The word covenant does not appear in Joel, but Joel is clearly operating from an understanding of God’s covenant with Israel. The Mosaic covenant promised agricultural blessing if Israel would be faithful to the Mosaic covenant (Dt. 28:3-5, 8, 11). God also promised agricultural destruction if Israel broke the Mosaic covenant (Dt. 28:16-18). Specifically, God said, “You shall carry much seed into the field and shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it. … The cricket shall possess all your trees and the fruit of your ground” (Dt 28:3-4). What Joel records in chapter 1 of his prophecy is the fulfillment of this curse from the Mosaic covenant.
Joel’s hope that God may relent from his judgment (2:13) is based on God’s revelation of his name Yhwh to Moses after Israel first broke the Mosaic covenant. In Exodus 34:6-7 God declared himself to be “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” as well as one who “forgives iniquity and transgressions and sin.”
The locust judgment in chapter 1 alludes to the plague of locusts that God sent on Egypt. In both cases the plague is said to be so severe nothing like it happened in the days of their fathers or grandfathers (Ex. 10:6; Joel 1:2) and such that the telling of it will be passed on from one generation to the next (Ex. 10:2; Joel 1:3). The Egyptian plagues were a day of Yhwh judgment on Egypt (though that term is not used there) that prefigured the ultimate day of Yhwh that will be visited upon all the nations. The trumpet judgments in Revelation 8-9 allude to the plagues on Egypt, and it is not surprising that the trumpet judgments also allude to Joel.
Joel’s promise that Spirit of God would be poured out on everyone, regardless of age or sex reflects a desire of Moses in Numbers 11:29, “Would that all Yhwh’s people were prophets, that Yhwh would put his Spirit on them!” The context for this wish was Moses’s contention that he could not bear this complaining people alone. God then set seventy men aside to aid Moses and empowered them with the Spirit. When Joshua reported to Moses that two other men, not of the seventy also received the Spirit, Moses expressed this wish. Schriener notes, “The fundamental flaw with Israel is revealed by this incident: the people lacked the Holy Spirit.”[1] Moses’s wish gestured toward the promise of the new covenant, and Joel now prophesies that this wish will come to pass. Obadiah is the prophet who most nearly proceeds Joel. Joel takes the day of Yhwh theme that Obadiah introduced and develops it further. Joel also quotes Obadiah’s affirmation that Yhwh will save a remnant from judgment.
[1] Schriener, The King in His Beauty, 71.