Israel

The Twelve (Minor Prophets)

Trei Asar

Twelve short, historically scattered prophetic voices were deliberately gathered into a single scroll because read together, across four centuries, they make one sustained argument about covenant, judgment, and the promised Day of the Lord.

Twelve short prophetic books, from Hosea and Amos in the 8th century BC through Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi after the Babylonian exile, transmitted since antiquity as a single scroll ("the Book of the Twelve") rather than as separate works. Scholars increasingly read the collection as a deliberately edited whole, with catchword links and a shared vocabulary of covenant lawsuit, social justice, and an approaching "Day of the Lord" threading otherwise unrelated books together. Individually they range from Amos's denunciations of social injustice in the northern kingdom to Jonah's satirical narrative about a prophet who resents God's mercy toward foreigners, giving the collection unusual range for its size.

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Descends from

  • Torah · composed c. 9th-5th century BC

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