“The Hills will Flow with Milk” Reading Joel 4:9–21 in the Context of Land Grabbing in Sub-Saharan Africa

Concern for how scriptures can inform our understanding of issues of land tenure, care, and use and the related food, water, and shelter insecurity in African rural communities led me to read Joel’s poetry in Joel 4:9–21 against the background of the expanding phenomenon of land grabbing in postcolonial Africa. Despite their reliance on community-owned lands for survival, African rural communities are constantly being stripped of those lands by powerful governments, corporations, and individuals. Writing within a context similar to that of contemporary African communities, Joel, in vivid poetry, imagines the restoration of Judah by YHWH in the aftermath of its destruction by international imperial trading and land grabbing. This article thus hypothesizes that the poetry of Joel can evoke in contemporary African consciousness the current land crisis that destroys many rural communities and yet is often ignored because of numbness and denial nurtured by the powers that be.