Book of Joel Chapter 3 Vs. 8

The Lord Judges the Nations

 

And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the children of Judah, and they shall sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far off: for the LORD hath spoken it. Joel 3:8

And I will... That is, deliver them into their hands, to dispose of them. This is thought to have been literally fulfilled in the Tyrians, when thirty thousand of them were sold for slaves, upon the taking of their city by Alexander, who put some of them into the hands of the Jews, they being in friendship with him.

It mystically designs the power that the Jewish church, converted, and in union with Gentile Christians, will have over the antichristian states.

and they shall... The inhabitants of Sheba, a country by the Jews reckoned the uttermost parts of the earth (see Mat. 12:42). These are not the same with the Sabeans, the inhabitants of Arabia Deserts, that took away Job's oxen and asses. But rather those who were the inhabitants of Arabia Felix, which lay at a greater distance.

to the Sabeans... Trading merchants who lived in Arabia (1Kgs. 10; Jer. 6:20).

for the Lord... Whose counsels and decrees can never be frustrated. This, in an ancient book of the Jews called Mechilta, is referred to the prophecy of Noah concerning Canaan, whose sons inhabited Tyre, "a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren" (Gen. 9:25).

Whatever they did to Judah happened to them in return. God is just in His judgment. These Sabeans were Arab traders.

The divine judgment on these nations would be perfectly appropriate. The Lord would rouse His dispersed people and put them in the position of slave traders. They would sell the sons and daughters of the Phoenicians and Philistines as slaves to the Sabeans (cf. Job 1:13-15), an Arabian people noted for their commercial activities (cf. “Sheba” in Eze. 27:22-23).