II. The Minor Prophets in the Canon

may distinguish three main types of communication that feature prophetic and divine speech:6 (1) prophetic discourse, like a sermon, which cites divine speech; (2) divine oracles, or instances in which someone impersonates God in order to bring a revelation from him, to which prophetic commentary is appended; and (3) prophetic-divine speech, in which the speakers are not clearly distinguished. To suggest these three types is to claim that a distinction between prophetic and divine speech is sometimes warranted rhetorically but that there are also cases in which it will not be helpful to claim a hard-and-fast distinction between the two.7

II. THE MINOR PROPHETS IN THE CANON

The traditional Jewish understanding of the prophetic literature is that it expounds the Torah; the traditional Christian understanding is that it points forward to Christ. Both are true in my view. Once it is part of the canon of Scripture, no part of prophetic literature is understood as competing with or substituting for the fundamental revelation that is Torah. The Minor Prophets are only a small part of the prophetic literature, if one follows the traditional Jewish understanding that includes Joshua to Kings in the prophetic canon. While obvious links with the Former Prophets are few and far between, the basic theological outlook and even some of the characteristic vocabulary is similar. This has often been explained with the thesis that the prophetic books underwent a redaction by those responsible for or familiar with the Former Prophets. Yet it is hard to distinguish between the common phraseology due to similar social and ideological background and that due to actual identity of authorship (redaction), and some books are closer to the “Deuteronomistic” style than others (see below). All in all, considering that (1) the prophets build on tradition in their condemnation of the sins of their people, (2) the redactors of the prophetic books were likely to increase the links with other parts of the tradition rather than decrease them, and (3) the injunction toward the end of the Book of the Twelve to “remember the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel,

but cannot altogether avoid gray areas. Cf. the marking of divine speech in Zeph 2:5–7 on p. 124 with his commentary on p. 129, and note the identification of 2:12 as prophetic speech on p. 145. 6. There is of course also a sense in which everything we find in prophetic literature is human speech and a sense in which it is all to be received as the word of God, but my concern here is with the literary features of the text. 7. Cf. Michael H. Floyd, Minor Prophets: Part 2, FOTL 22 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 166–67, on the fine line between prophets speaking for YHWH and speaking for themselves.