Locust

The locust is a swarming, plant-devouring grasshopper that Scripture treats both as a literal insect and as a byword for devastating numbers and divine judgment. The text reckons certain locusts among the foods permitted to Israel (Leviticus 11:22), and Matthew 3:4 records that John the Baptist’s food was locusts and wild honey. As a matter of language, Hebrew and Greek each use several overlapping words for locusts and grasshoppers, and matching those terms to modern species is uncertain.

The fullest narrative use is the eighth sign against Egypt in Exodus 10, where Moses announces Yahweh’s word to Pharaoh, “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?” (Exodus 10:3), and Pharaoh afterwards asks that “this death” be taken away (Exodus 10:17). Deuteronomy 28:38 lists the locust among covenant curses on the land — much seed sown, little gathered — and 2 Chronicles 7:13 places it in God’s own voice: “if I command the locust to devour the land.” Historically, locust swarms are a real and recurrent scourge in the Near East and North Africa, which is part of why the image carried such force.

Locusts also serve as a simile for number, as when the Midianites and their allies lie in the valley “like locusts for multitude” (Judges 7:12). Joel 1:4 describes wave upon wave — swarming locust, great locust, grasshopper, caterpillar — stripping vine and fig tree (Joel 1:7), and Joel 2:2 speaks of “a great and strong people” before whom the earth quakes and the heavens tremble (Joel 2:10); whether the prophet means actual insects, an invading army, or an apocalyptic host is genuinely debated, and the poetry moves between them. Proverbs 30:27 observes that locusts have no king yet advance in ranks, a detail Revelation 9 deliberately reverses: locusts come from the abyss, are told not to hurt grass but only people lacking God’s seal (Revelation 9:4), torment rather than kill, so that people seek death and do not find it (Revelation 9:6), and have a king over them, Abaddon (Revelation 9:11).

Christian traditions read this imagery differently. Some interpreters take Joel’s locusts as literal insects and the promise of restored years (Joel 2:25) as concrete restoration of what the swarm ate, while others read the passage as a figure of repentance and spiritual renewal, especially since Joel 2:28–29 is quoted at Pentecost (Acts 2:17–18). Patristic and medieval writers often treated locusts morally, as destructive passions or as false teachers. Revelation 9 is read historically by some as a symbol of past invasions or corrupt powers, futuristically by others as an end-time plague, and idealistically as a recurring picture of judgment — and the locusts of John’s diet are, in most readings, simply food.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.