Joel 1:5 (WEB)

Passage

Wake up, you drunkards, and weep! Wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.

Nearby Context

Joel 1:3 Tell your children about it, and have your children tell their children, and their children, another generation.

Joel 1:4 What the swarming locust has left, the great locust has eaten. What the great locust has left, the grasshopper has eaten. What the grasshopper has left, the caterpillar has eaten.

Joel 1:5 Wake up, you drunkards, and weep! Wail, all you drinkers of wine, because of the sweet wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.

Joel 1:6 For a nation has come up on my land, strong, and without number. His teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he has the fangs of a lioness.

Joel 1:7 He has laid my vine waste, and stripped my fig tree. He has stripped its bark, and thrown it away. Its branches are made white.

Study Lenses

The verse centers on "wake", "drunkards", "weep", "wail", "drinkers", "wine", and "sweet". It is saying that the verse draws attention to "wake" and "drunkards", so its meaning should be read from those terms before moving to application.

The nearby context moves from verse 4's "What the swarming locust has left the..." into verse 6's "For a nation has come up on...", so "wake" and "drunkards" belong inside that flow. In Joel context, the local focus is covenant, worship, and faithfulness.

A plain takeaway is to answer the verse's own emphasis on "wake" and "drunkards" with trust shaped by these words, not by a vague optimism outside the passage.