A fire devours before them; and behind them a flame burns: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
All Commentaries on Joel 2:3 Go To Joel 2
Gregory the Theologian
AD 390
Terrible is an unfruitful season, and the loss of the crops. It could not be otherwise, when people are already rejoicing in their hopes and counting on their all but harvested stores. Terrible again is an unseasonable harvest, when the farmers labor with heavy hearts, sitting as it were beside the grave of their crops, which the gentle rain nourished but the wild storm has rooted up, “with which the reaper does not fill his hand or the binder of sheaves his bosom.” Nor have they obtained the blessing which passersby bestow upon the farmers. Wretched indeed is the sight of the ground devastated, cleared and shorn of its ornaments, over which the blessed Joel wails in his most tragic picture of the desolation of the land and the scourge of the famine. Another prophet wails as he contrasts with its former beauty its final disorder and thus discourses on the anger of the Lord when he smites the land: before him is the Garden of Eden, behind him a desolate wilderness. On His Father’s Silence, Oration
