Genres and Forms in the Minor Prophets

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores the category of genre, the verbal conventions that signal what kind of messages are being sent and received. The prophetic books of the Bible are a distinctive genre. They are characterized by a dipolar rhetorical strategy, reinterpreting revelatory messages addressed by prophets to their audiences in the past as the basis for the writers’ own revelatory messages addressed to their present and future readers. In prophetic books, genres function on two levels simultaneously. The oracular raw material on which the text is based takes various conventional forms of prophetic speech, and the literary composition into which it has been refashioned takes one of several conventional forms of prophetic books. In the Minor Prophets three types of prophetic books are represented—typological books, narrative books, and massa books—each of which utilizes various basic forms of prophetic speech. Jonah is sui generis.