Twelve Minor Prophets

The Twelve Minor Prophets (Hebrew: שנים עשר, Shneim Asar; Imperial Aramaic: תרי עשר, Trei Asar, "Twelve"; Ancient Greek: δωδεκαπρόφητον, "the Twelve Prophets"; Latin: Duodecim prophetae, "the Twelve Prophets"), or the Book of the Twelve, is a collection of prophetic books, written between about the 8th and 4th centuries BCE, which are in both the Jewish Tanakh and Christian Old Testament.

In the Tanakh, they appear as a single book, "The Twelve", which is the last book of the Nevi'im, the second of three major divisions of the Tanakh. In the Christian Old Testament, the collection appears as twelve individual books, one for each of the prophets: the Book of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Their order, and position in the Old Testament, varies slightly between the Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles.

The name "Minor Prophets" goes back to Augustine of Hippo, who distinguished the 12 shorter prophetic books as prophetae minores from the four longer books of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

Scholars generally believe that each Book of the Twelve Prophets has an original core of prophetic tradition attributed to the respective figure it's named after, containing autobiographical, biographical, and oracular material. The Twelve were likely collected into a single scroll by the Achaemenid period, with the order possibly reflecting both chronological and thematic considerations, although some debate exists over dating and sequence.

Composition

Individual books

Scholars usually assume that there exists an original core of prophetic tradition behind each book which can be attributed to the figure after whom it is named. In general, each book includes three types of material:

Autobiographical material in the first person, some of which may go back to the prophet in question;

Biographical materials about the prophet in the third person – which incidentally demonstrate that the collection and editing of the books was completed by persons other than the prophets themselves;

Oracles or speeches by the prophets, usually in poetic form, and drawing on a wide variety of genres, including covenant lawsuit, oracles against the nations, judgment oracles, messenger speeches, songs, hymns, narrative, lament, law, proverb, symbolic gesture, prayer, wisdom saying, and vision.

The noteworthy exception is the Book of Jonah, an anonymous work which contains a narrative about the prophet Jonah.