the majority of critics on the date of Joel, and that it should now be assigned by them to a post-exilic date. Some place it in the sixth century before Christ,[1125] some in the first half of the fifth before “Malachi” and Nehemiah,[1126] but the most after the full establishment of the Law by Ezra and Nehemiah in 444 B.C.[1127] It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to decide. Nothing certain can be deduced from the mention of the _city wall_ in chap. ii. 9, from which Robertson Smith and Cornill infer that Nehemiah’s walls were already built. Nor can we be sure that Joel quotes the phrase, _before the great and terrible day of Jehovah come_, from “Malachi,”[1128] although this is rendered probable by the character of Joel’s other parallels. But the absence of all reference to the prophets as a class, the promise of the rigorous exclusion of foreigners from Jerusalem,[1129] the condemnation to judgment of all the heathen, and the strong apocalyptic character of the book, would incline us to place it after Ezra rather than before. How far after, it is impossible to say, but the absence of feeling against Persia requires a date before the cruelties inflicted by Artaxerxes about 360.[1130]