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. In this rich and vital ACCS volume you will find excerpts, some translated here into English for the first time, from more than thirty church fathers.
It has been widely recognized that the Book of the Twelve, Hosea to Malachi, was considered a single composition in antiquity. Recent articles and monographs have discussed the internal clues to this composition, but there has been little effort to understand the way the New Testament authors quote from the Twelve in light of the compositional unity of the book. The Twelve Prophets in the New Testament contends that New Testament quotations from the Twelve presuppose knowledge of the larger whole and cannot be understood correctly apart from awareness of the compositional strategy of the Twelve.
The Minor Prophets were the courageous and true spokesmen for God during the time of the great Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Joel's prophecy appears to be the first of all the books of prophecy, and Malachi the last. They are called Minor Prophets because they are shorter in length than the Major Prophets. However, their writings are no less important. We will look at the prophets in their chronological order. Joel, Jonah, Amos, Hosea, and Micah prophesied during the Divided Kingdom. Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, and Obadiah were prophets in Judah before the Babylonian Exile. Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi prophesied after the return to Jerusalem from the exile. Jonah of Israel and Nahum of Judah prophesied against the city of Nineveh in Assyria. "Before the time of Christ these twelve books were joined together to make one scroll known collectively as "The Twelve."
Ever wish someone could give you a big handle on the entire Bible without years of study? Well, this book not only promises to give you that big handle—it will deliver on the promise. You should be asking, how is this possible? The Bible is one story told over and over again, with many variations on the same theme. This structure is the Bible’s DNA. This basic seven-point pattern is the heartbeat of the Creation. It is the cycle of a human day and a human life. It is the pattern of the Tabernacle. It is the process of agriculture. It undergirds the speeches and Laws of God. It orders the rise and fall of nations and empires. It is also the structure of our worship. It is the rhythm of Christ, and it will open the Bible for you like never before.
The Minor Prophets is a collection of expositional essays on each of the twelve prophets. Dr. Feinberg's work illuminates the life, times, and major emphases of these men of God. Dr. Feinberg brings to this work an unusual combination of talents and background. He has a thorough knowledge of biblical Hebrew, having trained for the rabbinate. That, combined with his scholarship in New Testament Greek, qualifies him for an expert study of the Scriptures in the original languages. In this work, he carefully presents his own views as well as dissenting views of other biblical scholars. These studies include full treatment of the historical and cultural settings of each of the twelve prophets and their writings.
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.
