Day of the Lord

A coming day of divine judgment in Israelite prophecy.


In ancient Israel, the day of the Lord is thought to have been originally an autumn festival that marked the turn of the agricultural year and reaffirmed the bond between the Chosen People and their God, Yahweh. He had done great things for them in the past, rescuing them from Egyptian servitude by tremendous miracles. A belief seems to have taken shape in a special day of the Lord when he would do great things again.
The need was felt for a fresh divine intervention. The twelve tribes had gone through a triumphalist phase, probably somewhere about 1000 b.c., when David and Solomon had ruled them all together. Soon afterward, however, the kingdom had split, the breakaway northern portion being confusingly called “Israel” and the southern one “Judah” after its largest tribal component. Judah had Jerusalem, the Davidic dynasty, and the Temple that Solomon had built. Jeroboam, the first ruler of the north, tried to supply a religious substitute by setting up gold-plated images of bull calves at Bethel and Dan, which were supposed to be foci for the Lord’s presence—an action that condemned him and his successors in the eyes of the orthodox. The northern kingdom was richer and more powerful than Judah, but prophets such as Elijah denounced its apostasy. Over the years, forebodings of divine judgment and military pressure from neighboring states combined to foster a sense of instability that affected Judah as well.
The day of the Lord was probably envisaged at first as a deliverance, when God would act, perhaps at the time of his autumn festival, to destroy the enemies of the Chosen People and establish them in peace throughout the territory they held. But Amos, the earliest of the literary prophets who give their names to books of the Bible, saw it differently. He was active in the north about 760 b.c. and assailed the luxury and injustice of its ruling class, with their extravagant houses and oppression of the poor. Israelites, he said, imagined that they had a divine guarantee of some kind, but a future day of the Lord might not be at all as expected. He warned the northerners especially:

• Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
  
• Why would you have the day of the Lord?
  
• It is darkness, and not light. (Amos 5:18)
  
• “On that day,” says the Lord God,
  
• “I will make the sun go down at noon,
  
• and darken the earth in broad daylight.
  
• I will turn your feasts into mourning,
  
• and all your songs into lamentation”(Amos 8:9–10).
  
• “On the day I punish Israel for his transgressions,
  
• I will punish the altars of Bethel…
  
• I will smite the winter house with the summer house;
  
• and the houses of ivory shall perish,
  
• and the great houses shall come to an end,” says the Lord
  
• (Amos 3:14–15).
  
• Because you trample upon the poor,
  
• and take from him exactions of wheat,
  
• You have built houses of hewn stone,
  

but you shall not dwell in them;

You have planted pleasant vineyards,

But you shall not drink their wine

(Amos 5:11).

Apart from his cosmic hyperbole, Amos was right. The northern kingdom was conquered and devastated by the Assyrians a few years later. The mansions were torn down, and most of the wealthier citizens were deported.
The motif of a “great and terrible day of the Lord,” a fearful judgment going far beyond Amos’s merely regional doom, appears at the end of the Old Testament (Malachi 4:1,5). It develops in later Jewish literature and affects the apocalyptic genre, of which Revelation, at the end of the New Testament, is the principal Christian example. For Saint Paul, the emphasis is somewhat different: the day of the Lord is the day when Christ will return in majesty, bringing joy to Christians and destruction to sinners (1 Thessalonians 5:2–3).