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.

The moniker does not speak to the importance of their message, only to the fact that they are considerably shorter in length than the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah.

It is important to know when and where to “place” Hosea on the timeline of Jewish history. Here is the briefest of outlines:

• The Israelites enter the Promised Land under the leadership of Joshua after their 40 year trek in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses (~1400 BC)
• The Israelites settled in the land of Canaan. There was no central leadership. Each of the twelve tribes was on their own, cooperating or not with the other tribes. Under times of crisis God would raise up a Judge (military leader) to unite the tribes. (as early as 1350 BC, but most estimates are closer to 1250 BC; the age of Judges was over by ~1,000 BC)
• The Age of the Kings
  • United Kingdom under David and Solomon (1000-922 BC)
  • The Northern Kingdom, Israel (922-722 BC)
  • The Southern Kingdom, Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem (922-587 BC)
• The Babylonian Exile (587 to approximately 537 BC)

Hosea was a prophet of the Northern Kingdom (also called Israel, Jacob and sometimes, Ephraim – and in NT times, Samaria). Hosea began his ministry in the last years of prosperity, stability and peace in the north. It was a time in which the Empire of Assyria began to again assert its dominance over the surrounding countries. Hosea began his ministry in 750 BC and seems to have ended with the Fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC.

Image credit: The Prophet Hosea |  Transfiguration church, Kizhi monastery, Karelia, north Russia | PD-US