Locust

The locust enters Scripture in several distinct registers. It is a clean creature permitted at the Israelite table, a wilderness food eaten by John the Immerser, an instrument of Yahweh's judgment that strips a land bare in a single passage, an image of innumerable armies, a reminder of human smallness before the One who sits above the circle of the earth, and finally an apocalyptic horror loosed from the smoke of the abyss. The same insect carries each of these weights in turn.

Permitted as Food

In the dietary code, the locust is the one winged, swarming creature that Israel may eat. Yahweh allows four named kinds: "Even these of those you⁺ may eat: the locust after its kind, and the bald locust after its kind, and the cricket after its kind, and the grasshopper after its kind" (Lev 11:22).

That permission is still being exercised in the wilderness around the Jordan, where John appears in coarse dress and minimal provisions: "And John was clothed with camel's hair, and [had] a leather loincloth about his loins, and ate locusts and wild honey" (Mark 1:6).

The Plague on Egypt

The eighth plague is announced as a measured threat: "For if you refuse to let my people go, look, tomorrow I will bring locusts into your border" (Ex 10:4). The mechanism is wind. Moses stretches the rod, "and Yahweh brought an east wind on the land all that day, and all the night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts" (Ex 10:13). The result is total cover: "they were very grievous; before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them will be such" (Ex 10:14). What hail had spared, locusts finished: "they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they ate every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and no green thing remained, either tree or herb of the field, through all the land of Egypt" (Ex 10:15). The same wind that brought them takes them: "Yahweh turned an exceedingly strong west wind, which took up the locusts, and drove them into the Red Sea; not one locust remained in all the border of Egypt" (Ex 10:19).

The Psalter remembers the plague as a single command answered without limit: "He spoke, and the locust came, And the grasshopper, and that without number, And ate up every herb in their land, And ate up the fruit of their ground" (Ps 105:34-35).

Covenant Curse and Devastation

After Egypt, the locust returns as a covenant sanction inside Israel itself. Deuteronomy lists agricultural collapse among the curses for unfaithfulness: "You will carry much seed out into the field, and will gather little in; for the locust will consume it" (Deut 28:38). Solomon's temple prayer treats locust devastation as one of the standing categories of national distress for which Israel may turn back to Yahweh: "If there is in the land famine, if there is pestilence, if there is blasting [or] mildew, locust [or] caterpillar; if their enemy besieges them in the gates of their land; whatever plague, whatever sickness there is" (1 Kings 8:37). Yahweh answers in kind, claiming the insect as his instrument: "If I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people" (2 Chr 7:13).

In Joel, the devastation is the prophet's controlling image. The destruction passes through the field in successive waves, and what one wave leaves the next finishes: "That which the palmer-worm has left has the locust eaten; and that which the locust has left has the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm has left has the caterpillar eaten" (Joel 1:4). The prophet calls the drinkers of wine to wail because the sweet wine is cut off (Joel 1:5), and describes the swarm as a nation: "For a nation has come up on my land, strong, and without number; his teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he has the jaw-teeth of a lioness. He has laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he has made it clean bare, and cast it away; its branches are made white" (Joel 1:6-7).

Joel's promise of restoration runs along the same line. Yahweh names each wave and reverses it: "And I will restore to you⁺ the years that the locust has eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmer-worm, my great army which I sent among you⁺" (Joel 2:25). The army was always his.

Nahum turns the same image against Nineveh, where multiplication is no defense because the destroyer multiplies too: "There the fire will devour you; the sword will cut you off; it will devour you like the cankerworm: make yourself many as the cankerworm; make yourself many as the locust" (Nah 3:15). Isaiah pictures the spoiling of an army's camp in the same terms: "And your⁺ spoil will be gathered [as] the caterpillar gathers: as locusts leap will men leap on it" (Isa 33:4).

The Day of Yahweh

Joel ties the locust swarm to the Day of Yahweh and to a darkening of the heavens that goes beyond mere dust raised by wings. The day is "a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, as the dawn spread on the mountains; a great and a strong people; there has not ever been the like, neither will [there] be anymore after them, even to the years of many generations" (Joel 2:2). Cosmic disturbance accompanies the advance: "The earth quakes before them; the heavens tremble; the sun and the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining" (Joel 2:10).

Innumerable Hosts

The locust supplies Scripture's standard image for armies past counting. Gideon faces Midian in those terms — "they came up with their cattle and their tents; they came in as locusts for multitude; both they and their camels were without number" (Jdg 6:5) — and the picture sharpens at the eve of his raid: "the Midianites and the Amalekites and all the sons of the east lay along in the valley like locusts for multitude; and their camels were without number, as the sand which is on the seashore for multitude" (Jdg 7:12).

Jeremiah uses the same yardstick against Egypt's woodsmen: "They will cut down her forest, says Yahweh, though it can't be searched; because they are more than the locusts, and are innumerable" (Jer 46:23). Nahum applies it to Assyria's officers, then exposes the vulnerability hidden in the metaphor: "Your princes are as the locusts, and your marshals as the swarms of grasshoppers, which encamp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun rises they flee away, and their place is not known where they are" (Nah 3:17). Many, but with no power to stand.

The Instinct of the Swarm

Proverbs counts the locust among the "exceeding wise" small things, naming the trait that makes the swarm function: "The locusts have no king, Yet go they forth all of them by bands" (Prov 30:27). Movement without a sovereign, all together. Job hears something of the same coordinated fierceness in the war-horse: "Have you made him to leap as a locust? The grandeur of his snorting is terrible" (Job 39:20).

Smallness and Frailty

The grasshopper, closely linked to the locust in Hebrew vocabulary and the dietary list, supplies an opposing image: not the swarm's force, but a creature's smallness. The spies' panic at Hebron reduces them to it: "And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight" (Num 13:33). Isaiah uses the same picture in reverse — not as panic but as proportion. Compared with the One who sits enthroned, all humanity is on this scale: "[It is] he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are as grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in" (Isa 40:22). And in Ecclesiastes' description of old age, the grasshopper figures the failing body: "the almond-tree will blossom, and the grasshopper will be a burden, and desire will fail; because man goes to his everlasting home, and the mourners go about the streets" (Eccl 12:5).

The Locusts of the Abyss

In John's vision, the swarm crosses over from agricultural disaster to apocalyptic torment. They come up out of smoke: "And out of the smoke came forth locusts on the earth; and power was given them, as the scorpions of the earth have power" (Rev 9:3). Their target is reversed from the natural locust's: "And it was said to them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree, but only such men as do not have the seal of God on their foreheads" (Rev 9:4). Their effect is bounded torment, not death: "And it was given them that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when it strikes a man. And in those days men will seek death, and will in no way find it; and they will desire to die, and death flees from them" (Rev 9:5-6).

Their form is described in successive likenesses: "And the likenesses of the locusts were like horses prepared for war; and on their heads as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as men's faces. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as [the teeth] of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots, of many horses rushing to war. And they have tails like scorpions, and stings; and in their tails is their power to hurt men five months" (Rev 9:7-10).

The image gathers everything that has come before. Joel's nation with the teeth of a lion, the locusts ranged like an army, the swarm without number that obeys the wind — Revelation hears the echoes and renames them as the army of the abyss, given power on a fixed leash by the same God who once brought a wind out of the east, and afterward a stronger wind out of the west.