Joel 3King James Version
The valley of Jehoshaphat. I will gather all nations. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong. The valley of decision. Judgment and then blessing. A fountain shall come forth of the house of the Lord, and shall water the valley of Shittim.
At the end of history, God gathers all nations into the Valley of Jehoshaphat to answer for their crimes against Israel: the slave trade, the looting of the temple, the scattering of families. The nations are summoned to a final battle they cannot win. Jerusalem is made permanently holy, the land overflows with wine and milk, and God's presence in Zion is declared the ultimate security.
Every injustice done to the vulnerable will be answered; God's final verdict belongs to him alone.
"Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision." (3:14) The repetition of 'multitudes' captures the sheer scale of a judgment that is not personal and private but cosmic, with nations crowded together waiting for a verdict that cannot be appealed.
The prophet stands in a Judah that has survived plague and invasion but still carries fresh memories of neighbors sold into slavery and temple treasuries stripped bare by coastal traders. He speaks to people who wonder whether their suffering was noticed. Joel's answer is that history has a ledger, the nations that profited from Israel's pain will stand in a valley whose very name means judgment, and the God who seemed absent during the locust years will be loudly present at the end.
God is judge and advocate, speaking in the first person about his people and his land. Tyre, Sidon, and Philistia are cited by name as having sold Israelite children into slavery. Egypt and Edom appear as symbols of perpetual enmity. No human hero is named; the rescue belongs entirely to God.
Joel 3 closes the book by completing the arc: the locust plague of chapter 1 was local and reversible; the judgment of chapter 3 is universal and final. The Valley of Jehoshaphat, meaning 'God judges,' becomes one of Scripture's most vivid images of divine reckoning, later absorbed into Jewish, Christian, and Islamic eschatology as the site of the last judgment.
The tone shifts from warning to fury and then settles into a quiet certainty. The final image is not a battlefield but a city at rest, with rivers running from the temple and harvests too abundant to contain.
1For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,
2I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.
3And they have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink.
4Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye recompense me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon your own head;
5Because ye have taken my silver and my gold, and have carried into your temples my goodly pleasant things:
6The children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Grecians, that ye might remove them far from their border.
7Behold, I will raise them out of the place whither ye have sold them, and will return your recompence upon your own head:
8And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the children of Judah, and they shall sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far off: for the LORD hath spoken it.
9Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up:
10Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.
11Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O LORD.
12Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about.
13Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great.
14Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.
15The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.
16The LORD also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem; and the heavens and the earth shall shake: but the LORD will be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of Israel.
17So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain: then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more.
18And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the LORD, and shall water the valley of Shittim.
19Egypt shall be a desolation, and Edom shall be a desolate wilderness, for the violence against the children of Judah, because they have shed innocent blood in their land.
20But Judah shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.
21For I will cleanse their blood that I have not cleansed: for the LORD dwelleth in Zion.