Today is the 9th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible.

I'm Brian. It is wonderful to be here with you today as we dive in for the next step forward on our journey through the

scriptures and as we gather around the global campfire. Wow we've got some

ground to cover today because we're going to be beginning, well more than beginning,

we're going to read a whole book in the Old Testament, and then we're going to begin a new book in the

New Testament, so we got a lot of ground to cover. Here as we

begin today in the Old Testament, we're continuing through the minor prophets, and today we will read in its entirety the book of Joel,

and nobody really knows who Joel was.

There are other people in the Bible with that name, but scholars don't believe any of those people are the author of this book.

The language in this book is prophetic, like it will sound kind of common with some of the other prophets like

Ezekiel or Jeremiah or Amos or Micah or Zephania. And so scholars look at those similarities and say maybe Joel is the work of more than one

prophet and then other scholars consider maybe the similarities are just the language of the prophets.

Maybe there was like a culture and a tradition among the prophets and this is how they

communicated.

And Joel doesn't give us any historical clues in the text either, and that makes

dating it really difficult, and different conclusions have come to be over the

centuries. I guess in the most general terms somewhere between

500 and 800 BC is likely the time period of Joel and he writes of a vast horde of locusts that invade the land and

destroy it.

Eat everything.

All the vegetation tear down all the crops destroy everything and and because of that a

great famine follows the plague of locusts and this natural disaster is used as

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