Joel

Augustine was puzzled by how the book of Joel held together, and the scholar Merx later called it the problem child of Old Testament exegesis. Ronald L. Troxel takes that long struggle seriously, then argues that attention to genre clears up many of the old cruxes. Treating chapter four as a series of late additions, he reads the first three chapters as a unified work of schriftgelehrte Prophetie, or scribal prophecy. That places Joel alongside Jonah and Haggai rather than within theories of a growing Book of the Twelve.

The study moves from the history of interpretation, through the book's composite texture and narrative markers, to its distinctive eschatology. It finds in Joel 3 the culmination of a didactic narrative meant to prepare a future generation to survive the Day of the Lord. A closely argued, rewarding study for students and scholars of the Hebrew prophets.