Of all the prophetic writings the Book of Joel has, perhaps, suffered most at the hands of modern writers. The destructive critics assert that Joel wrote after the Babylonian captivity of Judah, and even after the reconstructive work of Ezra and Nehemiah. In Joel as in Daniel they confront the alternative, either of allowing the predictive and therefore supernatural character of the hook as a Divine revelation of the future, or of finding a naturalistic interpretation which eliminates inspiration. If Joel wrote in the time of Joash, then, incontestably, he was inspired. But that, to quote Welhausen, "Would be to surrender our dearly bought scientific method." To preserve the "method" the unanimous voice of antiquity, of Jewish scholarship, and of the most cogent internal evidence, are ruthlessly set aside!<br><br>But Joel has not only suffered in the house of his enemies, but also in the house of his well-intentioned friends.