Twelve Minor Prophets

The Minor Prophets or Twelve Prophets (Hebrew: שנים עשר, Shneim Asar; Imperial Aramaic: תרי עשר, Trei Asar, "Twelve") (Ancient Greek: δωδεκαπρόφητον, "the Twelve Prophets"), occasionally 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 apparently to St. Augustine,[1][non-primary source needed] who distinguished the 12 shorter prophetic books as prophetae minores from the four longer books of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

  1. ^ Augustine (1866). Civ. 18.29: Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum (Vienna 1866–). Vol. 40.2.306.

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