Locusts in the Bible: Disaster, Diet and an Army

Locusts in the Bible are a disaster, a diet and an army. They are also the subject of one of the most generous sentences in the prophets.

What a locust plague actually is

Worth knowing before the verses, because the image loses its force otherwise.

Desert locusts change when crowded. Solitary individuals are green and harmless; under the right conditions they alter colour, shape and behaviour within a generation, and swarm. A swarm can cover hundreds of square kilometres and eat, in a day, what would feed tens of thousands of people.

There is no defence. It arrives, and then the fields are gone.

The plague

Exodus 10 is the eighth plague, and the description is precise about the aftermath: Nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt. (Exodus 10:15)

Pharaoh’s officials had already asked him to let the people go before it came. Do you not yet realise that Egypt is ruined? (Exodus 10:7) They could see what was coming and he could not.

Joel

The whole book of Joel begins with a locust invasion, and the opening is a question to the oldest people present:

Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors? (Joel 1:2)

Then a description of the swarm as an army — running like warriors, scaling walls, marching in line without swerving — which is not exaggeration but close observation of how a swarm moves.

And then, after the calamity and the call to return, one of the most surprising promises in Scripture:

I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten. (Joel 2:25)

Not the harvest. The years. What the swarm took was not only food but time — a season of growing, and the season after it spent recovering.

That is the promise people return to, and it is worth reading in its setting: it is made to a people who have just been told the disaster was deserved.

The locusts nobody expects

Two smaller notes that change the picture.

Locusts are food, and permitted: Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. (Leviticus 11:22) They are the only insects the law allows.

Which is why the detail about John the Baptist is not eccentric but poor: John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt round his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. (Mark 1:6) He was eating what the desert provided and what the law permitted.

And Proverbs, in a list of small things that are wise: locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks (Proverbs 30:27).

The same creature, in the same Bible, as a picture of order achieved without anyone in charge.

What locusts stand for

Not evil, which is the reading usually offered. In Exodus and Joel the swarm is an instrument, and the text says so plainly — God calls it my great army that I sent among you (Joel 2:25).

What they stand for is loss that cannot be resisted and is not deserved by the individual. A farmer whose field is eaten did nothing different from the farmer whose field was spared.

That is why the promise in Joel matters. It is addressed to the kind of loss nobody could have prevented, and it does not explain the loss. It offers to make the years good.

Frequently asked

What do locusts symbolise in the Bible?

Irresistible loss, and an instrument rather than an evil. Joel 2:25 has God call the swarm “my great army that I sent among you.”

What does “the years the locusts have eaten” mean?

Joel 2:25 promises repayment not of the harvest but of the years — the growing season and the recovery after it.

Did John the Baptist really eat locusts?

Yes. They are the only insects the law permits (Leviticus 11:22), and Mark 1:6 describes a diet of what the desert provided.

Why does Proverbs praise locusts?

Proverbs 30:27 lists them among small wise things: “locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks.”