Introduction to Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah
I. THE NATURE OF PROPHETIC BOOKS The question of the nature of prophetic books is still contested. Roberts claims that “if one were looking for a modern analogy to the ancient prophetic book, a collection of relatively short sermons by a particular minister would be a good analogy. When reading such a modern collection, one cannot assume that the sermons will be arranged in a particular, logical order.” Consequently, “sometimes . . . too much attention to the book as a whole may lead to misinterpretation of a particular sermon.”1 Yet my previous research led me to conclude that at least the book of Ezekiel had been carefully arranged to communicate a message.2 Because many prophetic books are plausibly thought to go back to the oral ministry of a prophet, the genre of anthology is a distinct option, but the possibility that there is a coherent rationale behind the arrangement of a prophetic book and that the book itself functions as a piece of communication cannot be excluded. The question needs to be asked for each book afresh. There is, in my view, no one genre “prophetic book”—not in the narrow sense anyway. In the light of ancient Near Eastern evidence, it is probable that many prophecies were written down soon after being uttered. Collections of prophetic oracles are found elsewhere, but there is nothing known to us that is comparable to prophetic books of the kind we have in the Bible.3 Therefore, 1. J. J. M. Roberts, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, OTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 9. 2. See Thomas Renz, The Rhetorical Function of the Book of Ezekiel, VTSup 76 (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 3. According to William R. Osborne’s review in JETS 2 (2013): 252–55, R. Russell Mack
1
