(BA) The Twelve

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22 July 2022

The Twelve, in Judaism, is the book of the twelve minor prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The twelve works within it are small in comparison to the big three: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

In Christianity, these minor prophets are considered twelve separate "books". Both the Jewish and Christian approaches to book division have some advantages and disadvantages. In favor of the Jewish approach, these twelve works are hardly book-length in any normal sense of the word: Obadiah, for example, is a mere 21 verses: it fits easily on a page. In favor of the Christian approach, the twelve works are more or less independent from one another: they don't come together to form a single "book" in the way one might expect.

In Protestant Bibles, the minor prophets are generally at the end of the Old Testament, while in Jewish Bibles the Twelve end the Neviʾim but not the Bible as a whole--the Neviʾim are followed by the Ketuvim.

They are organized in roughly chronological order. I'm speaking here of the time when they were written if they are all taken at face value. I'm not making any comment on when the particular books were really written.

Hosea is about a man whose life is turned into an object lesson by God. He is told to marry an adulterous women, who, as adulterous women do, commits adultery. They are separated but later reunited, and their relationship is treated as an allegory for the relationship between God and Israel.^[1]

Joel, of uncertain date, laments a great plague of locusts. They are, Joel says, a judgment from God, and obedience will restore the fortune's of his people.

Amos covers various themes: condemning surrounding nations, condemning powerful persons in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, various visions containing object-lessons about the judgment of Israel, and a looking forward to restoration.

Obadiah, a very short "book", is mostly concerned with the judgment of Edom.

Jonah is unique among the Twelve, and among the Neviim, in being a prose story that contains no poetic oracles. Readers of this website will probably be familiar with the gist of the story.

Micah runs a gamut of traditionally prophetic themes, set around the time of the fall of the Northern Kingdom.

Nahum focuses on the fall of Nineveh (612 BCE).

Zephaniah, set in Josiah's Judah, follows a typical prophetic trajectory: judgment on Judah, judgment on the nations, and finally a celebration of Judah's restoration.

Haggai is a prophet concerned with the restoration of the Temple in the early Achaemenid Empire.

Zechariah was a contemporary of Haggai.

Malachi is the last of these eight books, appropriately following Haggai and Zechariah because it presupposes a time somewhat beyond them, when the Temple has already been rebuilt.