Twelve Minor Prophets
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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.

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:

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

It is not known when these short works were collected and transferred to a single scroll, but the first extra-biblical evidence for the Twelve as a collection is c. 190 BCE in the writings of Yeshua ben Sirach, and evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that the modern order of the Tanakh, which would potentially include the twelve, had been established by 150 BCE. It is believed that initially the first six were collected, and later the second six were added; the two groups seem to complement each other, with Hosea through Micah raising the question of iniquity, and Nahum through Malachi proposing resolutions.

Many, though not all, modern scholars agree that the editing process which produced the Book of the Twelve reached its final form in Jerusalem during the Achaemenid period (538–332 BCE), although there is disagreement over whether this was early or late.

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