Joel's Seeds Hidden in Ant Holes and God's Promise Not to Divorce Israel

The famine in the days of Joel lasted seven years. Seven years without adequate rain, without reliable harvests, without the ordinary rhythm of planting and eating that made life in the land possible. At the end of those seven years, the winter that should have brought relief brought nothing. The rain held back until the first day of the month of Nisan, which is already spring, already past planting season for most crops, already the edge of the window in which grain could conceivably grow before the dry months arrived.

When the rain finally came on that first day of Nisan, the prophet Joel told the people to go out and plant. The Ginzberg account records their response: they pushed back. A person who has saved a measure of wheat or two measures of barley, they said, would not use what little remained for seed and die. They would eat the seed and live a little longer. The prophet heard this and told them to go anyway. To plant. The tradition does not record a long argument. Joel said plant, and the people did.

In the ant hills and mouse holes across the land, there was grain. Not much, but enough. The creatures who had stored food underground through seven years of famine had accumulated exactly what was needed for seed, and the people who went out to plant found it. They cast the found grain on the second, the third, and the fourth day of Nisan. On the fifth day, rain came again. Eleven days after that, the grain was ripe. The Omer offering, which is required on the sixteenth of Nisan, arrived exactly on time. The Psalmist wrote: they that sow in tears shall reap in joy. The rabbis who preserved this story said that verse was written about this moment, about the specific people who went out with nearly nothing and cast seed that was not theirs into ground that had just barely softened.

The prophet Joel is not a well-known figure in the popular imagination of Jewish history. He belongs to the later prophets, the twelve shorter books that follow Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in the Tanakh. The date of his prophecy is debated by scholars, with estimates ranging from the ninth century BCE to the fifth. What the tradition remembered him for was not his chronology but his nerve: during a famine that had already lasted seven years, with the land exhausted and the people holding whatever grain remained as survival food rather than seed, he told them to plant. The Ginzberg account of this moment captures the quality of trust required. Joel did not promise that it would work. He said go. The promise was implied by what happened next, not by anything he said before the people went out.

This is one strand of the teaching. The other strand, preserved in the Midrash Tanchuma materials, describes a conversation that Israel will have with God at the end of days about the witnesses standing against them. Heavens and earth were called as witnesses against Israel throughout the Torah, invoked by Moses in Deuteronomy 4:26 and 30:19. At the end, Israel says: Lord of the universe, my witnesses remain and are testifying against me.

God's response to each witness is the same in structure: I will remove it. New heavens and a new earth will replace the old ones, eliminating the witnesses. Every valley will be raised, every hill made level, removing the places Israel had shamed itself. A new name will be given, cutting the old record. The names of the Baalim will be removed from Israel's mouth, so that even the record of the idolatry is gone. Israel offers one final objection, the kind that only a very close relationship allows: but it is written in Jeremiah 3:1 that if a man divorces his wife and she remarries, he cannot take her back. Israel has gone after other gods. Can God still take Israel back?

God's answer turns on a single word. Did I write, God says, a man? I wrote a man. And am I a man? It is already written in Hosea 11:9: I am God, and not a man. The law that governs human divorce does not govern God. And is it even written that I sent a bill of divorce? It is written in Isaiah 50:1: where is your mother's bill of divorce by which I sent her away? There is no bill. There was no divorce. The separation was real, the distance was real, the witnesses were real, but the legal bond was never severed, because the one who would have had to sever it chose not to, and that choosing was not weakness but a different kind of rule entirely.

The grain that grew in eleven days after seven years of famine is a small version of the same logic. The delay was real. The hunger was real. The risk that the people took when they cast seed into barely-wet ground was real. But the promise that made the ground receive the seed and the rain fall on the fifth day was also real, and it operated by rules that ant-hill grain and eleven-day harvests follow even when nothing about the situation looks like it should work. Joel did not explain the mechanism. He said go plant. He already knew what was hidden in the holes.