Bible Review

All quotations from the Book of Joel in the text of this article are from the New Jewish Publication Society translation.

In 1959, during a major locust plague in Ethiopia that lasted six weeks, it was conservatively estimated by Stanley Baron in “The Locust War,” World Health January 1979), pp. 10–15, that the locusts consumed enough food to feed one million people for a year.

See my earlier article, “Who Asks (or Tells) God to Repent?” BR 01:04.

In fact, as we learn later, in Jonah 4:2, Jonah did in fact argue; he there says to the Lord: “O Lord: Is this not what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish.”

B.C.E. (Before the common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) are the scholarly alternate designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

See Jane and John Dillenberger, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling—To Clean or Not to Clean,” and Suzanne F. Singer, “Understanding the Sistine Chapel and Its Paintings,” BR 04:04.

Midrash is a collective term for Jewish nonliteral scriptural exegesis.

“The Lord bless you and keep you;

The Lord make his face to shine upon you,

and be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you,

and give you peace.”

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) are the scholarly alternate designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

See Baruch Halpern, “The Assassination of Eglon—The First Locked-Room Murder Mystery,” BR 04:06.