desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it,
Thou delightest not in burnt offering,
The sacrifice of God is a broken heart,
A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

They represent, therefore, the oldest edition of the Psalter and the songs
which were probably sung by the temple singers and the people as they
went up to the temple on the great feast days during the closing years of
the Persian period.

III. The Prophecy of Joel. For a brief moment the clear light of
contemporary prophecy is turned upon the Judean community by the little
book of Joel. The immediate occasion was the invasion of a great swarm of
locusts which swept into Judea either from the desert or from the
mountains in the north. It contains in 3:6 the first Old Testament
reference to the Greeks. From 3:2 it is evident that the Jewish race has
already been widely scattered. In 3:2 the hope is expressed that the
time will soon come when strangers shall no longer pass through Jerusalem.
The temple, however, and the city walls (2:9) have already been
rebuilt, indicating that the prophecy followed the work of Nehemiah. The
priests are exceedingly prominent in the life of the community, and Joel,
though a prophet, places great emphasis upon the importance of the ritual.
When the community is threatened by the swarms of locusts, whose advance
he describes with dramatic imagery, he calls upon the people to sanctify
a fast and to summon an assembly, and commands the priests to cry aloud to
Jehovah for deliverance.

IV. Hopes of the Jews. In his prophecy Joel has given a very complete
description of the hopes which the people entertained regarding the coming
day of Jehovah. It is the same day of Jehovah that Zephaniah described
(Section LXXXI:v) and yet the portrait is very different. A divine
judgment is to be pronounced, not upon Jehovah's people, but upon their
foes. Here Joel reveals the influence of Ezekiel's graphic descriptions
found in the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters of his prophecy.
Vividly he describes the advance of Israel's hereditary foes. With
Full panoply of war they are pictured as advancing to the Valley of
Jehoshaphat, the valley of judgment (popularly identified with the
Kidron), where Jehovah is to pass sentence upon them. Then suddenly, as
the harvester puts the sickle in the grain, they shall be cut down and
utterly destroyed. Also in the prophet's imagination above this carnage
rises Jerusalem, an impre