It is true that the account of the locusts appears to bear features which conflict with the literal interpretation. Some of these, however, vanish upon a fuller knowledge of the awful degree which such a plague has been testified to reach by competent observers within our own era.[1158] Those that remain may be attributed partly to the poetic hyperbole of Joel’s style, and partly to the fact that he sees in the plague far more than itself. The locusts are signs of the Day of Jehovah. Joel treats them as we found Zephaniah treating the Scythian hordes of his day. They are as real as the latter, but on them as on the latter the lurid glare of Apocalypse has fallen, magnifying them and investing them with that air of ominousness which is the sole justification of the allegorical and mystic interpretation of their appearance. To the same sense of their office as heralds of the last day, we owe the description of the locusts as _the Northerner_.[1159] The North is not the quarter from which locusts usually reach Palestine, nor is there any reason to suppose that by naming the North Joel meant only to emphasise the unusual character of these swarms. Rather he takes a name employed in Israel since Jeremiah’s time to express the instruments of Jehovah’s wrath in the day of His judgment of Israel. The name is typical of Doom, and therefore Joel applies it to his fateful locusts. 3. STATE OF THE TEXT AND THE STYLE OF THE BOOK. Joel’s style is fluent and clear, both when he is describing the locusts, in which part of his book he is most original, and when he is predicting, in apocalyptic language largely borrowed from earlier prophets, the Day of Jehovah. To the ease of understanding him we may attribute the sound state of the text and its freedom from glosses. In this, like most of the books of the post-exilic prophets, especially the Books of Haggai, “Malachi” and Jonah, Joel’s book contrasts very favourably with those of the older prophets; and that also, to some degree, is proof of the lateness of his date. The Greek translators have, on the whole, understood Joel easily and with little error. In their version there are the usual differences of grammatical construction, especially in the pronominal suffixes and verbs, and of punctuation; but very few bits of expansion and no real additions. These are all noted in the translation below. FOOTNOTES: [1068] See above, Chap. XIII. [1069] See Vol. I. The Assyria of “Zech.” x. 11 is Syria. See below. [1070] The two exceptions, Nahum and Habakkuk, are not relevant to this question. Their dates are fixed by their references to Assyria and Babylon. [1071] See Rob. Smith, art. “Joel,” _Encyc. Brit._ [1072] So obvious is this alternative that all critics may be said to grant it, except König (_Einl._), on whose reasons for placing Joel in the end of the seventh century see below, p. 386, n. 1130. Kessner (_Das Zeitalter der Proph. Joel_, 1888) deems the date unprovable.