a locust: one of the swarming, crop-stripping insects, sometimes taken to be the young, still wingless kind
Biblical Hebrew has a small vocabulary of locust words, and this is one of them. The common one is the locust of the plague on Egypt (אַרְבֶּה), and around it stand others, among them the consumer (חָסִיל) and the shearer (גָּזָם). This word hardly ever appears alone. It is paired with the common word in Psalm 105:34 and again in Nahum 3:15, and it is stacked with three other locust words in Joel. It always speaks of the swarm as a mass, never of a single insect.
What the writers do with it is steady even where its exact reference is not. At ground level it names the thing that eats: a cloud of insects that arrives beyond counting and leaves nothing green behind. From there the prophets lift it into comparison. Jeremiah fills Babylon with soldiers as thick as locusts and calls up cavalry the same way. Nahum dares Nineveh to breed like locusts, since the sword will eat the city the way locusts eat a field, and then turns the picture around: the city's traders swarmed in, stripped what they could, and flew off.
What nobody has settled is how precise the word is. Three readings compete:
- It names one particular kind of locust, distinct from the others.
- It names the young insect that hops and crawls before its wings are grown.
- It is simply another word for locust, heaped up with the rest for the force of the picture.
The third reading is the one most scholars now hold. The word is safest read as a locust word whose finer point we can no longer recover, and whose work in every passage is to make a devastation feel total.
Nuances
The sense of פָּשַׁט in Nahum 3:16, which materially determines whether יֶלֶק can be identified with the pre-adult, molting locust. The clause states that the yeleq פָּשַׁט and then flew away (וַיָּעֹף).
- contested"Strips off its skin," that is, molts, and then flies away. On this reading the noun denotes the pre-adult nymph, and HALOT's "hopper" gloss has direct textual warrant here.; BDB, s.v. פָּשַׁט; HALOT, s.v. פשט ("strip off the skin"); John A. Thompson, "Joel's Locusts and the Ancient Versions," The Bible Translator 25 (1974), 406; O. Palmer Robertson, The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (NICOT, 1990), 118-119; Kevin J. Cathcart, Nahum in the Light of Northwest Semitic (BibOr 26, 1973), 144-146
- contested"Strips the land, raids, plunders," the martial sense of the verb that is far better attested elsewhere in biblical Hebrew. On this reading the noun is a generic locust image and the developmental-stage identification loses its clearest single support.; Klaas Spronk, Nahum (HCOT, 1997), 138; Willie Wessels, "The Metaphorical Depiction of Nineveh's Demise," Scriptura 116 (2017), 246-259; David J. Clark and Howard A. Hatton, A Handbook on the Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (UBS Handbook Series, 1989)
Disputed
Whether יֶלֶק designates a distinct locust species, a specific developmental stage (the wingless, molting nymph or "hopper"), or simply functions as one of several near-synonyms for locust, piled up for rhetorical intensification. No Akkadian, Ugaritic, or Arabic cognate has been securely established, and the ancient versions render the noun inconsistently, so the question cannot be settled by comparative philology.
- majorityOne of several Hebrew locust nouns functioning as near-synonyms, with no fixed technical referent; the heaping of names in Joel exhausts the semantic field rhetorically rather than taxonomically. The decisive evidence is that the four names appear in different orders in Joel 1:4 and Joel 2:25, which fixed biological stages could not tolerate.; Hans Walter Wolff, Joel and Amos (Hermeneia, 1977), 27-28; James L. Crenshaw, Joel (AB 24C, 1995), 88-90; John Barton, Joel and Obadiah (OTL, 2001), 47, 69; Helmer Ringgren, "אַרְבֶּה," TDOT 1:335-341
- minorityThe wingless, molting nymph, the "hopper" stage before the locust can fly. This is the standing lexicographical gloss; it rests chiefly on reading the verb in Nahum 3:16 as "strip off the skin," and more recently on comparative Akkadian locust terminology.; HALOT 2:413, s.v. יֶלֶק; TWOT 870a, s.v. יֶלֶק; Ludwig Koehler, "Die Bezeichnungen der Heuschrecke im Alten Testament," ZDPV 49 (1926), 328-333; M. D. Lopatin, "Locust Designations in Akkadian and Ancient Hebrew," Acta Linguistica Petropolitana 20/3 (2024), 66-97
- minorityA distinct locust species, winged (Nahum 3:16) and hairy or bristling (Jeremiah 51:27), named from a putative root meaning "lick up." This is the older species tradition of Christian Hebraism.; Gesenius, Hebraisches und aramaisches Handworterbuch, 18th ed. (Meyer and Donner), s.v. יֶלֶק; Samuel Bochart, Hierozoicon II (1663), 441-475