Joel 2:1

On בא: The form בא (bāʾ) may represent either the Qal perfect/complete 3ms “he/it came” (completed action) or the Qal active participle ms “he who comes” (ongoing or imminent action). Orthographically the two forms are identical; distinction depends entirely on syntactic and contextual cues. Translations have always rendered this as though it were in the imperfect "is coming" which is not accurate. Because no one could ever believe that "it has come" translators opted to force a future tense out of the participle.

Misleading

The Qal active participle in Biblical Hebrew is fundamentally a verbal adjective: its base sense is “the one who comes” / “he who comes,” rather than an inherently tense-bound form like “is coming" which in English is actually an incomplete future tense.

The participle’s temporal value is supplied by context, so while translators often render it as “is coming” in Joel 2:1 for the sake of their bias, that choice imposes a present-progressive nuance that the Hebrew does not encode in itself.

Joel 2:1 opens with the command:
"הבא שופר בציון"
“Blow the shofar/trumpet in Zion”

Following this, the verb בא is often translated or understood as an incomplete or participle form—“is coming” or “will come”—to frame the prophecy in a future temporal context. The nuance is typically read as a progressive or imminent action, something yet to unfold. But why would there be an imperative blow now, for a future event that hasn't happened? Blow the trumpet, because the day is coming? This is just more confusion. "Blow the trumpet, for the day has come!" This is coherent. 

Prophetic discourse operates outside of linear chronology (chronos time). The perfect form here signifies an event simultaneously present, fulfilled, and unfolding in the eternal “now” of prophecy. The “coming” of the day of the Lord is not a distant future event to be awaited but a realized eschatological moment, perpetually accessible and active within the prophetic “fold of time.” It has come.

Thus:

• The perfect בא conveys that the divine intervention or “day of the Lord” has already come in the aonic sense, immanent and potent.

• Attempts to read this as a future imperfect action miss the layered temporality of prophecy, which enfolds past, present, and future into one dynamic event.

Translators and interpreters who impose a strict chronological frame obscure the timeless, recursive nature of prophetic utterance. The qal perfect בא here is not mere historical past but a proclamation of an eschatological reality fully “arrived” within the prophetic voice, living, and real time.