Part of the NIV based College Press Commentary series, which blends solid scholarship with practical usefulness, this second volume commentary on the Minor Prophets will be a helpful and reliable addition to your reference library. This volume contains the minor prophets from Nahum to Malachi.
The act of reading and interpreting the Bible requires contemporary readers to traverse from their world to the world of the text. However, a cultural distance between the two worlds complicates this journey. Biblical authors use images from ancient agriculture and warfare that are distant to modern readers. They refer to events, circumstances, geographical entities, and sociopolitical realities familiar to the text's original audience, but not part of a frame of reference for contemporary readers.
Both general Bible readers and others doing in-depth biblical research should find helpful this volume for diminishing or closing the distance between the biblical audience and contemporary readers. As a result, they may better read, understand, and be challenged by the messages of the prophets.
Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are the final six books in a twelve-book collection often referred to as the Minor Prophets. This name refers to their relative brevity as opposed to their diminished significance. They circulated together with the first six books of the collection (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah) in an anthology known to the Jews as the Book of the Twelve, the final book in the section of the Hebrew Scripture known as the Prophets.
