The Twelve Minor Prophets are “minor” only in regard to the quantity of their writings that have come down to us. In fact, in Hebrew they are simply called “the Dozen,” with no mention of minor. The longest among these books, Hosea and Zechariah, are barely a sixth the length of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, and some of these Prophets show only three, two, or even one chapter. (The brevity might reflect the temporal brevity of their missions, in contrast to the three major prophets, each of whom was active for decades.) One of the twelve, moreover, Jonah, doesn’t really belong. The Book of Jonah was put in this group because it is a very short text about a prophet; however, in fact it is not, like the others, a book of prophecies but rather a fable about prophecy featuring a fictitious prophet, and as such it really should have been placed in Ketuvim, the miscellaneous writings. (Consequently, it will be accorded its own introduction here.) “Minor,” then, has nothing to do with the resonance or power of these Prophets, and at the very best, Hosea and Amos are among the greatest biblical Prophets, though their books weigh in, respectively, at fourteen and nine chapters according to the conventional chapter divisions.
Hosea and Amos are the first of the so-called literary prophets, and it is a mystery why in the eighth century B.C.E. Hebrew prophets should have begun to cast their messages in writing—chiefly, in poetry. There are frequent appearances of prophets in the early biblical narratives—Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, and Elisha are the most familiar names, and quite a few others enter the sundry stories. These prophets are said to exert a certain divinatory power; some are reported to work miracles; and most assume a role of moral castigation, which, however, is usually directed to rulers, not to the general populace. There is no indication that any of these early figures used writing as a medium for their prophecies. Then, probably in the 760s B.C.E., a cattle herder and arborist from a small village near Jerusalem makes his way from the kingdom of Judah to the northern kingdom of Israel and begins to inveigh, in powerful poetry, against the moral and economic crimes of its inhabitants. While some of the other prophets come from a priestly background, it is noteworthy that the first among them is of peasant stock, and yet literate, which might offer a clue about the dissemination of literacy in this culture. He evinces a mastery of the parallelistic form of Hebrew verse, which lends itself to strong emphasis through interechoing utterances; and he uses this form, among other purposes, to convey to his audience the urgent imperative of the prophetic calling:
Do two walk together
if they have not first agreed?
Does the lion roar in the forest
unless it has taken prey?
Does the maned beast put forth its voice from its lair
if it has not made a catch? . . .
A lion roars,
who does not fear?
The Master, the LORD, speaks.
Who cannot prophesy? (Amos 3:3–4 and 8)
Amos provides a bit of autobiographical information in responding to a challenge from a northern priest. About others of the Twelve Minor Prophets we know less, or nothing at all. Hosea, who probably prophesied in the generation after Amos, is definitely from the northern kingdom, and some of his writing appears to reflect traditions about the patriarchs that diverge from those that appear in Genesis, the larger part of which was written and certainly edited in the south. He is enjoined to marry a whore, but whether this is an actual biographical fact or merely a symbolic gesture is not entirely certain. About Joel nothing is known, and the dating of his four chapters is elusive. Of Obadiah, represented by a single chapter, all that is inferable is that because of his angry doomsaying against Edom, he probably wrote during the last years of the kingdom of Judah, when the Edomites were active collaborators with the Babylonians in their onslaught against Jerusalem. The ordering of the twelve is not strictly chronological, and thus Micah, the next in sequence after Obadiah and Jonah, would have been active after the destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. and also after the incursion of Sennacherib into Judah in 701 B.C.E., both reflected in his writing. One famous passage, 4:1–5, the exalted vision of teaching going out from Zion and the nations grinding their swords into plowshares, is nearly identical with Isaiah 2:2–4, and may well be the insertion of a later editor, although it is at least possible that Micah was Isaiah’s source. Scholars have detected other late materials in his text, which is common for any Prophetic book longer than a couple of chapters. In any case, Micah’s noble vision of the LORD requiring justice and humility more than spates of animal sacrifice puts him early in the line of prophets that set ethical behavior above the Temple cult as Israel’s primary responsibility.
Nahum (three chapters) is another prophet about whom precious little is known. His book is followed in the canonical order by Habakkuk. Here, again, there are three brief chapters with little indication of historical context. The invocation of a threat from the Chaldean army suggests a date not long before the destruction of the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., but even that has been disputed by some scholars. Zephaniah, the next book in the canonical order, has a superscription reporting that he was active during the reign of King Josiah (640–609 B.C.E.). Some have inferred that he wrote before Josiah’s sweeping reforms in 622 B.C.E. He fulminates about the imminent Day of the LORD, which is also a motif in other Prophets, and which is imagined to be realized when Jerusalem will be destroyed. Haggai and Zechariah are the latest of the Twelve who can be confidently dated. They prophesied in the later decades of the fifth century B.C.E. and were part of the early community of those who had returned to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile after the enabling edict of the Persian emperor Cyrus issued in 538 B.C.E. Both Haggai and Zechariah are concerned with the project of rebuilding the Temple and establishing safeguards for its ritual purity. Both ally themselves with Zerubbabel, the Persian-appointed governor of the province of Yehud (formerly the kingdom of Judah) and Joshua the high priest. This concentration on the practical task of restoring the Temple reflects a reduction of the grand moral sweep of many of the earlier prophets.
Malachi, the concluding book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, again three relatively short chapters, takes its title not from the proper name of a prophet but rather from a general designation: the Hebrew means “my messenger,” and quite a few times the prophets are elsewhere referred to as God’s messengers. This text also appears to be post-exilic, but, even in its brevity, it is uncertain whether it is the work of a single writer. In any case, it does provide an apt conclusion to the collection of all the prophets by invoking Elijah, the iconic prophet of the preliterary era, in a promise of a restorative, not destructive, Day of the LORD.
Look, I am about to send to you
Elijah the prophet
before the coming of the day of the LORD,
great and fearsome.
And he shall bring fathers’ hearts back to sons
and the sons’ hearts to their fathers. (Malachi 3:23–24)
This is not altogether as upbeat as it initially sounds because this last poetic line of the book is triadic, and its third verset reads as follows: “lest I come and strike the land with utter destruction.” That is, if people know what is good for them, they will embrace Elijah’s project of bringing fathers’ hearts back to sons. Otherwise, the usual prophetic warning of disaster remains in place. In any case, this conclusion of the Book of Malachi, of which much has been made by both Jewish and Christian tradition, vividly illustrates the enduring power of the Minor Prophets. Each works on a small scale; many of these texts tend to be fragmentary; most of them are stripped of the enhancing sense of historical context that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel give us. But despite all this, these little books incorporate moments of soaring poetry and visionary illumination that still speak to the heart and to the religious imagination.