Joel 1:7

He hath made my vine into a waste, and my fig-tree into splinters] The vine and the fig-tree are mentioned as the two principal and most representative fruit-trees of Palestine, the vine holding the first place (cf. Hosea 2:12; 1 Kings 4:25; 2 Kings 18:31). For splinters(lit. something broken into pieces), comp. nearly the same word in Hosea 10:7 (R.V. marg.). The words indicate the severity of the visitation. Locusts first attack plants and vegetables; when these have been all consumed, they attack trees, consuming first the leaves, then the bark. Comp. the quotation from Shaw's Travels, below, p. 88. The effects of such ravages are felt sometimes for many years: "the wine of Algiers, before the locusts in 1723 wasted the vineyards, was in flavour not inferior to the best Hermitage. Since that time the wine has much degenerated, and has not yet [1732] recovered its usual qualities" (Shaw, p. 227).

made it clean bare viz. by stripping off the bark, cf. Psalms 29:9 (the same word).

castit away There is no pron. in the Hebrew; and the reference is, no doubt, partly to the fragments of bark and wood which have been bitten off by the locusts, but being uneatable by them have fallen to the ground, partly to the barked branches and trunks themselves, which (metaphorically) the insects have -cast away." "After they have passed, nothing remains but the large branches, and the roots, which, being under ground, have escaped their voracity." "The bushes were eaten quite bare, though the animals could not have been long on the spot. They sat by hundreds on a bush gnawing the rind and the woody fibres" (Lichtenstein, Travels in S. Africa, p. 241, ap. Pusey).

its branches Genesis 40:10; Genesis 40:12 only, also of the vine: properly, something intertwined.

shew whiteness] viz. through the bark being stripped off. "Ambedunt enim, ut Tacitus (Annal. xv. 5) loquitur, quicquid herbidum est et frondosum;ut nee culmus, nec granum ullum remaneat, et arbores frondibus et cortice tamquam vestibus nudatae instar truncorum alborumconspiciantur" (Ludolf, Hist. Aeth.p. 178 f., ap.Credner).