¹ The word of Yahweh that was addressed to Joel son of Pethuel.

² Listen to this, you elders; everybody in the country, attend! Has anything like this ever happened in your day, or in your ancestors' days?

³ Tell your children about it and let your children tell their children, and their children the next generation!

⁴ What the nibbler has left, the grown locust has eaten, what the grown locust has left, the hopper has eaten, and what the hopper has left, the shearer has eaten.

⁵ Wake up, you drunkards, and weep! All you wine-bibbers, lament for the new wine: it has been snatched from your lips.

⁶ For a nation has invaded my country, mighty and innumerable, with teeth like a lion's teeth, with the fangs of a lioness.

⁷ It has reduced my vines to a desolation and my fig trees to splinters, stripped them and broken them down, leaving their branches white.

⁸ Mourn, as a virgin-bride in sackcloth for the bridegroom of her youth!

⁹ Cereal offering and libation are lost to Yahweh's Temple. The priests, the ministers of Yahweh, are in mourning.

¹⁰ The fields are ruined, the land is in mourning, for the grain has been ruined, the new wine has failed, of olive oil only a trickle.

¹¹ Stand dismayed, you farmers, wail, you vinedressers, for the wheat, for the barley! The harvest of the fields has been lost!

¹² The vine has withered, the fig tree wilts away; pomegranate, palm tree, apple tree, every tree in the countryside is dry, and for human beings joy has run dry too.

¹³ Priests, put on sackcloth and lament! You ministers of the altar, wail! Come here, lie in sackcloth all night long, you ministers of my God! For the Temple of your God has been deprived of cereal offering and libation.

¹⁴ Order a fast, proclaim a solemn assembly; you elders, summon everybody in the country to the Temple of Yahweh your God. Cry out to Yahweh:

¹⁵ 'Alas for the day! For the Day of Yahweh is near, coming as destruction from Shaddai.'

¹⁶ Has not the food disappeared before our very eyes? Have not joy and gladness vanished from the Temple of our God?

¹⁷ The seeds shrivel under their clods; the granaries are deserted, the barns are in ruins, because the harvest has dried out.

¹⁸ Loudly the cattle groan! The herds of oxen are bewildered because they have no pasture. The flocks of sheep bear the punishment too.

¹⁹ Yahweh, to you I cry: for fire has devoured the desert pastures, flame has burnt up all the trees in the countryside.

²⁰ Even the wild animals pant loudly for you, for the watercourses have run dry, and fire has devoured the desert pastures.

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The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) is a Catholic translation of the Bible published in 1985. The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) has become the most widely used Roman Catholic Bible outside of the United States. It has the imprimatur of Cardinal George Basil Hume.

Like its predecessor, the Jerusalem Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) version is translated "directly from the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic." The 1973 French translation, the Bible de Jerusalem, is followed only "where the text admits to more than one interpretation." Introductions and notes, with some modifications, are taken from the Bible de Jerusalem.

Source: The Very Reverend Dom (Joseph) Henry Wansbrough, OSB, MA (Oxon), STL (Fribourg), LSS (Rome), a monk of Ampleforth Abbey and a biblical scholar. He was General Editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. "New Jerusalem Bible, Regular Edition", pg. v.

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