The Twelve Minor Prophets for Today’s Church (Part 5): Imagining the Future

All groups think about their own past. That’s how we humans discern our present. Where we are derives from how we got here. 

But if our stories about the past determine our present, so too do our stories about the future. Where are we going, and why and how are we going there? Those are also vital questions.

The Twelve Minor Prophets speak of possible futures for Israel, both proximate and distant. For the earlier prophets, the proximate future holds the threat of invasion, destruction, and deportation. For the later prophets, the horrors of exile are fading into the past, but their aftereffects linger. The future for one set of speakers and hearers becomes the past of another set. 

Each of the twelve books in the Book of the Twelve ends in some sort of oracle of hope, as we noted in an earlier post. Those expressions of hope tend to center on promises of sufficiency: enough food, enough safety, enough health, enough life expectancy. The physicality of those promises is important, for they center on the normal things of life. 

Along with the hopeful oracles ending each book are those inside each one. A good example appears in Micah 4:1-5. Verses 1-3 repeat Isaiah 2:1-4 almost verbatim, and one wonders which book quoted the other or if they both quoted a third party, now lost. There is no way to know, and perhaps it does not matter.

The book of Micah uses this oracle for different purposes, however. The text says,

In the future, the mount of YHWH’s temple will be lifted up as the highest mountain,
raised above the hills. 
And the peoples will flow to it. 
Many nations will come and say, 
“Come, let us go to YHWH’s mountain,
to the house of Jacob’s God.
Then he will teach us some of his ways,
And we will walk in his paths.
For, from Zion Torah will come,
YHWH’s word from Jerusalem.
And he will judge among many peoples,
decide among mighty nations far away.
And they will beat their swords into plowshares,
their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not raise sword against nation,
nor will they learn war again.

All of that appears in Isaiah; additionally, in both prophetic works, it offers a vision of a possible world in sharp contrast to the present. That future world enjoys the peace that flows from the removal of both the causes and the tools of war.

Then Micah takes a different turn. Whereas Isaiah 2 proceeds to a sharp contrast between that longed-for future and the present tragic reality, Micah pursues the future more relentlessly. Here is verse 4: “All will dwell under their own vine or fig tree, and no one will terrorize them. For the mouth of YHWH of Hosts has spoken.”

The line imagines world peace as it plays out in the lives of ordinary people. No more sharp divisions between rich and poor. No more scrambling to survive. No more ceaseless toil benefiting either oneself or (mostly) someone else. Rather, the people in this imagined world enjoy the simple pleasures of life without worry. God guarantees that situation, and the prophetic word announces it.

And then verse 5: “For all the peoples come, each in its own gods’ name, / but we will go in the name of YHWH our God, forever and ever.” This line seems to be a commentary on the preceding verses. It reflects on the promise that all nations will proceed to Jerusalem, not as conquerors or raiders or vandals, but as pious supplicants to Israel’s God. Such a hoped-for eventuality has not yet arrived and may not arrive for a long time. Even so, Micah’s Judean hearers (and the readers of the Twelve Minor Prophets of whatever era) can nevertheless come to Jerusalem in the name of the God who makes such daring promises. They may already live as though the promises had come true.

So, Micah. Another good example comes in Zechariah in the visions and other stories in chapters 1-7. These sections follow an orderly outline:

Vision 1: Horse Patrol (1:7-17)
Vision 2: Four Horns and Four Smiths (2:1-4 = English 1:18-21)
Vision 3: A Man with a Measuring Tape (2:5-9 = English 2:1-5)
Expansion 1: an invitation to the exiles (2:10-17 = English 2:6-13)
Expansion 2: Joshua and his Clothes (3:1-10)
Vision 4: A Lampstand and Two Trees (4:1-14)
Vision 5: The Flying Scroll (5:1-4)
Vision 6: The Ephah (5:5-11)
Vision 7: Four Chariots (6:1-8)
Conclusion: The Crowning (6:9-15)

The visions seem odd in many ways. They take familiar images from life and turn them into something meaningful. To take some examples, Visions 1 and 7 both concern angelic (not imperial) armies crisscrossing the land of Israel. Meanwhile, some of the visions imagine the rebuilding of Jerusalem and other cities (Vision 3), or the reconstruction of the temple and reinvigoration of worship in it (Expansion 2 and Vision 4). Still others imagine the removal of idols from the homeland and their repatriation to Babylon (Vision 6). 

All of these visions allow Zechariah to invite hearers to imagine a future in which foreign powers do not threaten, and internal problems are mostly solved. Most important, their estrangement from God has come to an end. 

These visions present readers with an early version of apocalyptic literature, a literary genre that later became more popular. Such literature—and these visions in particular—introduce an audience to an alternative world. They ask us to imagine something other than what we see around us.  

More generally, the Twelve Minor Prophets remind us that today’s hot trends sometimes become tomorrow’s embarrassing discards, while seemingly obscure or insignificant things can assume great importance in the future. 

We are back, then, to the question of Joel and Jonah’s Assyrian king: “Who knows?” In those books, that question points readers to the depth of God’s mercies, as well as to its inscrutability. The Twelve Prophets invite us into a new world awaiting us in God’s future. For that reason alone, they deserve our attention.