The Lord Judges the Nations
The children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Grecians, that ye might remove them far from their border. Joel 3:6
have ye sold... They had sold them to the Greeks to get them further away from their homeland, so there would be less chance of them returning. This speaks in the past tense, and is not connected to the end time prophecy, except that God had not forgotten even in the endtimes what they had done.
unto the Grecians... The sons of Greece. Although not prominent militarily, the Greeks were active in commerce on the Mediterranean in the 9th century B.C.
Phoenician and Philistine involvement in slave trade (Joel 3:6) is mentioned elsewhere (cf. Amos 1:6, 1:9). According to Kapelrud, the Greeks mentioned here are actually Ionians (yewānı̂m), who populated the coasts of Asia Minor (Joel Studies, p. 154). Ionian commerce was at its peak in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c. Eze. 27:13, 27:19 mentions Tyrian trading arrangements (including slaves) with the Ionians (or Greece). The trading recalled in Joel may have occurred in conjunction with Judah’s fall to the Babylonians.
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