Everyone is wired differently, and, in my case, I knew that if I started watching YouTube videos of soldiers returning home to their dogs, I would quickly fall into depression. Also, I knew that spending every extra minute of the deployment year reading the Bible would be my best antidepressant.
Additionally, somewhere in the back of my mind was Julie & Julia, the 2009 movie about the true story of a writer in New York named Julie who, in one year, cooked all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In Julie’s case, she distracted herself from her monotonous dead-end job and found purpose in the art of culinary creation. My psychological tool for survival became a life-changing love of the prophets. I suppose one woman’s French cooking is another woman’s stack of Bible commentaries.
I could have picked any part of the Bible for a year-long reading challenge, but I selected the Minor Prophets because I knew the shorter prophetic writings were the least-examined pages in my Bible. When I scanned the prophets, I focused on verses that still sounded relevant when plucked out of their larger contexts. However, to experience the consistency of the Minor Prophets’ messages and their unified declarations, the 12 books needed to be read together and in order, with an eye on their historical and cultural contexts.
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The fundamental message spoken through the prophets was Yahweh’s distress call: “Return to me, and I will return to you.” Not only does the message of the prophets still ring true today, but they served as my anchor throughout the year-long deployment. Getting through one prophet at a time got me through one month at a time, until we welcomed our airman home at the airport. I know every Bible reader has his or her own countdown and a hurdle to cross. I recommend the Minor Prophet challenge as a healthy, faith-forming distraction.
Bible Reading Challenge
In the Hebrew scriptures, a prophet was a special human recipient of divine revelation, commissioned by God to communicate his mind to the people of Israel. From Abraham to Malachi—1,500 years—God appointed spokespeople to communicate his special revelation. Abraham was the patriarch prophet to whom God revealed himself (Gen. 20:7). Moses was a prophet and leader, authorized to speak in the name of Yahweh (Ex. 3:13-14). In the days of the judges, Samuel was priest, judge, and prophet (1 Sam. 3:20). Mysteriously, the Bible even references a school of the prophets filled with an infectious degree of the Holy Spirit and gifted in musical worship (1 Sam 10:5). Elijah and Elisha were miracle-performing prophets, unrelenting in their confrontations with pagan seers, faulty priests, and wicked kings. By the eighth century BCE, a new prophetism arose: the writing prophet. The writing prophet was a unique brand of an ancient office. These were messengers of God who eventually preserved their oracles in literary products.
In the introduction to the book of Hebrews, we read that God spoke to the prophets in “many and various ways” (Heb. 1:1). To the reluctant prophet Jeremiah, God promised he would put his words in his mouth (Jer. 1:9). When God commissioned the prophet Ezekiel, he had to first ingest a scroll (Ezek. 3:1-3). Scribes wrote and preserved the authentic oracles. Jeremiah had his own scribe, Baruch. There are other indicators that prophets were sometimes scribes themselves. God commanded Habakkuk to “write down the revelation” (Hab. 2:2). Ezekiel declared that the false prophets would never “be listed in the records of Israel” (Ezek. 13:9).
Scholars divide the prophetic books into preexilic, exilic, and postexilic. Leading up to Israel’s exile at the hands of the Assyrians (721 BCE) and Judah’s overthrow by the Babylonians (586 BCE), the prophetic message reached a fevered pitch while repentance could still cancel God’s punishment for the people. The earliest preexilic prophets, Hosea and Amos, warned Israel of the pending consequence of their idolatrous and unethical ways. In the eighth century BCE, Isaiah and Micah sounded the alarm for the Kingdom of Israel to repent, or God would use the Assyrians as his weapon of punishment. Jonah was a contemporary of Hosea who preached repentance to the hated Assyrians, albeit reluctantly. Later, Nahum called out the Ninevites for returning to their sinful ways, foretelling God’s retribution on the Assyrian Empire.
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Although difficult to date, most scholars place Joel before the Babylonian exile. After the fall of the Northern Kingdom, Jeremiah and Zephaniah warned Judah of coming judgment, and when the predicted punishment happened, Jeremiah itemized the horrors of the Babylonian siege in Lamentations. Obadiah condemned the Edomite enemies of Judah for their lack of empathy during the Babylonian attack. Habakkuk begged God to stop the endless cycle of violence in the world. Ezekiel and Daniel were the exilic prophets, writing their oracles in captivity. Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were the last of the writing prophets, or the postexilic prophets, sent to exhort the returnees from Babylon to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, to restore ritual worship, and to obey the laws of Moses.
Each of the prophets delivered messages tailored to the most offensive sins committed in their time by their respective communities. Returning to God, in the prophetic sense, meant obeying the covenant regulations: “What Moses promised, the prophets reinforced, actively proclaiming a message that preceded them by hundreds of years—the choice of life or death, blessing or cursing (Deut. 30:11-20).” The prophetic message stayed within the limits of covenant life, as set out in the Torah. The prophets condemned idolatry, social injustice, violence, and empty religion.
Hosea protested the ongoing idolatrous practices of the Israelites. Amos and Micah denounced the exploitation of the poor and the neglect of widows and orphans. Obadiah and Habakkuk detested gratuitous violence. Joel called for a revival. Zephaniah longed for the people’s purification. Haggai and Zechariah hated the apathetic attitudes of the returnees from exile. Malachi condemned divorce and accused them of robbing the temple.
The common misconception about the prophets is that their chief contribution to spiritual life, both in antiquity and today, is their predictive messianic prophecies and their visions of the distant future. In fact, only a small percentage of prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures pertain to the Messiah. Because the prophets offer a peek behind the veil of God’s mysterious plan of redemption, believers seeking every meaning of divine revelation have mined their words for centuries. Their earnest voices and beautiful prose transmit the secrets revealed by God to men (Deut. 29:29).
The Bible shows that for every true prophet in the Holy Land, there were also false prophets. True to their vocation, the genuine prophets called out the imposters. Ezekiel accused the false prophets of dressing the part, but the imposters could not discern their own imagination from the word of God (Ezek. 13:17). Jeremiah hated the false prophets’ sham operation, accusing them of spreading “false visions, divinations, idolatries and the delusions of their own minds” (Jer. 14:14). Authentic biblical prophecy was not in the same camp as divination, fortune telling, or sorcery. God had banned such practices among his covenant people (Deut. 18:14), declaring false prophecy punishable by death (Deut. 18:20).
Prophecy was one mode of God’s self-revelation, but it was never the only mode. God reveals himself through his creation to all who open their hearts to sense a power outside of themselves (Rom. 1:20; Ps. 19:1-6). To the descendants of Abraham, God revealed himself through his covenant and laws (Deut. 29:29), as well as through his historical interventions on their behalf (Ex. 20:2). When the people strayed from the covenant and forgot his saving works, God spoke to and through the prophets, commissioning them to communicate his will in both spoken and written form.
In preexilic Judah, there were at least three distinct types of spiritual leaders: priests, sages, and prophets (Jer. 18:18). Prophets had no official status, and their appointment was not a hereditary position or based on popular election. The prophets stood outside the biblical system of checks and balances among Judah’s and Israel’s leaders. Prophets challenged kings, as Nathan did with David (2 Sam. 12:1-13) and Elijah did with Ahab (1 Kings 21). Prophets also challenged priests, as Amos did with the rebellious priests of Bethel (Amos 7:10-17).
Reminding the descendants of Abraham of their spiritual and ethical commitments, the prophets’ oracles addressed the entire nation, as well as individuals. With conviction, they condemned sin, imparted the knowledge of God, exalted righteousness, and preached repentance. As God’s mouthpieces, they never doubted the divine origin of their messages, opening their oratories with “thus says the Lord.” The prophet Amos said, “surely the sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets” (3:7).
In the tradition of the Hebrew Bible, dating as far back as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the 12 prophetic anthologies by the Minor Prophets make up a single literary unit called the “Book of the Twelve.” Augustine of Hippo was the first Christian thinker to refer to the Book of the Twelve as the Minor Prophets, as opposed to the longer and broader works of the Major Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel. Despite their shorter length, there are no minors among these messengers from the Lord.
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Pulpit preaching often trims down the threads that run through the prophetic text to offer only life application. The impact is useful if the only goal is to help believers mend small tears in the frayed fabric of their spiritual lives. However, this style of teaching does not equip believers with the tools to comprehend the dramatic tapestry of revelation woven throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. The congregants in the pews may develop a dim view of the scriptures and become color blind to the vibrancy of Biblical truths.
I believe the reason so many Christians are walking away from the faith of their youth is that they have lost touch with their Bible. The widespread decline of spiritual health correlates with the loss of biblical literacy. They read the same 30 percent of the scriptures, mostly the gospels and Paul’s letters, and they neglect the Torah, prophets, and narratives of the Hebrew Bible. The result is that Christians believe in the Messiah, but they cannot appreciate the 2,000 years of Jewish messianic hope and expectation that preceded the birth of Jesus. The birth of Jesus is celebrated at Christmas, but the full significance of his incarnation as the apogee of all prophetic revelation is not always understood.
Bible Fiber bends toward the history, language, literary style, and archaeology of the prophetic books. This approach allows us to read the prophets on their own terms and avoids the interpretations of debated eschatological prophecies. Truthfully, the prophets referred more frequently to events happening in their own lifetimes (military alliances, wars, political intrigue, locust invasions, wayward kings, and drought) than to predictions of the end times. Historians have uncovered an abundance of knowledge about the historical settings for the prophetic books. A host of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian chronicles corroborate the biblical narratives.
Please join me for this Bible reading challenge as we return to God by returning to the whole Bible. I hope, over the course of the study, that you find the poetry and prose of the ancient prophets ringing true to your modern ears as they rail against spiritual apathy, social injustice, immorality, iniquity, idolatry, violence, corruption, and ambivalent leadership. Yahweh promised the Israelites that he would send prophets “from among their own people” to speak in his name (Deut. 18:18-19). We get to benefit from the delivery of that ancient promise!
I recommend that you follow the study guide by first reading the assigned biblical passage, and then read the corresponding Bible Fiber commentary essay. I will introduce the prophets in the same order as presented in the Christian canon: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. I have divided the study into 52 lessons, so you can complete it in a year. Of course, you may go at your own pace. What was a year-long writing challenge for me might be a three-month reading challenge for your own daily devotions.