Welcome - or welcome back to the Bible Challenge
This section of the challenge is to read the minor prophets. The minor prophets are the 12 books of prophecy at the end of the Old Testament. They are called minor because they are all short - between 1 and 14 chapters, not because they are unimportant.
As we begin a note about the words "prophet" and "prophecy". In the modern world these words have come to mean foretelling the future, or a person who foretells the future. That isn't what the Bible means when it uses the word prophet. A Biblical prophet is one who proclaimed the word of God to either the people, the priests or the king (or sometimes all three). The prophets in the Bible were called by God to proclaim to the people, usually, how far they had gone away from who God had called them be be and what God had told them to do. Now usually the prophecy included something like: "If you don't shape up, God will turn his face from you and then you'll be sorry" and usually they didn't shape up and usually they were sorry - but the point of the prophecy wasn't the information about God making them sorry, it was the information that they were not following the ways of God.
This week we start the book of Hosea.
Hosea prophecied in the northern kingdom - that is in Israel rather than Judah - while that kingdom was at war with Assyria. The kingdom was basically in anarchy, king after king had been assassinated and the Assyrians were on the verge of complete victory. This is all happening around 730 BC.
The most striking feature of the book of Hosea is God's command to him to "take a wife of whoredom" and to treat his wife "Gomer" with the same redeeming love that God has for the people of Israel - even though they have turned from his ways and done evil things for profit.
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