The Book of the Twelve: One Scroll, Many Voices w/ Dr James Nogalski

Johnny Ova: You're listening to the Dig In Podcast. I'm your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have a very special guest. We're joined by Dr. James Nogalski. Dr. Nogalski, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm assuming you're Polish, right? Because my real last name is Polish too.

Dr. James Nogalski: My pleasure. Well, it's a bit more complicated. On my Nogalski side, my grandfather was Polish, and he married a woman who was Prussian. His son married a woman whose mother was Italian and had married an Irishman. So on my Nogalski side I'm Polish, Prussian, Irish and Italian. On my mother's side, it's complicated.

Johnny Ova: My dad's dad was Polish and married a Russian woman, and my dad married my mom, who was 100 percent Italian. So I've got about 75 percent of you in there. Let's start off with what I ask all our guests. Were you born and raised in a Christian home, and what led you to this area of expertise, the Book of the Twelve?

Dr. James Nogalski: I was born into a Baptist home, Southern Baptist at the time. Later the church I belonged to became part of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the more moderate and progressive side. I experienced a call to ministry in high school and went to Samford University, where I was a religion and history major. Then I went to seminary and did my first master's degree at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. There I had a professor in a Hebrew class on Malachi who stopped in the middle of talking about some participle form and said, you know, Malachi is part of the Book of the Twelve. And there's this tradition that it was written on a single scroll and counted as a single book. And I've always wondered why.

Dr. James Nogalski: When I got to my second master's and had to choose a thesis topic, my thesis advisor asked if I had one. Of course I hadn't, but you don't want to look bad in front of your professor, so I said exactly what that professor had said: I've always heard of this tradition about the Book of the Twelve, and I've wondered if there's anything to it. That started me on the path. That was spring of 1985, and it turns out it has kept my attention for 40 years now.

Johnny Ova: Wow. Forty years on one topic. That's pretty amazing. For those hearing the term Book of the Twelve for the first time, can you explain what it is and what it means?

Dr. James Nogalski: Before there were books, there were scrolls. The first books are called codices, and the codex came into being probably around the first century BC or first century AD. The innovation of the codex was twofold: you could write on both sides of vellum, and you could stitch it together like a book and turn the pages. With a scroll you have to unroll it, and you can only see one piece at a time.

Dr. James Nogalski: In Judaism, copying a biblical book onto a leather scroll was a very expensive endeavor. If you've heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the large Isaiah scroll held all 66 chapters of Isaiah, and it took 11 cows to get enough hides to make that scroll. So it was expensive. They only put important documents on leather, but leather preserved them for a long time. That's why, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the leather ones were the ones that survived. Things written on papyrus were just fragments that had fallen to pieces.

Dr. James Nogalski: When a congregation, a synagogue or the temple used a scroll, it eventually wore out after 10 or 15 years, so it had to be recopied, and great care was taken to copy it as perfectly as they could. But the technology for making scrolls allowed them to get longer over time. In pictures of Egyptian scribes, they write on a tablet about this big, which isn't enough to hold even one song. When you can put it on a scroll and roll it up, instead of having 150 of those things, you have one scroll about this thick.

Dr. James Nogalski: So with these smaller prophetic writings, somebody decided to keep them together, because they showed prophets from the eighth century down through the Persian period, and they arranged them chronologically and thematically. The scroll begins with Hosea, then Amos, another eighth-century prophet, then Micah, an eighth-century prophet. Then it jumps to Zephaniah, who prophesied in the reign of Josiah. We think at one point those four formed a collection copied together.

Dr. James Nogalski: Then, as they were able to put more prophetic writings on the scroll, Joel and Obadiah were inserted: Joel between Hosea and Amos, and Obadiah between Amos and Micah, because of thematic links. Hosea ends with a call to confession, and Joel also has a call to repent. The end of Joel has the line, Yahweh roars from Zion and utters his voice from Jerusalem. That's in Joel 4, and Amos 1:2 starts exactly the same way. So they're putting these together. Joel is about the repentance of the Southern Kingdom. Hosea is about the repentance of the Northern Kingdom. Amos is about the destruction of the Northern Kingdom. Micah is about the possible destruction of the Southern Kingdom. They're scaffolding these books together.

Dr. James Nogalski: By the time you get to Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, their superscriptions tell us those prophets worked and wrote in the Persian period, specifically from the second year of Darius, 520 BCE. The Persians defeated the Babylonians in 539 and became the empire over Judah and Jerusalem at that point. So there's a chronological structure, and there are theological threads running through it. What did the prophets tell the people of Israel and Judah, from the eighth century through the post-exilic period, after the destruction and the rebuilding of the temple? And what did people learn from it? The answer is not much. They continued to sin. They continued to sacrifice improperly. The prophets were not shy about confronting people in power. If they felt the priests or the leaders were doing something against Yahweh's message, they spoke truth to power.

Johnny Ova: So if I'm understanding correctly, these are individual works that over time were collected for a reason, put on one scroll, and edited thematically?

Dr. James Nogalski: And then transmitted together and translated together. Even in the English Bible it's always Hosea through Malachi: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, always in that order. There's a slightly different order in some Septuagint versions, because they pulled the three eighth-century prophets up front, so they begin with Hosea, Amos and Micah, then Joel, Obadiah and Jonah, and follow the same order after that. Once they reached twelve, they decided that was a pretty good way to end the scroll. So they were collected together, but some of us, myself included, think that part of this scribal recopying also involved updating some of those works to make them mesh together more carefully.

Johnny Ova: As you're explaining this, I'm thinking you must hate when people call these the minor prophets.

Dr. James Nogalski: That isn't a bad word in our language.

Johnny Ova: Let's touch on that for a second, because we hear minor prophets and major prophets, and it's kind of funny why they're called that. Can you explain why these are called minor prophets versus major prophets?

Dr. James Nogalski: First off, in Jewish tradition the historical books aren't called historical books. They're called prophets. You have the former prophets, and there are four: Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Samuel used to be one book until the Middle Ages, when it was decided it was better to break it in two, and Kings also used to be one book. So there were four former prophets, and then four latter prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve. The former prophets recount the history from the time of Moses to Jerusalem's destruction, Joshua through Kings. Later, in the English Bible, Ruth was inserted after Judges, because Ruth begins in the days when the judges judged. The Hebrew Bible keeps the original order: the Torah, the Nevi'im or prophets, former and latter, and then the Writings as the third part. So the Hebrew Bible is called the Tanakh, an acronym for Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.

Johnny Ova: Very cool. Going back to the themes in the Book of the Twelve, you mentioned one in Joel, but is there other evidence, historical, textual or canonical, that supports the idea of these twelve books being edited together intentionally?

Dr. James Nogalski: The early sources don't talk about them being edited together intentionally. They talk about them being read together intentionally. Jerome is one, but let me get my Bible. The earliest reference is in the book of Sirach, chapter 49, part of a hymn in praise of the fathers. It's a six-chapter poem. Most of the book is like Proverbs, from a wisdom teacher, but the end is dedicated to the famous people throughout Jewish history. In chapter 48 they get up to the reign of Hezekiah, and while they praise Hezekiah they mention the prophet Isaiah, who was active in Hezekiah's time. Then they skip to Josiah, 100 years later, and mention Jeremiah, and then Ezekiel.

Dr. James Nogalski: This is 49:6: they set fire to the chosen city of the sanctuary and made its streets desolate, as Jeremiah had foretold, for they had mistreated him, who even in the womb had been consecrated a prophet. That's alluding to Jeremiah 1. "To pluck up and ruin and destroy" is alluding to Jeremiah too. Ezekiel saw the vision of glory, alluding to the call narrative of Ezekiel, who saw the kavod, the glory, coming from Jerusalem to him in Babylon. Then it says, may the bones of the Twelve Prophets send forth new life from where they lie, for they comforted the people of Jacob and delivered them with confident hope. Then, how shall we magnify Zerubbabel? He was like a signet ring. That's a clear reference to Haggai 2:23. So Sirach is reading the history and the Twelve together. He does it just like the other books. Comfort my people is what he says about Isaiah, and that's from Isaiah 40. So he mentions a king, a prophet, and a theme from the prophetic scroll: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve, and he chooses Haggai to drive home the point for the Twelve. That's Sirach. Jerome does some other things in his commentary on Jonah. He reads Jonah and Nahum together. Jonah is about the salvation of the Assyrians, and Nahum is about the destruction of the Assyrians, so he draws from both.

Johnny Ova: Wow. It seems like these themes are an arc that just keeps happening over and over again.

Dr. James Nogalski: I think that's by design, because it's trying to teach the people reading it and hearing it read: this is what God expects of us, and our ancestors did not do it. Zechariah, the eleventh book of the Twelve, begins with what scholars call a summary of a sermon, four verses long. In verse 4 he says, do not be like your ancestors, to whom the former prophets proclaimed, thus says the Lord of hosts, return from your evil ways and your evil deeds. But they did not hear or heed me, says Yahweh. Your ancestors, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? Those are rhetorical questions that mean no, they didn't. Then, did my words not overtake your ancestors? Yes, they did. So the generation of Zechariah repents. They rebuild the temple, and the promise starts being fulfilled, until Malachi, when they're back to practicing religion wrong.

Johnny Ova: We just keep going up and down. That somewhat answers my next question, but do you see the Twelve functioning more like a prophetic anthology, back to back to back, or is there a single theological statement being made? Or is the answer both?

Dr. James Nogalski: I'd say it's both. An Old Testament professor named David Petersen called it a thematized anthology. Each book has its own history, its own way of coming to be, and goes back to a different prophet. If you read them in Hebrew, they read very differently. The writing style is distinct from one book to the next. But there are recurring themes and motifs, catchwords that bring those motifs back in, like wine, grain and oil. That combination stands for the fertility of the land. It comes up at the end of Hosea, where the land is promised to flourish, and then you turn to Joel and the locusts have destroyed the wine, grain and oil. But by the end of Joel, Yahweh has come back to deliver Zion and pour out his spirit on them. So each book rehearses several of these recurring motifs.

Dr. James Nogalski: Probably the most consistent one in the Twelve is the day of Yahweh. That's how they refer to Yahweh's divine intervention in history. And there are multiple days of Yahweh in the Twelve. In Joel, a day of Yahweh is coming against Jerusalem. In Obadiah, the day of Yahweh is coming against Edom and has already come against Jerusalem. It's interwoven with the fertility of the land as a sign of blessing, or the destruction of the land as a sign of curse. Those curses and blessings from the way Deuteronomy ends become involved. I think that's part of it. And Malachi and Isaiah both end with an open-ended warning: you'd better get your act together before Yahweh comes again.

Johnny Ova: So when we say the day of Yahweh, we're referencing the term the day of the Lord, right?

Dr. James Nogalski: Yes. And this is another thing. English Bibles translate Yahweh as the Lord, following the Greek in that respect. The problem is that Yahweh is actually a name. Yahweh is the name of God. That's important in these prophetic texts where Yahweh says this or Yahweh says that. It's saying not just any god, because they lived in a context where every nation around them was polytheistic. So the name of God was really important. Our God is Yahweh, not Baal, not Marduk, not some Edomite god, not the Canaanite pantheon with El and Asherah. We take that monotheistic mindset for granted, but it was not the case in the ancient world. Judah and Israel were unique in developing that kind of devotion to one God whose name was Yahweh, and it became clearer and clearer that this is the only God. Then you have Isaiah saying Yahweh sits on the throne of heaven and the earth is his footstool. The enormity they meant is that this God is so big he uses the whole earth to rest his feet on, and yet he's engaged enough to care about us.

Johnny Ova: Amazing. So the day of Yahweh, what you're saying, is more of a term of judgment?

Dr. James Nogalski: No, not necessarily. It's a term for divine intervention in the historical world, because Yahweh comes either to save or to punish, or both. Take the day of Yahweh in Habakkuk 3. Habakkuk opens with the prophet complaining to Yahweh: O Yahweh, how long do we have to suffer with my countrymen who use violence and bloodshed to get what they want? He's condemning other people of Judah. That's 1:2 to 4. Then in 1:5 to 12 Yahweh responds and basically says, you're right, I'm going to send the Babylonians to destroy them. And Habakkuk says, wait, that's not what I meant. But in Habakkuk 3 another day of Yahweh is described, and this time it's against the Babylonians, because they've gone too far. They punished Judah more than they were supposed to. So Yahweh intervenes on that day against Babylon to help Judah.

Dr. James Nogalski: So the same day of the Lord, depending on which side of the line you're on. The word is mishpat. It basically means an orderly structure that's supposed to be maintained, and when you get out of line, Yahweh brings justice and puts it back. If you're the one being oppressed, that justice is a great thing. If you're the oppressor, you don't feel so good having Yahweh battle you. Conceptually, that's how they thought of it: justice is what is proper and right.

Johnny Ova: That's so good. Thank you for bringing that to light, because the day of the Lord is a very misunderstood and misused term.

Dr. James Nogalski: I say Yahweh here because I'm talking about the Hebrew Bible. But if I'm reading in church, I don't say the day of Yahweh. I say the day of the Lord, because people wouldn't follow it otherwise. It's not that the day of the Lord is a bad term. It just means a day when God will intervene.

Johnny Ova: Intervene, and again, good or bad depending on the side. Very good. Back to the Twelve, because I have some questions on the individual books too. How does recognizing the unity of these twelve change the way we should read and interact with them? Does it make a big difference?

Dr. James Nogalski: It's like reading any book. The first time you read it through, it's hard to absorb. The more you read it, the more you see the commonalities, and that causes you to stop and reflect on why. Why does history repeat itself like that? And it pushes you to ask, what about me? Hosea, for example, ends with the call to repent I mentioned, and then Hosea 14:9, after calling the Northern Kingdom to repent, says at the very end of the book: those who are wise understand these things, and those who are discerning know them. For the ways of Yahweh are right, and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them. That's the takeaway at the end of that book, because Hosea constantly alternates between judgment and salvation. Chapters 1 to 3 have six segments. The first is about the children and how they foretell judgment, then how they foreshadow deliverance, and chapter 3 is also judgment and salvation. Chapters 4 through 10 are judgment, chapter 11 is salvation, 12 and 13 are judgment, and 14 is salvation.

Johnny Ova: Can you highlight some of the unique voices of these prophets? We're talking about their unity, but some clearly have their own voice and message. How do Hosea, Micah and Habakkuk, for example, stand apart from the rest?

Dr. James Nogalski: Hosea preached, we think, from the Northern Kingdom and to the Northern Kingdom. But when the Northern Kingdom was destroyed, someone brought his words down to the Southern Kingdom, to Jerusalem. Part of that updating is that where the message was originally directed to Ephraim, the Northern Kingdom, there will be a parenthetical note saying Judah should also take note of this. So it becomes applied to both north and south, and it alternates strongly between judgment and salvation. Joel is the book that has all the recurring themes I mentioned. All of them run through Joel, so I call it the literary anchor of the book. It's placed near the front and foreshadows all the themes that come together. Amos is more about social justice, whereas Hosea is more about cultic impropriety, sacrificing improperly. Amos is the one who says, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. He focuses a lot on the social side.

Dr. James Nogalski: Obadiah is, from start to finish, a word of judgment against Edom. The Edomites were descendants of Esau. Jacob and Esau were twins and were supposed to stand together, but the Edomites allied with Babylon, and Obadiah condemns them for helping overthrow Jerusalem. Jonah is a very unique voice, because it strongly proclaims that Yahweh is the God of all, even the Assyrians, the evil empire of the eighth century. Jonah is set in the eighth century as well. Micah is the Judean counterpart to Hosea. He focuses on social justice and on the fertility of the land, but it's really more about social justice, especially in chapters 2 and 3. Habakkuk picks up where Micah leaves off: how long will we suffer because our own people are treating us cruelly? Nahum is about judgment on Assyria, which is then replaced as the empire by Babylon, and that's what Habakkuk is about. So the books are marching you through time.

Dr. James Nogalski: Then Zephaniah prophesied in the time of Josiah, when the book of the law was found. He condemns Jerusalem for what they're doing, and to do that he alludes to the creation story in Genesis 1, but in reverse order. We call his judgment oracle the undoing of creation: all the created beings will be destroyed in the opposite order in which they were created. Then Haggai and Zechariah are about rebuilding the temple. Notice what they do: they skip from Josiah, before Jerusalem's destruction, straight to rebuilding the temple. There are 100 years in there, and those are the years Jeremiah and Ezekiel focus on. Jeremiah covers the end of the seventh century up to and through Jerusalem's destruction, and that's basically all it covers, but from within the land. He's still in Jerusalem. Ezekiel starts a little later, because he was already part of the first exile in 597, so he's living in Babylon, and the recurring themes of Ezekiel are how the exiles experience living outside the land and longing to get back. The Twelve, like Isaiah, goes from the eighth century to the Persian period. In Malachi the temple has been rebuilt, and we know it's the Persian period because they use the Persian loanword for governor. Would your governor, your pechah, accept this sacrifice from you? No. Yet you're willing to give it to Yahweh.

Johnny Ova: They say every parent has a favorite kid, and that's a lie, okay? I have five kids. But I'm going to ask you anyway: is there a book of the Twelve that stands out to you most? A favorite book, an outlier, something that's just so rich with revelation for you?

Dr. James Nogalski: I'd say there's a favorite book and a favorite passage, and they're not in the same book. My favorite book to teach is Jonah, because people don't understand how humorous it is. When you read it closely, the humor comes through loud and clear. It starts off: the word of Yahweh came to Jonah and said, go to Assyria. Head east. And he got up and went west toward Spain, across the Mediterranean, in the opposite direction. Then God has to send a fish to come get him and take him to Assyria. The person who wrote that story is using humor to say, don't disobey God.

Dr. James Nogalski: My favorite passage is Micah 6:6 to 8. "With what shall I come before Yahweh and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" How much should I sacrifice, in other words? Should I bring buckets of oil, the more the better? And the prophet says, he has told you, O mortal, what is good. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, chesed in Hebrew, and to walk humbly with your God? I just think that's it in a nutshell.

Johnny Ova: So good. I've got two more questions as we land this plane today. Question number one: what do you think we miss when we isolate these books instead of seeing them in conversation with one another?

Dr. James Nogalski: I think you miss the full didactic picture. If you read Nahum by itself, it's a pretty vindictive book. Obadiah by itself is a vindictive book. God is going to kill Edomites. God is going to destroy the Assyrians. The king is going to die. But when you have the longer picture, you realize this is part of God's mishpat, setting things back in order, because the king of Assyria did what he wasn't supposed to do in attacking Judah. People who haven't read the Old Testament carefully think, I don't like the Old Testament because God is so violent. It's a different thought world. When we say, come to us, Lord, we think of it in warm, fuzzy terms. We want to hold God close.

Johnny Ova: Embrace everything.

Dr. James Nogalski: In the Old Testament, when God comes to earth, it's not necessarily a good thing. He walks across the tops of the mountains, they thunder and rumble, and he's coming to get somebody and set things right. I have this thing I tell my kids all the time. They'll say something's out of whack, you've got to get it back in whack. And I say, but why don't we ever say something's in whack? So I think you miss that big picture.

Johnny Ova: God was getting everything back in whack in the Old Testament, over and over and over again.

Dr. James Nogalski: Yes, exactly. But then he still shows grace. That's another recurring theme in the Twelve. In spite of all that, he shows grace to Jonah, and Jonah is angry because God is going to show grace to the Assyrians. This is what I said, Lord, when I was back in my home country. I wasn't going to go because I knew you'd let them off the hook if they repented. And they did.

Johnny Ova: I love how you said that about Nahum. Reading everything tied together really pulls it out. I think it's so important, when people think about the Old Testament, to read it as a whole story instead of randomly plucking things out. Otherwise you miss what's going on.

Dr. James Nogalski: That's what Jerome and others in the early church said about Jonah and Nahum. In Jonah the Assyrians repented and God showed them grace. But then they didn't stay repentant. So what's God going to do? He has to honor that part of his word too.

Johnny Ova: That's right. Lastly: are there any forgotten prophets in this group that you wish churches or seminaries paid more attention to?

Dr. James Nogalski: I think Micah, for sure. They all have a reputation for being minor prophets, so in one sense they're all forgotten, I guess. Hosea and Amos get more press, but Micah has some really good stuff in it. More than any forgotten prophet, though, it's understanding who prophets were. When they talked about the future, it was to change the present. It wasn't to foretell things just to show they could see the future. We often say they were not foretellers. They were forth-tellers. They told priests, kings and people what Yahweh expected of them and when they had crossed the line.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Nogalski, I can't thank you enough for your time today. This has been a fascinating conversation. Reading up on your work and listening to some of your teaching, I've got to be honest, I never thought about these being one work put together like this. It's fascinating to me.

Dr. James Nogalski: Well, I say one book and twelve books. Each one has its own character, twelve writings in one book. So it is like an anthology. But there are enough signs that whoever kept them together wanted us to read them together.

Johnny Ova: We're going to link all your resources in the episode description. For anybody listening who wants to dig deeper, Dr. Nogalski has a ton of materials you can jump into. Again, thank you so much for your time today. I truly appreciate it, and hopefully we can get you back on in the future to talk about some other great topics.

Dr. James Nogalski: All right, sounds good. Thank you.