The first readings for the daily Masses this week are taken from the Book of Hosea. It is the first of the so-called “Minor Prophets” of the Old Testament. The Minor Prophets (also called “The Book of the Twelve) is a collection of prophetic books, written between about the 8th and 4th centuries before Jesus. In the Jewish Tanakh they appear as a single book. In the Christian Old Testament the collection appears as twelve individual books, one for each of the prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The name “Minor Prophets” goes back apparently to St. Augustine, who distinguished the 12 shorter prophetic books as prophetae minores distinguished from the four longer books of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. There are other OT prophets whose stories are recounted in other OT books, e.g. Elijah and Elisha, recorded in Kings and Chronicles. Continue reading →