Week 32 Hosea & Co.
I started reading Hosea today – the first of the Short Prophets (the others are Joel Amos Obadiah Jonah Micah Nahum Habakkuk Zephaniah Haggai Zechariah & Malachi).
I usually just read through the bible in bible-order even though I know that bible-order isn’t the same as calendar-order but I sometimes get lulled into thinking the-book-before-happened-before-the-book-after. Which isn’t necessarily true.
So anyway I was reminded about that when Hosea said his messages came to him during the years when Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah were kings of Judah.
That made me think about re-ordering the books so I could read them in date sequence. But I didn’t get too far with that idea because only six of them gave me a time-stamp:
Amos said he wrote during the time of king Uzziah
Hosea was Uzziah too…as well as Jotham-Ahaz-Hezekiah
Micah prophesied to Jotham-Ahaz-Hezekiah
Zephaniah to Josiah
Haggai & Zechariah both prophesied during the second year of Darius
Jonah & Nahum – Nineveh/Assyria prophets – didn’t give dates. But Jonah had to be earlier and Nahum later
Joel was before the fall of Jerusalem & Malachi after the return from exile
Obadiah talks about Edom & Habakkuk about Babylon.
The long-and-short is that with some of them I’m playing a guessing-game. And ball-parking a date to a one or two or three decade estimate isn’t too helpful. Not too helpful to me anyway.
So reading the Short Prophets this year I’ll just take them as they come.
Note: Hosea 1:1 (NLT)