Caterpillar

Scripture references: 1 Kings 8:37; 2 Chronicles 6:28; Psalm 78:46; Isaiah 33:4; Joel 1:4

Or if there be caterpiller, 1 Kings 8:37, "If there be in the land famine, if there be pestilence, blasting, mildew, locust, or if there be caterpiller; if their enemy besiege them in the land of their cities; whatsoever plague, whatsoever sickness there be;" The caterpiller's first appearance is not in a locust-plague narrative but in Solomon's prayer at the temple's dedication, where the king anticipates the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28 and asks that whenever Israel turns toward this house and confesses, the LORD would hear and forgive. Famine, pestilence, blasting, mildew, locust, siege, plague, and sickness are named together as covenant discipline. Caterpiller, Hebrew chasil, holds its own place in that list, distinguished from locust (arbeh) in the same verse, a recognized calamity serious enough to stand beside famine and siege.

If there be dearth, 2 Chronicles 6:28, "If there be dearth in the land, if there be pestilence, if there be blasting, or mildew, locusts, or caterpillers; if their enemies besiege them in the cities of their land; whatsoever sore or whatsoever sickness there be:" The Chronicler preserves Solomon's prayer almost verbatim, dearth for famine, caterpillers for caterpiller, sore for plague, but the same list and the same insect named beside locust. The parallel, composed and copied at a real remove from Kings, shows chasil functioning as a fixed term in Israel's covenant-curse vocabulary, not a one-time flourish.

Their increase unto the caterpiller, Psalm 78:46, "He gave also their increase unto the caterpiller, and their labour unto the locust." Psalm 78 rehearses Israel's rebellion against the plagues God performed in Egypt. This verse recalls Exodus 10's locust plague, though Exodus itself names only arbeh; the psalmist adds chasil beside it, a poetic pairing for total agricultural loss, both increase and labour surrendered to the devourer. Here the same instrument of covenant discipline is turned outward, against Egypt, within a deliverance narrative rather than a judgment on Israel.

Gathered like the gathering of the caterpiller, Isaiah 33:4, "And your spoil shall be gathered like the gathering of the caterpiller: as the running to and fro of locusts shall he run upon them." Isaiah turns the image around. The caterpiller is not judgment falling on Israel here but a simile for how thoroughly Israel's oppressor will be stripped of plunder, swiftly and completely, the way a caterpiller or locust swarm strips a field. The same devouring thoroughness becomes, in this oracle, an image of the spoiler spoiled.

That which the cankerworm hath left, Joel 1:4, "That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten." Joel's opening lament names four devouring insects in sequence, palmerworm (gazam), locust (arbeh), cankerworm (yeleq), and caterpiller (chasil), each finishing what the one before it left. This is the chasil's most famous appearance and the one that fixes it in popular imagination as a locust-plague term, but real scholarly dispute surrounds what these four words actually name. Many interpreters, drawing on comparative Semitic philology and on Joel 2:25's re-listing of the same four terms in a different order, read them as four names for stages or aspects of a single locust invasion rather than four distinct creatures, one devastation described four ways for rhetorical completeness. Others hold the terms distinguish genuinely different pests, among them a true caterpillar-stage devourer. Scripture itself does not settle the question.

The Hebrew chasil comes from a root meaning to consume, to finish off, a name for what the creature does rather than a fixed species. The King James translators rendered it caterpiller throughout; that rendering is defensible but the identification remains genuinely open, not settled. What is not open is the term's textual weight. It is not merely one word in Joel's locust list; it stands independently in Solomon's temple-dedication prayer, in the Chronicler's parallel of that prayer, and in the historical Psalm recalling Egypt's plagues, appearing in five separate books before its famous outing in Joel. Whether the chasil names a caterpillar proper or a stage of the locust beside it, Scripture consistently places it under the hand of the God who sends it as discipline and who can turn its completeness against the oppressor instead.

The chasil carries genuine textual weight beyond a single locust-plague list, naming a covenant-curse category in Solomon's temple prayer, Israel's historical memory of Egypt's plagues, and a judgment-reversed image in Isaiah before its best-known appearance in Joel's fourfold locust army. The Sanctum holds it as Canon-tier by text, five KJV citations across five books, while noting honestly that its precise zoological identity, caterpillar or locust developmental stage, is a genuine, unresolved scholarly question.