Return to Me: 40 Prophetic Teachings about Unfaithfulness, Punishment, and Hope from the Minor Prophets (ebook)

Who Are the Minor Prophets?

A large portion of the Old Testament contains books of prophecy. Bible scholars divide these prophetic books into two categories. They call one group the Major Prophets, which includes the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah (who also wrote Lamentations), Ezekiel, and Daniel.
The other category is the Minor Prophets, which we’ll cover in this book. They are:

1. Hosea
2. Joel
3. Amos
4. Obadiah
5. Jonah
6. Micah
7. Nahum
8. Habakkuk
9. Zephaniah
10. Haggai
11. Zechariah
12. Malachi

This makes a total of twelve so-called Minor Prophets. The label minor is unfortunate because it leads many people to believe that their works and messages aren’t as important as the Major Prophets. This isn’t true.

They’re called minor because the books they wrote are shorter.

I, for one, like shorter books. It might be that you do too. The writings of these twelve prophets are quick to read and easier to digest.

We’ll cover all twelve in Return to Me. However, we won’t address them in the order they appear in the Bible. Instead, we’ll place them in chronological order (the best we can). This will give us some needed context and help us with continuity.

For many of these twelve prophets, the Bible lets us know the period of their ministries by mentioning the kings who ruled at that time, along with other useful hints. For other prophets, the Bible gives us no indication of when they prophesied. For these we place them in order based on Bible scholars’ interpretations of nonbiblical historical documents. Several of the prophets in the following list have overlapping timelines, being contemporaries of one another and prophesying in the same era.

Here are the twelve Minor Prophets placed in rough chronological order. Key events and other notable biblical figures appear in parentheses to help us round out the timeline...