heres one for a sunday.why were locusts considered bad news in biblical time?

Question

why did they cause famine?
john the baptist lived on 'locusts and honey' and he was a fairly
lively bloke.
also locust are quite nutritious - a kind of flying prawn.
were the israelites just plain fussy?

Answer 1

well if they taste like prawns then they are bad news to me i hate bloody fish!! id rather eat my own.......

Answer 2

Locusts are considered bad news nowadays. From time to time these 'grasshoppers' multiply and form clouds of flying insects, which are so dense, they actually black out the sun. They devour all vegetation in their path. That's how they created famine.
Locusts are fried with honey by most nomadic tribes in desert regions.
Just for information, John the Baptist was an Israelite.

Answer 3

As Johnny S points out locusts have different stages in their life cycle and in the earlier stages could have been food for John the Baptist. Later in their life cycle they form the enormous flying swarms which are so destructive to crops. In both Biblical times and in the 17th century when the bible was translated most people were self sufficient peasant farmers and if crops failed they starved, they could not just import more from America or Australia as we do today.

Answer 4

Because you can't catch enough locusts to replace the tons of crops they have eaten, and you can't feed locusts to your cattle and other farm beasts. As well, there's no grain left to plant for the following year, and the locusts won't come back to give another food source the next year. One man alone might survive on locust and honey, a whole farming community will not.

So once all your beasts have died of hunger you are left with no crops, no meat, milk, eggs and no possibility for food for next year. And only a few kilos of dead locusts for food.

Answer 5

In the Bible, a swarm of locusts comprised the eighth plague in the story of the plagues of Egypt. In the Book of Revelation, locusts with "scorpion tails and human faces are to torment unbelievers for five months when the fifth trumpet sounds".

One Old Testament book, Joel, is written in the context of a recent locust plague. Interestingly, the locusts are described in four different ways - "swarming locusts, cutting locusts, hopping locusts and destroying locusts." Although these were identified by the old Authorised Version as four different creatures, modern translations identify them as four kinds of locusts. This fits with the many molts (called instars) through which locusts go.

For example, the "hopper" probably denotes the nymph stage (the first instar), the wings are not developed and the nymph hops about.

that's about all the information I have about locusts in biblical times.

Answer 6

Locusts come in swarms of thousands and literally eat everything before moving on to the next crop.

I think alot of insects are nutritious - alot of communities eat them and they are always advocated in survival programmes.

And locusts are still a problem today - they had massive swarms a couple of years ago all over the news.

Answer 7

They are still bad news today. They arrive in their millions and destroy crops over a wide area in a very short time. This will cause famine in subsistence economies.

Curiously, Leviticus considers the locust to be "clean" and therefore edible.

Answer 8

well one single locust do not bring famine. Some population eat them, like we eat shrimps, and seems they are not bad. But periodically locust makes huge swamis, and eat every vegetation and crops were they pass. It is a natural phenomenon not yet completely explained that happens once in 5-10 years, especially in Africa, but also in America has happened.

Answer 9

Locusts devour all vegetation after the locusts have been the only thing left to eat is locusts, fortunatly humans are omnivorous,we eat almost anything.

Answer 10

Locusts still are, and always have been, bad news. They eat every bit of vegetation around - hence the famine when they destroy crops.

Answer 11

Because locusts destroyed all the crops.