Sunday, December 27, 2020

Joel 2:3

I've been reading Joel lately (although by the time this post is published, I'll have finished it and moved on to Amos).  A couple weeks ago, I noticed a nice feature in the first part of 2:3:  "Fire devours before them, and behind them a flame burns."  There's a chiasm here, so even in the structure of the sentence, fire is both in front of and behind the people.  From what I can tell, however, this feature isn't present in the original Hebrew.