Awake, you drunkards, and weep; and wail, all you drinkers of wine: The prophet calls on drunkards to awake from their drunken sleep and to weep. These two lines are parallel, repeating the same message in different words, adding only the phrase of wine at the end. The subject of wine is then carried over to the next line.
Drunkards are people who habitually become drunk. The drinkers of wine are not necessarily drunkards, but the two expressions combine to indicate that everyone will be without wine, whether they drink it to excess or not.
Weep and wail are two aspects of the same activity. To weep involves shedding tears of sorrow, while to wail involves using your voice to cry out in a lament or an expression of sorrow, as many people are accustomed to doing at a funeral.
Wine is a fermented drink made from grape juice. Grapes are fruits about 1 to 2.5 centimeters (½ to 1 inch) in diameter, growing in clusters on a vine; they may be light green, red, blue, or purple when ripe, depending on the variety. A thin skin covers the juicy sweet interior of the fruit. The word wine can cause problems for translators in areas of the world where it is not known. Many languages have borrowed a term for it from international or trade languages that have prestige in their area. However, such a borrowed term may not be readily known at the level of common language, which many teams focus on in their work. In such situations a glossary item on wine may be helpful. In some languages translators have resorted to a descriptive phrase for it, sometimes combined with a generic term or classifier; for example, “a fermented drink made from fruits.” If the generic concept of “fermented drink” is difficult to express, a comparison can be made with a local liquor; for example, “a kind of … made from fruits.”
In spite of the possible different emphases, many of the modern common-language translations have shortened and combined the first two lines of this verse into one, since they are very similar; for example, “You, wine drinkers [or, drunkards], wake up and mourn.”
Because of the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth: The loss of the sweet wine is the cause of the lament for the drunkards. As a result of the locust plague, there is nothing left to eat or drink. Sweet wine, or “new wine” (Good News Translation), is the grape juice as it comes fresh from the wine press (the place where the juice is squeezed from the grapes). The juice has not fermented, or has only started to ferment. By referring to the fresh grape juice, the prophet is emphasizing that the very source of the drunkards’ supply of wine has been destroyed. Sweet wine may be rendered “fresh wine,” “new wine,” or “newly made wine.”
It is cut off from your mouth renders a Hebrew idiom that means they can no longer drink sweet wine because it is no longer available. Good News Translation recognizes that the locusts did not attack and destroy the sweet wine itself, but the grapes for making it, so for the last two lines it has “the grapes for making new wine have been destroyed.” Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch simply states “because there will be no new wine!” The French common language version (Bible en français courant) explicitly translates “due to lack of grapes, you are deprived of new wine.”
Quoted with permission from de Blois, Kees & Dorn, Louis. A Handbook on Joel. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2020. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .