Yesaya 34:4

34:4 All the stars in the sky will fade away, ¹ 

the sky will roll up like a scroll;

all its stars will wither,

like a leaf withers and falls from a vine

or a fig withers and falls from a tree. ² 

Yeremia 4:28

4:28 Because of this the land will mourn

and the sky above will grow black. ³ 

For I have made my purpose known ⁴ 

and I will not relent or turn back from carrying it out.” ⁵ 

Yoel 2:2

2:2 It will be ⁶  a day of dreadful darkness, ⁷ 

a day of foreboding storm clouds, ⁸ 

like blackness ⁹  spread over the mountains.

It is a huge and powerful army ¹⁰  –

there has never been anything like it ever before,

and there will not be anything like it for many generations to come! ¹¹ 

Yoel 2:10

2:10 The earth quakes ¹²  before them; ¹³ 

the sky reverberates. ¹⁴ 

The sun and the moon grow dark;

the stars refuse to shine. ¹⁵ 

Yoel 2:31

2:31 The sunlight will be turned to darkness

and the moon to the color of blood, ¹⁶ 

before the day of the Lord comes –

that great and terrible day!

[34:4]  ¹ tc Heb “and all the host of heaven will rot.” The Qumran scroll 1QIsa^a inserts “and the valleys will be split open,” but this reading may be influenced by Mic 1:4. On the other hand, the statement, if original, could have been omitted by homoioarcton, a scribe’s eye jumping from the conjunction prefixed to “the valleys” to the conjunction prefixed to the verb “rot.”

[34:4]  ² tn Heb “like the withering of a leaf from a vine, and like the withering from a fig tree.”

[4:28]  ³ sn The earth and the heavens are personified here and depicted in the act of mourning and wearing black clothes because of the destruction of the land of Israel.

[4:28]  ⁴ tn Heb “has spoken and purposed.” This is an example of hendiadys where two verbs are joined by “and” but one is meant to serve as a modifier of the other.

[4:28]  ⁵ tn Heb “will not turn back from it.”

[2:2]  ⁶ tn The phrase “It will be” does not appear in the Hebrew, but is supplied in the translation for the sake of smoothness and style.

[2:2]  ⁷ tn Heb “darkness and gloom.” These two terms probably form a hendiadys here. This picture recalls the imagery of the supernatural darkness in Egypt during the judgments of the exodus (Exod 10:22). These terms are also frequently used as figures (metonymy of association) for calamity and divine judgment (Isa 8:22; 59:9; Jer 23:12; Zeph 1:15). Darkness is often a figure (metonymy of association) for death, dread, distress and judgment (BDB 365 s.v. חשֶׁךְ 3).

[2:2]  ⁸ tn Heb “a day of cloud and darkness.”

[2:2]  ⁹ tc The present translation here follows the proposed reading שְׁחֹר (shÿkhor, “blackness”) rather than the MT שַׁחַר (shakhar, “morning”). The change affects only the vocalization; the Hebrew consonants remain unchanged. Here the context calls for a word describing darkness. The idea of morning or dawn speaks instead of approaching light, which does not seem to fit here. The other words in the verse (e.g., “darkness,” “gloominess,” “cloud,” “heavy overcast”) all emphasize the negative aspects of the matter at hand and lead the reader to expect a word like “blackness” rather than “dawn.” However, NIrV paraphrases the MT nicely: “A huge army of locusts is coming. They will spread across the mountains like the sun when it rises.”

[2:2]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “A huge and powerful people”; KJV, ASV “a great people and a strong.” Many interpreters understand Joel 2 to describe an invasion of human armies, either in past history (e.g., the Babylonian invasion of Palestine in the sixth century b.c.) or in an eschatological setting. More probably, however, the language of this chapter referring to “people” and “armies” is a hypocatastic description of the locusts of chapter one. Cf. TEV “The great army of locusts advances like darkness.”

[2:2]  ¹¹ tn Heb “it will not be repeated for years of generation and generation.”

[2:10]  ¹² sn Witnesses of locust invasions have described the visual effect of large numbers of these creatures crawling over one another on the ground. At such times the ground is said to appear to be in motion, creating a dizzying effect on some observers. The reference in v. 10 to the darkening of the sun and moon probably has to do with the obscuring of visibility due to large numbers of locusts swarming in the sky.

[2:10]  ¹³ tn Heb “before it.”

[2:10]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “trembles.”

[2:10]  ¹⁵ tn Heb “gather their brightness.”

[2:31]  ¹⁶ tn Heb “to blood,” but no doubt this is intended to indicate by metonymy the color of blood rather than the substance itself. The blood red color suggests a visual impression here – something that could be caused by fires, volcanic dust, sandstorms, or other atmospheric phenomena.