INTRODUCTION TO THE TWELVE MINOR PROPHETS IN THE SEPTUAGINT

The Title of the Twelve

The twelve so-called Minor Prophets have existed as a collection from our earliest knowledge of them. The title “The Twelve,” or “Book of the Twelve,” reects the number of books in the group. Such a title was employed for them as early as Ben Sira (see Sir 49:10, “May the bones of the Twelve Prophets send forth new life from where they lie, for they comforted the people of Jacob and delivered them with con dent hope,” NRSV). This reference to the Twelve Prophets in Ben Sira also indicates these twelve books were one collection of books. In B, the LXX manuscript that is the basis of this commentary, the subscripts at the end of each of the twelve Minor Prophets number the books from 1–12. (See the text notes at the end of the commentary on Hosea.) Thus, the scribe(s) responsible for B also understood the Twelve to be a unit, or collection. In Judaism the collection of the twelve Minor Prophets is counted as one of the twenty-four (or twenty-two) books that comprise the Tanak. Josephus apparently counts the collection as one book among the twenty-two books the Jews believe are divine (Ag. Ap. 1.8), and according to 2Esd 14:44–45 Ezra must have counted the Twelve to be one among the twenty-four books he made public. Redditt (1) notes that the instructions in the Babylonian Talmud for copying the Twelve “stipulate leaving four lines between canonical books, but only three between the prophets of the Twelve.” Thus, these twelve books were understood to be connected in a special way. The other main title used for this collection, “Minor Prophets,” distin- guishes these twelve books from the longer prophetic books, Isa, Jer, and Ezek (see Augustine, City of God, 18.29). This title does not mean that the “Minor Prophets” are minor in substance or importance, but that they are shorter than the “Major Prophets.” Both of these titles (the Twelve and the Minor Prophets) will be used for these twelve books in this commentary. In the Hebrew Bible Isa, Jer, Ezek, and the twelve Minor Prophets are called the “Latter Prophets” to distinguish them from Josh, Judg, 1–2Sam, and 1–2Kings, which are also considered to be prophetic books and are called the “For- mer Prophets.” The superscriptions at the beginning of several of the Minor Prophets relate them to the narrative world of 1–2Kings (LXX 3–4Kgdms). 2 introduction to the twelve minor prophets in the septuagint

Probably the main reason the twelve Minor Prophets were one collection, or book, in Jewish tradition was for convenience. The Rabbis (Baba Bathra 13b, 14b) felt Hosea could have circulated independently on a short scroll, but they bound it up with later prophecies in the book of the Twelve because it was short and easily could have been lost (Macintosh, li). All twelve books that make up this collection are fairly short compared with the rest of the books in the Septuagint; they have between 21 verses (Obad) and 211 verses (Zech). In Rahlf’s Septuagint the Book of the Twelve  lls 75 pages, Isaiah 90 pages, Jeremiah 92 pages, and Ezekiel 92 pages. Thus, it is likely that the Book of the Twelve was a convenient length for one scroll. The importance of the Twelve for Christians is demonstrated by the use of these books in the New Testament and the Church Fathers. Muraoka counts 33 passages in them that are cited in the New Testament, compared with 72 from Isaiah, 10 from Jeremiah, and 5 from Ezekiel (“Introduction aux Douze Petits Prophètes,” II, in BA, 23.1). They are also employed often in the writings of the Church Fathers. An accessible entrée into the Church Fathers’ use of the Minor Prophets is The Twelve Prophets (vol. XIV on the Old Testament in the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture); this volume has over 300 pages of important excerpts from the early Church Fathers on the Minor Prophets. In recent years it has become common to study the Twelve not only as individual compositions but also as a single book, a coherent literary unit, and this is true not only for the Twelve in the Hebrew Bible but also in the Septuagint (Jones, 170–242; Seitz; Sweeney). In keeping with this method of studying the Twelve, it is believed that their order reects an intentional arrangement. With this approach to the Twelve one not only studies the individual books in their historical and literary contexts but also considers the contribution of their canonical order to their meaning as individual books and as a collection. Such a canonical approach is appropriate for studying the Twelve; since they have been traditionally understood to be one collection, or book, it is important to try to understand why the collection is arranged as it is. The importance of this approach is even more obvious in the LXX than in the Hebrew, because the altered arrangement in the LXX suggests the order and relationship of the books to each other is important. Redditt (25) gives two reasons for a “holistic or canonical reading of the Twelve.” First, this kind of reading “takes note of items in the biblical text that a chronological reading misses.” And, second, the book of the Twelve is “meant to be read straight through,” and if not read this way the reader “misses framing devices, allusions, themes, and other devices used by the redactors of the Twelve in knitting the books together.”