The Formation Of The Book Of The Twelve

In The Book of the Twelve: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, an international group of biblical scholars discuss different aspects of the formation, interpretation, and reception of the Book of the Twelve as a literary unity.

The formation of the Book of the Twelve is one of the most vigorously debated subjects in Old Testament studies today. This volume assembles twenty-four essays by the world’s leading experts, providing an overview of the present state of scholarship in the field. The book’s contributors focus on questions of method, history, as well as redactional and textual history.

In antiquity, the twelve books of the Minor Prophets were transmitted as a single volume known as the Book of the Twelve. This 1994 Duke dissertation uses manuscript discoveries from the Judean Desert and a fresh re-appraisal of the Greek translation of the Minor Prophets to argue for the existence of three versions of the Book of the Twelve in ancient Judaism. The differences between these versions illustrate the role that ancient biblical interpretation played in the shaping of the canonical prophetic literature. Among its other contributions, the book marshalls textual evidence for the integrity and chronological priority of the Hebrew text of the Septuagint Minor Prophets as compared to the Masoretic textual tradition. -- Back Cover.

The books of the twelve Minor Prophets are some of the least studied by Christians today, but they contain some of the great themes of Scripture, such as God's mercy and judgment, His covenant with Israel, the day of the Lord, and the coming of the Messiah. Arguing for a canonical unity that recognizes the Minor Prophets as one cohesive composition, Michael Shepherd explains the historical meaning of each verse of the twelve books and also provides guidance for application and preaching. Pastors, teachers, and serious students of Scripture will find a wealth of insights for understanding the Minor Prophets. - from publisher.

There is generally no common material that binds together the works of the individual prophets that comprise the Twelve, but through Sweeney's commentary they stand together as a single, clearly defined book among the other prophetic books of the Bible. The Book of the Twelve Prophets is a multifaceted literary composition that functions simultaneously in all Jewish and Christian versions of the Bible as a single prophetic book and as a collection of twelve individual prophetic books. Each of the twelve individual books - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi - begins with its own narrative introduction that identifies the prophet and provides details concerning the historical setting and literary characteristics. In this manner each book is clearly distinguished from the others within the overall framework of the Twelve. By employing a combination of literary methodologies, such as reader response criticism, canonical criticism, and structural form criticism, Sweeney establishes the literary structure of the Book of the Twelve as a whole, and of each book with their respective ideological or theological perspectives. An introductory chapter orients readers to questions posed by reading the Book of the Twelve as a coherent piece of literature and to a literary overview of the Twelve. Sweeney then treats each of the twelve individual prophetic books in the order of the Masoretic canon, providing a discussion of each one's structure, theme, and outlook. This is followed by a detailed literary discussion of the textual units that comprise the book.

"And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, [the risen Jesus] interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Lk 24:27). The church fathers mined the Old Testament throughout for prophetic utterances regarding the Messiah, but few books yielded as much messianic ore as the Twelve Prophets, sometimes known as the Minor Prophets because of the relative brevity of their writings. Encouraged by the example of the New Testament writers, the church fathers found numerous parallels between the Gospels and the prophetic books. Among the events foretold, they found not only the flight into Egypt after the nativity, the passion, and resurrection of Christ, and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, but also Judas's act of betrayal, the earthquake at Jesus' death and the rending of the temple veil. Detail upon detail brimmed with significance for Christian doctrine, including baptism and the Eucharist as well as the relation between the covenants. In this rich and vital resource you will find excerpts, some translated here into English for the first time, from more than thirty church fathers, ranging in time from Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus (late first and early second centuries) to Gregory the Great, Braulio of Saragossa, and Bede the Venerable (late sixth to early eighth centuries). Geographically the sources range from the great Cappadocians—Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa—John Chrysostom, Ephrem the Syrian, and Hippolytus in the East, to Ambrose, Augustine, Cyprian, and Tertullian in the West, and Origen, Cyril, and Pachomius in Egypt. This Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture volume is a treasure trove out of which Christians may bring riches both old and new in their understanding of these ancient texts.

By conceptualizing the 'Book' of Psalms as an anthology, and by inquiring into its poetics by means of paratextuality, David Willgren provides a fresh reconstruction of its formation and concludes that it preserves a selection of psalms that is best seen not as a book of psalms, but as a canon of psalms. - back of book.

Die Frage der Beziehung zwischen dem Jesajabuch und dem Buch der Zwölf Propheten ist angesichts vielfältiger Berührungen sprachlicher und motivischer Art zentral, jedoch hinsichtlich der damit verbundenen möglichen Implikationen bislang nur ungenügend bearbeitet. Im Rahmen eines internationalen Kongresses, der vom 31.Mai bis 3.Juni 2018 an der Katholischen Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt stattfand, suchten Fachleute des Zwölfprophetenbuches bzw. des Jesajabuches mit unterschiedlichen methodischen Ansätzen ein umfassenderes Bild der verschiedenen Arten von Beziehungen oder thematischen Berührungen zu erarbeiten, die entweder für die beiden Corpora als ganze oder für spezifische Teile beider charakteristisch sind, um daraus entsprechende Schlussfolgerungen zu ziehen. Das Ergebnis ist ein Überblick zur Vielfalt der semantischen, intertextuellen, literarischen, redaktionellen, historischen und theologischen Aspekte der Beziehungen zwischen dem Jesajabuch und dem Zwölfprophetenbuch, die einlinigen Lösungsvorschlägen zur Erklärung des Zustandekommens dieser Bezüge widerstreiten.