Joel 2:2

"A day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, as a dawn spread upon the mountains; a great people and a strong; there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any after them, even to the years of many generations.

It would appear that far more than any locust plague is in view here. "The locusts are now pictured on a scale larger than life, and many commentators have understood them here as prefiguring some invading army from the north."[8] We do not hesitate to interpret this as a prophecy of the invasion of Israel by the Assyrians, who usually entered Palestine from the north. Some commentators, of course, hesitate to accept this, due to their erroneous decision that Joel was written at a time when the Assyrian scourge had already disappeared from the earth.

"There hath not been ever the like ..." The unique terror of the Assyrians is a historical phenomenon; even the friezes that decorated the palaces of Ashurbanipal, and Ashurnasipal depicted the slaves and captives without skin, exposing the muscles and tendons as articulating with the bones in such a manner as to indicate that the Assyrians were more familiar with the human anatomy without skin, than they were with the normal body.[9] They customarily flayed their victims, and often did this while the unfortunates were still alive!

As has been repeatedly stressed in this series, the prophetic description of "the day of the Lord" invariably appears in the very darkest colors. Another example is Amos 5:18ff, where the impact of that day upon men will be like that of one who flees from a lion, but who meets a bear, and then, finally reaching what might have been supposed as the safety of his house, he went in and leaned against the wall; and a serpent bit him! The seven parallel presentations of the Judgment Day in the Book of Revelation all follow this tragic and exceedingly distressing pattern.