Joel 2:9 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

They shall run to and fro— Shall range about. Bishop Warburton observes, that the fine conversion of the subjects in Joel is remarkable. The prophesy is delivered in the first chapter; Awake, ye drunkards, &c. and repeated in the second; Blow, ye the trumpet, &c. In the first chapter the locusts are described as a people: For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number. But, that we may not be mistaken in the primary sense,—the plague of locusts; the ravages described are the ravages of insects; chap. Joel 1:7. In the second chapter, the hostile people are described as locusts; Joel 2:2-9. But, that we may not mistake the secondary sense, namely, the invasion of a foreign enemy, they are compared, we see, to a mighty army. This art in the complexture of the prophesy, is truly divine, and renders all chicane to avoid a double sense ineffectual; for in some places of the prophesy, dearth by insects must needs be understood; in others, desolation by war; so that both senses are of necessity to be admitted: and here let me observe, that had the commentators on this prophesy but attended to the nature of the double sense, they would not have suffered themselves to have been so embarrassed, or have spent so much time in freeing the prophet from an imaginary embarrassment (though at the expence of the context) on account of the same prophesies having in one part that signification primary, which in another is secondary: a circumstance, which is so far from inaccurate, that it gives the highest elegance to the discourse; and joins the two senses so closely, as to obviate all pretence for a division, to the injury of the sacred writer. See Div. Leg. book 6: sect. 6. We may just observe, in confirmation of what has been here advanced, that the 10th and 11th verses cannot with any great propriety be understood literally of locusts, but of the destruction by the Chaldeans. See the note on Isaiah 13:9-12. Some read the 10th verse throughout in the present tense: The earth quakes, the heavens tremble—the sun and moon become dark, &c.