The Book of Joel A New Translation and Commentary

By Richie Cooley

The end times will feature heavenly bodies striking the earth and demonic creatures attacking humanity. These events were foretold by the Old Testament prophecy of Joel. This is a new translation of and commentary on the book of Joel, written from a fundamental Christian perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richie Cooley
• Release date: Apr 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463095850

Richie Cooley

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The Book of Joel

A New Translation and Commentary

by Richie Cooley

Licensed by:

Richie Cooley (2019); [edited: (2020)]

Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International

Email: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

I. A Brief Prelude

II. Chapter I

III. Chapter II

IV. Chapter III

V. Citations

VI. Works by Me

Before getting started, let’s review a few notes that are common to my writings…

*British spelling is often used, except for the quoted material, which normally employs U.S. spelling.

*Old Testament Scripture is normally taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE® (NASB), copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

*New Testament Scripture is normally taken from the Analytical-Literal Translation of the New Testament: Third Edition (ALT3). Copyright © 2007 by Gary F. Zeolla of Darkness to Light ministry. Previously copyrighted © 1999, 2001, 2005 by Gary Zeolla.

*The terms LORD, GOD, and Hashem are all ways to describe the personal name of God, also rendered as Yahweh or Jehovah (YHWH).

*The ALT3 distinguishes between singular and plural second-person pronouns by means of an asterisk (*).

*Divine pronouns are normally not capitalized, unless they appear that way in Bible versions or other quotes.

*As a general rule, words that appear in brackets within quotes are not found in the original texts, and were added by the translators or are my personal comments, etc.

Regarding the translation of Joel…

*In my version of Joel, the abbreviations id and lit are employed. Id means idiomatically. The literal text can sometimes be a bit jarring; thus, I occasionally supply a smoother alternate translation. Lit is just the opposite. Sometimes the original words have been left a bit by the wayside, so lit alerts the reader to how the text literally reads.

*I’ve often used amplifications in order to relate the original book of Joel as fully as possible. Instead of just choosing one English word to translate the Hebrew, sometimes I use several. These alternate readings are separated from each other by use of a slash (/). However, it can be confusing when the alternate rendering has more than one word as its final entry. In these cases the alternate rendering ends in an asterisk; that way the reader knows when the description ends and the next part of the verse begins. For example, when a single-word alternate is given it looks like this: tree/wood. When the last alternate has several words it looks like this: tree/a wooded area*; however, there is no asterisk when the entry is followed by a punctuation mark.

I. A Brief Prelude

A. General Introduction

I originally penned a translation and commentary on Joel five years ago. Ultimately I deemed the booklet to be of horrible quality, and so the project was put on the back burner. The original was incredibly awful, as my style was more in tune with haughty rabbit-holes and random whinging as opposed to expounding the text with simplicity.

Recently I was reading through Joel again and was reminded of how special it is. In terms of Bible prophecy, Joel is certainly the oft-forgotten goldmine. You cannot always exegete the book in a strict, historical-grammatical way; yet, when comparing it with the book of Revelation, its ethereal meanings become very obvious, very certain—and very profound.

So I’m taking another stab at this project. I have done a significant amount of more work on my old translation, but the recast has more to do with my desire to tie Joel’s writing tightly to the book of Revelation.

Thank you very much for joining me in this revamped study. This prophet’s wee exhortation is amazing. It deserves much more attention than it normally gets.

As to this study, I’d like to offer two sections of citations at the start. I will have another citations section at the end where I will give other references; however, I’d like to cite the major influences from the get-go. This way I can casually refer to the authors throughout.

For the translation of Joel, the major sources are…

Armstrong, Terry and Douglas Busby and Cyril Carr. A Reader’s Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1989. (This is based upon the famous Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon, which also is another major source.)

Brown, A. Philip II and Bryan Smith. A Reader’s Hebrew Bible. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2008. (This is based upon HALOT.)

Holladay, William. A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans/Brill, 1988.

Groves, Alan et al. The Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphological Database. 2007.

For the commentary of Joel, the major sources are…

Feinberg, Charles L. The Minor Prophets. Chicago: Moody Press, 1990.

Garrett, Duane. The New American Commentary: Hosea/Joel. Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Publishers, 1997.

Hindson, Edward and Michael Woodrow (general editors). The KJV Bible Commentary. Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 1994. (Paul Fink wrote the commentary on Joel here, so he’ll be our cited author for this source.)

MacArthur, John. The MacArthur Study Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2010.

MacDonald, William. Believer’s Bible Commentary. Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 1995.

Rydelnik, Michael and Michael Vanlaningham (general editors). The Moody Bible Commentary. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2014. (Michael Rydelnik wrote the commentary on Joel for this volume.)

Unger, Merrill. Unger’s Bible Handbook. Chicago: Moody Press, 1967.

B. Raising the Curtain

The book of Joel