locust: the swarming, migratory insect that arrives in devouring clouds and eats a land bare, and the ordinary Hebrew word for it
This is the Bible's default word for the locust, and nearly every modern lexicon identifies the creature behind it as the desert locust in its swarming phase, the insect that gathers into vast travelling clouds and leaves nothing green. It is usually a collective: one word for the whole swarm rather than for a single bug. Only once, when the wind sweeps the plague out of Egypt and "not one locust remained," is a single insect clearly in view. Almost a third of its uses belong to that plague story, which fixed the word in Israel's memory as the picture of a harvest lost overnight.
From there the word is put to a surprising range of work:
- It is the instrument of judgment in the plague on Egypt, and the loss of a crop threatened in the covenant curses.
- It is the standard picture of a host too many to count, so enemy camps and invading armies are said to arrive "like locusts."
- It is a wisdom teacher: a war horse leaps like it, and it marches out in ranks with no king to give the order.
- It is food, the first of the hopping insects Israel was permitted to eat.
- Once, remarkably, it pictures a person rather than a multitude, a man shaken off like a bug flicked from a coat.
Hebrew writers heard the name echoing their verb for "being many," and they played on the resemblance: the Midianites come "like locusts for multitude," and an army invading Egypt is "more numerous than the locust." Specialists now think the name is in fact a very old inherited noun that only looks related to that verb, since the same word turns up across the Semitic languages in a shape the derivation cannot explain. The wordplay is still real in the writers' hands; it just tells us what they heard in the name rather than where the name came from.
Hebrew has an unusually crowded vocabulary for locusts, and this is the general term among them. It heads the short list of edible kinds, and it stands beside three other names in Joel's account of a devastated countryside (גָּזָם, יֶלֶק, and חָסִיל). Whether those companions name separate insects, successive stages of one insect's growth, or are simply poetry piling up words for ruin has never been settled.
Nuances
Whether the four locust names listed together in Joel 1:4 denote four species, four developmental stages of a single locust generation, or are near-synonyms piled up rhetorically.
- majorityThey are poetic near-synonyms accumulated for rhetorical effect, not an entomological code. The reversed order of the same four names at Joel 2:25 tells against any fixed sequence.; Leslie C. Allen, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah (NICOT; Eerdmans, 1976), 49-50; James L. Crenshaw, Joel (AB 24C; Doubleday, 1995), 86-90; John Barton, Joel and Obadiah (OTL; Westminster John Knox, 2001), 43-44; Ronald A. Simkins, Yahweh's Activity in History and Nature in the Book of Joel (Edwin Mellen, 1991)
- minorityThey name successive stages in the life cycle of one locust generation, with this word standing for the mature winged adult.; John A. Thompson, Joel's Locusts in the Light of Near Eastern Parallels, JNES 14 (1955): 52-55; Ovid R. Sellers, Stages of Locust in Joel, AJSL 52 (1935-36): 81-85; Hans Walter Wolff, Joel and Amos (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1977), 27
- minorityThey name distinct species of Palestinian orthoptera, this one being the desert locust.; I. Aharoni, On Some Animals Mentioned in the Bible, Osiris 5 (1938): 461-478; F. S. Bodenheimer, Animal and Man in Bible Lands (Brill, 1960)
Whether the locusts of Joel 2 are literal insects, a metaphor for a human invading army, or an eschatological army.
- majorityReal locusts, continuous with the infestation described in Joel 1.; James L. Crenshaw, Joel (AB 24C; Doubleday, 1995), 121-122; Ronald A. Simkins, Yahweh's Activity in History and Nature in the Book of Joel (Edwin Mellen, 1991); John Barton, Joel and Obadiah (OTL; Westminster John Knox, 2001), 43-44
- minorityThe locusts are a metaphor for a human army throughout.; Douglas Stuart, Hosea-Jonah (WBC 31; Word, 1987)
- minorityJoel 2:1-11 describes an apocalyptic army rather than an insect plague.; Hans Walter Wolff, Joel and Amos (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1977), 41-42
Disputed
Whether the word designates one particular species of locust or is a general Hebrew term for the swarming locust.
- contestedIt designates a specific insect, the desert locust Schistocerca gregaria, precisely enough that the dietary legislation depends on zoological identification; the formula according to its kind at Leviticus 11:22 presupposes species-level differentiation.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (AB 3; Doubleday, 1991), 664-665; F. S. Bodenheimer, Animal and Man in Bible Lands (Brill, 1960); Oded Borowski, Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient Israel (AltaMira, 1998)
- contestedIt is the generic Hebrew term for the swarming locust rather than a zoological label, and no consistent species mapping of the Hebrew locust vocabulary has commanded consensus.; John A. Thompson, Translation of the Words for Locust, The Bible Translator 25 (1974): 405-411; John Barton, Joel and Obadiah (OTL; Westminster John Knox, 2001), 43-44; DCH, s.v. אַרְבֶּה
- minorityThe locust names of Leviticus 11 designate halakhic categories of jumping insects recognized in rabbinic tradition rather than species.; Zohar Amar, ha-Arbeh be-Masoret Yisrael (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2004)