JONAH

First, laying aside for the moment the question of the date of composition of Jonah, the reference
by the author of Kings to his prophecy in the reign of Jeroboam (793/92–753 B.C.) fixes his
activity in the first half of the eighth century and prior to this king’s expansionist success.
Outline of Jonah
1. The Lord’s First Word to Jonah (1:1–17)
1. Jonah’s Call and Flight (1:1–3)
2. His Plans Complicated (1:4–10)
3. The Miraculous Calm (1:11–16)
4. Judgment on Jonah (1:17)
2. Jonah’s Response to Divine Mercy (2:1–10)
1. His Prayer (2:1–9)
2. His Deliverance (2:10)
3. The Lord’s Second Word to Jonah (3:1–10)
1. Jonah’s Second Call and Mission (3:1–4)
2. Nineveh’s Response to the Prophet (3:5–9)
3. God’s Response to Nineveh’s Repentance (3:10)
4. Jonah’s Response to Divine Mercy (4:1–5)
1. His Prayer and God’s Response (4:1–4)
2. Waiting for Judgment (4:5)
5. Final Dialogue between God and Jonah (4:6–11).
New insight from the book of Jonah
 God loves His people
 True repentance gives a chance for forgiveness
 God is the controller of all things in heaven and the earth.
Hence this book although there are many discussions but the historicism must be applied as the
best approach for its interpretation.
AMOS
The prophet from Tekoa found, as did his eighth-century contemporaries Hosea and Micah, that
being a prophet was not an easy or well-appreciated occupation. Hailing from the little town of
Tekoa about six miles south of Bethlehem in the Judean hills, Amos made his entrance into the
kingdom of Israel with a message of judgment. Amos was called from his pastoral occupation to
one of the flourishing urban centers made infamous by Jeroboam I. His hometown was among
the cities that Jeroboam’s Judean rival, Rehoboam, fortified to provide his kingdom with a
defensive chain of fortresses (2 Chron. 11:6). It was in that region also that Jehoshaphat defeated
the Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites (2 Chron. 20:20– 30), three peoples that interestingly
enough fell under Amos’s indictment.
His ministry occurred during the reigns of Uzziah of Judah and Jeroboam of Israel and two years
before the earthquake. We know from 2 Kings 14 that the reigns of Uzziah (Azariah) and
Jeroboam had a rather long overlap. Edwin R. Thiele gives 782–753 B.C. as the years of
Jeroboam as sole ruler of Israel and 767–740 as the reign of Uzziah as sole ruler in Judah.
About half the book of Amos is composed of the oracles against the nations (1:3–2:16) and the
five visions (7:1–9; 8:1–9:10), plus their appendixes. Those two segments occupy a prominent
place in the literary plan, which has led some scholars to advance the thesis that the book has two
literary centers, the oracles and the visions, and that the rest of the prophecy has clustered around
those two collections.
The Amos oracles have generally been grouped into three categories based upon form and
content: (1) oracles against Damascus, Gaza, Ammon, and Moab; (2) oracles against Tyre,
Edom, and Judah; and (3) the oracle against Israel.
The words of Amos reverberate from Bethel to Dan to Samaria to Gilgal, the places of religious
and political authority, that there is an authority who supersedes the bloated self-confidence of
the religious and political systems of Israel. He stands above them first in judgment and finally in
grace. The power and prerogative of this God, Yahweh by name, are most clearly attributes that
flow out of His nature as Creator and Sustainer of the world.
NEW INSIGHT FROM THE BOOK
 The judgement of God is real to those who go against his covenant.
 The issues of religion and the society problems addressed better by God himself in this
book.
 Worship and the common life constitute the whole.
 HOSEA
Hosea exemplified the dilemma of the ancient Israelite prophet as well, if not better, than any of
the writing prophets. Possessed by an awareness of having been grasped by God—a knowledge
that dominated the prophet’s activity—the Hebrew prophet was also held by intense love for his
people. Hosea’s personal life symbolized that traumatic predicament.
To be caught up in one’s mission was normative for the prophets. Personal involvement and risks
were all part of the execution of the call. No prophet took a greater risk than Hosea, and no
prophet suffered more personal anguish than he. Yet risk and suffering were means by which his
heart was borne more closely to God. But to be borne toward God was not to be carried away
from the people in whose behalf he ministered. Rather, to be close to God was to be close to
Israel, whom God had elected. Thus, Hosea’s dilemma was Yahweh’s dilemma.
Even though Hosea was intimately familiar with the ways of the farmer (6:11; 8:7) as well as the
baker (7:4–7), the book uses rich and diversified imagery. So, on that basis we could easily
assign to him several occupations. The truth is that we do not know what his occupation was,
aside from being a prophet.
This prophet’s public addresses were likely delivered in the cultic centers of Bethel and Gilgal,
and perhaps also in the capital, Samaria. Based upon the speech forms of the legal dispute (2:4;
4:1, 4; 12:3) and the watchman (5:8; 8:1 9:8), Hans Walter Wolff surmises that Hosea probably
spoke in the city gates of those urban centers. Of course, he may also have trespassed the courts
of the cultic centers (2:4–17; 4:4–19; 9:1–9).
The form of the Masoretic text and its resultant form in our modern English versions would
suggest that most of the book is written in poetry. However, the literary style is not uniform.
Chapters 1–3 are not easily scanned as poetry because they do not consistently exhibit the typical
Hebrew parallelism. Yet their form is not prose either.
Hosea’s message is rooted in Israel’s past, in which Yahweh had expressed His overflowing love
for His people by calling them out of Egypt (11:1). With tender nostalgia He recalls His infant
son’s toddling days as He Himself taught him how to walk, taking him up in His arms (11:3),
and under a different metaphor, leading him with “bonds of love” (11:4). Judging from Hosea’s
imagery, we can be confident that he was a tender and gentle father whose love knew no bounds;
he saw Yahweh as that kind of Father to Israel.
We can get the message from this book like, Healing of Israel’s faithlessness (14:4–7), Return
from Exile (11:8–11) and Seeking the Lord their God and David their king (3:5).
MICAH
Micah takes his place in the prophetic constellation of the eighth-century prophets as
significantly and prominently as any of its luminaries. Although he has not received as much
academic attention as Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah, he is nevertheless fixed in his stellar orbit as
firmly as they. And although his oracles do not run on at the length of theirs, his brevity is
marked by deep insight into the social, religious, and political movements of the eighth century.
Micah is preceded in his courage and social and professional alienation by a prophet of the same
name, Micaiah, son of Imlah (1 Kings 22:8). Despite, however, the similarities in name and
disposition, as well as the identical formula of 1:2 and 1 Kings 22:28 (“Hear, O peoples, all of
you”), there seems to be no connection between them.
Although Micah was from Moresheth-Gath, his major prophetic activity was probably not there,
because that would have posed the problem of transmitting his message to the capital cities,
Jerusalem and Samaria. It is very likely that he, like Isaiah his contemporary, prophesied in
Jerusalem.
The scholarly views regarding the time when Micah was an active prophet fall roughly into four
classes. First, there are those who confine his activity to the period before the fall of Samaria.
Wolff belongs to this class, dating Micah’s appearance in 734 at the very latest and suggesting a
terminal date of 728, although he leaves open the possibility of a longer ministry. some believe
that Micah’s ministry commenced before the fall of Samaria, because his reference to Samaria in
1:5–7 presupposes the existence of the Northern Kingdom, and it concluded sometime after that
great crisis, perhaps before the time of the Assyrian invasion of 711 B.C
The literary style of Micah has been characterized as rough and rugged. That, of course, is a
judgment made in comparison to the styles of Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah. The specific
observations include his abrupt transitions from threat to promise (2:1–11, 12, 13; 3:9–12; 4:1–5;
etc.), from one subject to another (7:1–7 and 11–13), and sudden changes in grammatical person
and gender (1:10; 2:12; 6:16; 7:15–19).
Micah’s insight into the spiritual and social problems of the eighth century was as penetrating as
Isaiah’s. To throw those problems into sharper relief, Micah’s view of God, known to the
prophet by His covenant name Yahweh, left his audience no room to escape the consequences of
their sins or to accuse Him of arbitrary behavior. He was a God who demanded moral obedience
of His people rather than sacrificial appeasement (6:6–8). Of Judah’s leaders He required that
they know justice (3:1), but their response had been to pervert it (3:9).
Micah’s grasp of the importance of history can be seen in his references to past events and the
response to which they called the Lord’s people. In the legal dispute between the Lord and Judah
in 6:1–5 the Lord reminded them, as Amos had reminded Israel a generation earlier (Amos 2:10),
that He had redeemed them from Egypt. Moreover, He recalled the opposition of Balak, king of
Moab, and how Balaam the prophet answered him. In one phrase, “from Shittim to Gilgal” (6:5),
the Lord summed up the victorious entrance into Canaan that included the defeat of Jericho.
ISAIAH
Isaiah was prophet par excellence of the classical era of prophecy. Along with Amos, Hosea, and
Micah, he was a bright star in the prophetic constellation of the eighth century B.C., soaring like
an eagle in his literary and theological distinction. No prophet of his time more fully
comprehended the gravity of the Assyrian threat and its implications for the immediate present
and remote future.
With his eyes fixed on the troubled societies of Israel and Judah and his heart fixed on the
faithful covenant God, Isaiah exemplified the spiritual trauma such a dilemma created in the
heart of a prophet. It was no less than Yahweh’s own distressing dilemma lived out in His
servants the prophets. Isaiah’s “Lord, how long?” (6:11a) was the distress signal of a heart
crushed by Israel’s hardened nature (6:9–10) and compelled by an irresistible call to prophesy
(6:6–8).
Isaiah was married, but, unlike Hosea, we do not know his wife’s name or anything about her
personality. She is referred to as “the prophetess” in 8:3. Whether that implies that she too
engaged in prophetic functions is not clear. More than likely, however, it was a term that simply
referred to his wife rather than a profession. As with Hosea before him, Isaiah’s family life was
bound up with his prophetic ministry. There is no evidence, however, that he endured anything
like the trauma that Hosea did. Yet when the names of one’s children symbolize the destiny of
nations, there is likely no total escape from whatever grief or joy they symbolize.
According to the superscription (1:1), Isaiah’s ministry took place during the reigns of Uzziah,
Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. If, as is generally thought, chapter 6 records his call, then he began
prophesying in the last year of Uzziah’s life (740 B.C.) and continued into Hezekiah’s reign
(which ended in 686). His ministry very likely extended beyond that date, because the last
definite historical incident mentioned is the death of Sennacherib in 681 (37:38).
DIVISION OF THE BOOK
More general agreement among Isaiah scholars may be found on seven main divisions of the
book:
1. Chaps. 1–12
2. Chaps. 13–23
3. Chaps. 24–27
4. Chaps. 28–33
5. Chaps. 34–35
6. Chaps. 36–39
7. Chaps. 40–66