JOCHEBED Gear-glorified ; Sept. 'Icexa f3e5), wife of Amram, and mother of Miriam, Moses, and Aaron. In Exod. vi. 20, Jochebed is expressly declared to have been the sister of Am ram's father, and consequently the aunt of her husband. As marriage between persons thus re lated was aftenvards forbidden by the law (Lev. xviii. 12), various attempts have been made to show that the relationship was more distant than the text in its literal meaning indicates. We see no necessity for this. The mere mention of the relationship implies that there was something re.
markable in the case ; but if we shew that nothing is remarkable, we do away the occasion for the relationship being at all noticed. The fact seems to be, that where this marriage was contracted, there was no law forbidding such alliances but they must in any case have been unusual, alth'ough not forbidden and this, with the writer's know ledge that they were subsequently interdicted, sufficiently accounts for this one being so pointedly mentioned. The candour of the historian in de claring himself to be sprung from a marriage afterwards forbidden by the law, delivered through himself, deserves especial notice.—J. K.
JOEL &t.4.14, Whose God is Iehovah, e., a war shipper of 7ehovah, Gesen.; Sept. 'IcojX). 1. The eldest son of Samuel the prophet (t Sam. viii. 2 ; Chron. vi. 33), appointed in the old age of his father, along with his brother Abia, a judge in Beer sheba, an office which they dishonoured by their cor ruption and profligacy, and thereby paved the way for the placing of the government in the hands of a king (I Sam. viii. 3-5). In Chron. vi. 12 [A. V. 281, Vashni appears as the name of Samuel's eldest son • but this is evidently a mistake, arising from Joel' having fallen out of the text, and 1.4)1, ' which means and the second,' and applies to Abia, being taken as a proper name. Joel was the father of Heman the singer (t Chron vi. 33 ; xv. 17). Another error occurs in ver. 2o [A. V. 36], where Joel stands for Shaul of ver. [A. V. 241 2. One of the minor prophets, the son of Pethuel. Beyond this, nothing is known with certainty con cerning him. That his sphere of prophetic activity was in Judah, may be gathered, however, from his own book, in which he addresses the priests as in the midst of them ( Joel i. 13, 14 ; 15, 17) ; speaks of the house of the Lord and of Zion as places in the vicinity of which he was (i. 9 ;
1, 23) ; and dwells exclusively on what relates to Judah and Jerusalem without any allusion to Israel. This throws discredit on the statement of Pseudo Epiphanius (De Vit. Proph. c. 14), that he was of the tribe of Reuben, and was buried at Bethhoron. From the frequent reference which he makes to the Temple, its offices, and services, it has been inferred that he was himself a priest ; but the man ner in which he addresses the priests leads rather to the opposite conclusion, for he invariably ad dresses them as a body to which he himself did not belong. The close resemblance between parts of his prophecy and parts of that of Amos (comp. Joel iii. 16 with Amos i. 2 ; JOC1 hi. 18 with Amos ix. 13 ; Joel i. 4, ii. 25, with A T 1 -MOS .v. --9 ; Joe. iii. 4-6 with Amos i. 6-to) points to the conclu sion that they were nearly contemporaries, and as Amos appears to have connected his book with that of Joel by commencing with the words witb which Joel introduces his closing utterance, it is probable that Joel was the earlier of the two. This would place the time of his prophesying somewhat earlier than the reign of Azariah king of Judah, during which Amos prophesied. Some however, contend for an earlier date. Thus Credner, Hit lig, Ewald, Keil, and others, place Joel in the early part of the reign of Joash, before the attack of the Syrians under Hasael, on the ground that had this event preceded his writing, he would have included (iii. 4) the Syrians among the doomed enemies of Judah, as Antos includes them among those of Israel. But it might as well be argued that be cause Joel does not include Moab and Ammon in his denunciation, he must have written before the invasion of Judah by them in the reign of Jehosha phat (2 Chron. xx. 1); and, moreover, the doom of Syria was incurred, not by the attack upon Judah, in which the Syrians were God's instruments to punish the Jews for their apostasy (2 Chron xxiv. 24), but by their oppression of Israel (2 Kings xiii. 22), and especially by the cruelty they prac tised in Gilead (Amos i. 3) ; so that it did not fall to Joel as the prophet of Judah to refer to them. As has been justly remarked, the religious aspect of the single invasion of Judah hy this band of Syrians was very different from the perpetual hos tility of the Philistines, or the malicious cupidity of the Phcenicians ' (Pusey, Proph., p. 96).