Allen's study of the Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah constitute a volume in The New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Like its companion series on the New Testament, this commentary devotes considerable care to achieving a balance between technical information and homiletic-devotional interpretation.
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.
Taken together, the nine prophets found in the books Obadiah through Malachi lived during a tumultuous two hundred years of Israelite history. Their communities dealt with the crisis of the impending Assyrian threat in the eighth century and the Babylonian exile in the sixth, as well as the hopeful age of restoration in the late sixth and early fifth centuries. Intimately connected to the travails and needs of their communities, these prophets had the responsibility of bringing God's message of hope - even in the bleakest times - to their people. Their questions - Where is the God of justice and mercy? What is God up to these days? and What are we, in turn, to do? - are timely for our own church and society. William Brown offers readers a look at these important prophets and their message about where the God of justice and mercy is at work today.
The NIV Application Commentary helps you communicate and apply biblical text effectively in today's context. To bring the ancient messages of the Bible into today's world, each passage is treated in three sections: Original Meaning. Concise exegesis to help readers understand the original meaning of the biblical text in its historical, literary, and cultural context. Bridging Contexts. A bridge between the world of the Bible and the world of today, built by discerning what is timeless in the timely pages of the Bible. Contemporary Significance. This section identifies comparable situations to those faced in the Bible and explores relevant application of the biblical messages. The author alerts the readers of problems they may encounter when seeking to apply the passage and helps them think through the issues involved. This unique, award-winning commentary is the ideal resource for today's preachers, teachers, and serious students of the Bible, giving them the tools, ideas, and insights they need to communicate God's Word with the same powerful impact it had when it was first written.
Where is the line between God’s mercy and judgment? In the latest volume of the New International Commentary on the Old Testament, James D. Nogalski offers a new translation of and commentary on several of the Minor Prophets—the Books of Joel, Obadiah, and Jonah—that grapple with this theme in radically different ways. This volume includes a robust introduction for each book, delineating its textual transmission, historical context, literary form, and major themes. The introduction also discusses the role of each book within the collection of the Twelve (Minor) Prophets. The commentaries proper explain the texts verse by verse, illuminating each book’s structure and canonical significance, yet always with an eye toward pastoral application. Academically rigorous and accessibly written, The Books of Joel, Obadiah, and Jonah is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and pastors.
The Open Your Bible Commentary was written to encourage daily Bible study. Each reading is short, but the content is rich with careful explanation, devotional warmth, and practical relevance. Its four great strengths are that it is accessible, digestible, dependable, and practical.
The Day of the Lord texts of Malachi (Mal 3:2, 7; 4:5) demonstrate that he seems to allude to Joel's Day of the Lord (2:11, 13, 31 [MT 3:4]). Malachi's Day of the Lord seems to have a strong inner-biblical relationship with the Day of the Lord motif of Joel. A significant interpretive loss is committed when allusion is recognized in the source text but ignored and not explored. Thus, the passages themselves call for an inner-biblical allusion study. In addition, the interpretive significance of Joel's Day of the Lord in Malachi has not been investigated comprehensively as the review of literature and intertextual and inner-biblical studies on Malachi validated. Thus, these are the interrelated questions: (a) "What are the criteria to verify the inner-biblical connection between Malachi and Joel on the Day of the Lord?" (b) "How did Malachi use Joel's Day of the Lord motif?" (c) "How did Malachi develop the Day of the Lord theme in his book?" There are three purposes of this study. The first is to identify objective criteria to verify the inner-biblical connection between Malachi and Joel on the Day of the Lord. The second is to determine how Malachi used Joel's Day of the Lord motif. The last is to ascertain how Malachi developed the Day of the Lord theme in his book.