the years the locusts have eaten
24 The threshing floors will be filled with grain;
the vats will overflow with new wine and oil.
25 “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten—
the great locust and the young locust,
the other locusts and the locust swarm—
my great army that I sent among you.
I’m not one to go to the Bible for comfort—it is much better for violent tales of dream-interpretation and punishment—but this spring, as the earth thaws and people emerge from their torpor, I guess I can take some heart in the phrase: I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.
That’s the NIV translation, at least; the KJV puts it somewhat differently:
25 And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller [sic], and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.
If you are wondering how locust / cankerworm / caterpiller / palmerworm became the almost-Seussian great locust / young locust / other locusts / locust swarm of the NIV, you are not alone. I myself waded into an ancient and answerless exegetical debate that is almost too tedious to recount. Basically, nobody knows what exactly the four Hebrew words refer to in this context: different stages of the same locust, different species of locusts, or totally different insects.1 But, since Joel is apocalyptic literature, it doesn’t really matter: the point is that God’s “great army” will terrorize his people, that death and ruin must come before the good times can begin.
Yesterday my friend Vita sent me a screenshot, along with “Happy bday week!”, that read:
Billions of cicadas are expected to emerge in several states in the next few weeks after 17 years underground, just in time to help orchestrate the soundtrack of summer.
People sometimes confuse cicadas and locusts, but they aren’t even closely related. Billions of locusts would be an Exodus-grade plague; billions of cicadas will just be really, really loud. As the weather warms, the foretold nymphs of Brood X’s periodical cicadas will crawl from the ground and molt into garnet-eyed adults, buzzing off into the trees and leaving empty shells, or exuviae, behind. The males will make a racket, mate, and die. (Many, of course, will just die.) In August the nymphs will hatch and descend into the earth. When they see sunlight again, I will be forty-four.
Christine Hayes, Professor of Religious Studies at Yale, notes that the last prophetic books of the Old Testament date to the time of the return of the first exiles to the Promised Land. Rather than experiencing the glorious homecoming foretold by pre-exilic prophets, they find themselves in poverty, toiling to rebuild the temple, surrounded by hostile factions, lacking political autonomy, and generally bummed out. New prophets insist that God is displeased because the temple is unbuilt, but once the temple’s done, the goalposts keep moving. Promised peace fades into the distance, to a time of judgment, to the eschaton, to the end.
“I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Monday. “I so badly want to be done. I know you all so badly want to be done. We are just almost there, but not quite yet.” When reality doesn’t live up to the oracles, the world requires further grimness, further prophecy, and a future that gets further and further away.
Charles Wright, a favorite poet of mine who once lived on Locust Avenue in Charlottesville, Virginia, wrote in a coda to one of his poems:
I slip the word in my shirt pocket: Time.
To warm it, to keep it dark, to keep it back from Forever.
I fold it in half and hold it there.
Like the cicada, however, it leaves its body and goes about its business.
Slick shell, such beautiful wings,
A corpse to reckon with.
Memento mori, perhaps.
This week I will turn twenty-seven; when the cicadas return I will be forty-four. There are ways of keeping time beyond the tick and shuffle of papers and clocks, meetings and work, birthdays and holidays: Jupiter’s 12-year trip around the sun, the return of Halley’s Comet every 75 years, biennial plants that take two years to bloom and then die.
Here is another: a billion flightless insects burrowed beneath America, feeding silently on roots, waiting to emerge, waiting for the end.
ben tapeworm