About this audiobook

The Book of Joel is generally considered one of the older surviving books of the Israelite Scriptures, with most scholars dating it to before the Torah was compiled, or at least heavily redacted in the time of King Josiah. Most scholars accept that Joel was written by a prophet called Joel sometime during the ancient kingdoms of Samaria and Judea, although estimates of when he lived vary greatly. The dominant view is that he lived in the 9th century BCE, however, some place his life as late as the 7th century. His world was very different from the later Kingdom of Judea that emerged in the 2nd century BCE, as the Israelites of his time were still polytheistic, worshiping the Canaanite gods, as well as statues of Yahweh, the God the Jews and Samaritans would later worship. While the Book of Joel is accepted by many as dating to the 9th through 7th centuries BCE, the oldest fragments of it to survive to the present are Hebrew fragments of the Sheneim Asar found among the Dead Sea Scrolls written in the Aramaic script, dating to the Hasmonean era. The text in these scrolls are generally the same as the Aleppo Codex’s Joel, which shows the surviving texts have been copied accurately since around 100 BCE. As it is unclear when exactly Joel lived, it is difficult to place his writing into a historical context, however, he does refer to his temple as being in the valley of acacias, also called the valley of Shittim, which identifies his Lord as Ba'al Hammon, the Canaanite fertility god. The Temple of Hammon, at the ruins of Tell el-Hammam in Jordan, reportedly sent tribute to Solomon when he was the king, and the town around the city existed from roughly 980 to 332 BCE. As Joel mentioned the Valley of Jehoshaphat, it is accepted he lived after the time of King Jehoshaphat, King of Judah between approximately 870 and 849 BCE. At the time, the region northeast of the Dead Sea, where the valley of acacias is located, was under the dominion of the Kingdom of Samaria. Joel also refers to Zion and Jerusalem, which implies a strong connection to the Kingdom of Judah. While the Septuagint’s Book of Joel makes a clear division between the “temple of your god”, and the “Lord’s temple”, the Masoretic version does not make this distinction, interchangeably referring to a “temple of God” and a “temple of Yahweh”. Only a few fragments have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, half of which confirm the Septuagint’s translation of “temple of your god”, and half of which confirm the Masoretic “temple of God”. These fragments date back to the Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties after the Judeans had adopted the Aramaic script. The Aramaic script was officially adopted for the Hebrew language under the Hasmonean dynasty, as Aramaic was already the common language and script of Judea, however, the country was inundated with refugees from the collapsed Carthaginian empire in the western Mediterranean, who spoke Punic and used the old Phoenician script.

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