The Twelve: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi

By Bob MacDonald

How will we think about the twelve?

Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi are considered a single book in the Hebrew canon. They are the third section of the prophets, the second major division of the Hebrew Bible.

We can hear in the music, the words of Amos, and his contemporary, Hosea, whose child was named Not-My-People, yet he sings about the count of the children of Israel as the sand of the sea. And Micah sings, like his contemporary, Isaiah, of swords into plowshares.

Zephaniah chants about the unclean bird and the porcupine, stopping over in the capitals of Nineveh. And thinking of that great city, who can forget the lilt of the Jonah cantata once it has been heard?

The Twelve is volume 4 of the series, The Hebrew Bible and Its Music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Energion Publications
• Release date: May 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781631996313

Bob MacDonald

Bob MacDonald is a retired West Australian Police officer of thirty years experience. Bob's last day at school was his 14th birthday - commencing work, the very next day, in a timber mill in his home town of Pemberton, West Australia.He later self-educated and enlisted in the West Australian police force, retiring as a superintendent in the Internal Investigations Branch of the Professional Standards portfolio.Since retirement Bob has been working at remote aboriginal communities in Central Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. He also did a tour of duty on the island nation of Cyprus with the United Nations Blue Beret Peacekeepers.Bob, a keen sportsman continues with various sporting activities; which also includes fishing and camping trips. Writing articles for various magazines and now venturing into anecdotal short story compilations and fictional manuscripts ensures Bob leads a busy life.

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Preface

The Twelve is considered as a single book in the Jewish Bible. In English Bibles, they are called the minor prophets, but minor only in the sense that their texts are of shorter length.

This translation was developed to show in English the intricate patterns of repeated words in the Hebrew poetry. The translation is close and concordant, even retaining Hebrew word order wherever it is reasonable for the English reader.

The line breaks have been chosen to correspond with the major rest points as indicated in the Hebrew manuscripts by the accents. The line breaks are the major cadences in the music. The music has been derived from the deciphering key developed by Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The music for all 929 chapters of the Hebrew Bible is all available online through the pages at https://meafar.blogspot.com.

This edition includes minor changes to the translation from 2019-2021.

Table of Contents

Preface

List of Musical Examples

Introduction to the Bible and its Music

Hosea

Joel

Amos

Obadiah

Jonah

Micah

Nahum

Habakkuk

Zephaniah

Haggai

Zechariah

Malachi

Acknowledgements

List of Musical Examples

Score 1 Jonah 1:3 multiple reciting notes

Score 2 Hosea 3:2 a singular reading (לתך) and English homonym

Score 3 Yahweh in Hosea

Score 4 The sand of the sea

Score 5 Healing, binding, reviving, raising up

Score 6 Nymph, locust, pygmy, caterpillar

Score 7 Can two walk together

Score 8 The vision of Obadiah

Score 9 The only verse with no words that recur elsewhere in the poem

Score 10 Swords into plowshares

Score 11 Merchants more than the stars of the heavens

Score 12 Appeal for judgment

Score 13 Porcupine in her capitals

Score 14 Appeal for priorities

Score 15 Do not be like your ancestors

Score 16 Jacob and Esau

Score 17 I will send you Elijah

Introduction to the Bible and its Music

This reading of the Bible is in seven sections according to the divisions of traditional Judaism. First the three major divisions: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Torah is not further subdivided. The prophets are subdivided into three: the former prophets, and the latter prophets, which in turn are in 2 sections: the three major prophets, and the twelve. The Writings are similarly divided into three: The books of truth, Psalms, Proverbs, and Job, the five scrolls, The Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Qohelet, and Esther, and the remaining writings, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

What is unique in this reading?

Music

This English reading of the Hebrew Bible is intended to be the ground for an underlay to the musical score. The deciphering key of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura is a full musical clarification of the text, not just verse by verse but as a whole. The shape of each part of the text becomes transparent. To learn Hebrew, it is good to begin with hearing the music.

JONAH_001_003-1

Score 1 Jonah 1:3 multiple reciting notes

But Jonah arose and ran away to Tarshish away from the face of Yahweh.

And he went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish, and he gave her fare, and went down into her to go with them to Tarshish away from the face of Yahweh.

For every book, some examples of the music are included. The music is best sung in Hebrew, but the translation is close enough to allow a non-Hebrew reader to know what the words signify. The accents are always aptly placed. The scores show by the presence of a bar line a change in reciting note and by implication, the accentuation of the word, and the rest point(s) for the recitation. The reciting note is an indication of tone of voice. In this example, it shows descent and ascent C-B-A-B-C. Can Jonah really find rest in Joppa? The ornaments (accents over the text, for example, over the last syllables of Jonah and Joppa), may indicate significant similarities in the surrounding text. The opening note of a verse, if not the default tonic, indicates a connection with prior verses or even a prior book or set of books.

Concordance

The algorithms that were used to support this work strive for a one-to-one mapping of Hebrew stems to English lemmas.

Take nation as an example of an English lemma form. In English we recognize nation in a word form like nationalize or international. This word has the same lemma at its base. Similarly, Hebrew words in their many word forms have a stem. For example, the Hebrew stem גוי, goi, occurs in the Hebrew text 561 times in 23 distinct word forms. In this reading it is always rendered as nation, a word derived from the idea of native, i.e. where you were born.

In contrast to the one-to-one simplicity of nation, and the several more complex one-to-many mappings, there are several stems in Hebrew describing common human actions, like walk, come, go, bring. In both languages these glosses are multi-faceted and were allowed to have a many-to-many mapping between the two languages. There are relatively few of these stems, about 1%, perhaps 2 dozen in all, but they are common and pervasive in our speech and our writing. They account for about 4% of the words in the Hebrew canon. One of these common words occurs in Jonah 1:3 (and he went down) on the rest note recitation after the mid verse caesura.

As in English, there are Hebrew stems that indicate two or more differing senses, i.e. homonyms in Hebrew. The stem has more than one sense. For example, the English word bit in Hosea 3:2 has several senses: the bit as in bit and bridle, the act of biting, and the bit as an indeterminate small measure. Similarly in Hebrew, the same stem may have more than one sense. The first word in score 2 (stem כרה) rendered bargained, is also used for dig or gouge.

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Score 2 Hosea 3:2 a singular reading (לתך) and English homonym

So I bargained for me with fifteen silver pieces,

and a homer of barley, and a bit more of barley.

One consequence of this process is that if a stem is used only once in the Hebrew text, then there is an obligation to find a unique English gloss for it. There are over 200 such single-usage stems (hapax legomena) in the concordance for this reading. The twelve minor prophets contain exactly twelve unique readings.

Grammatical connectors like prepositions are notorious for not mapping consistently to single values. There are various reasons for this difference in languages. Sometimes, a preposition is implied by the usage of a verb. One language may require it and the other assume it. Each preposition has a dominant sense, but will not always take its dominant sense. Identifying the exceptions is subjective. For example, the prefix ב b, in Hebrew is usually in, but it may also be rendered as any one of a number of other glosses.

This brings up a significant difference between Hebrew and English ‘words’. A Hebrew word is more like an English phrase than an English word. We have seen that English has the prefixed preposition, inter, above. Hebrew has several frequently used prefixed prepositions. In general, Hebrew has far more prefixes and suffixes than English.

Pronouns may be separate words as in English but are more frequent as suffixes. In addition to these prefixes and suffixes, verb forms are many, and their affixes indicate their form including person, gender, number, mode, voice, and aspect. Both English and Modern Hebrew think in person, gender, number, mood, voice, and tense: past, present, or future. While there is both history and story time in Biblical Hebrew, the selection of past, present, or future is by no means cut and dried. Tense may be indeterminate, and there may be more emphasis in the verb form on the aspect of continuing or completed action. In English we would chose continuing present, imperfect and so on.

Translation of Names

Thirteen percent of the words in the Bible are classified as names. Some names are opaque to us, and some may be made easier to hear if we translate rather than transcribe them. With 1,690 distinct personal names used 16,279 times, a translation of every name would be as tedious to the reader as a consistent transcription. So the somewhat capricious variations may keep us on our toes. Some names, readers of other translations will recognize. Some they will not. Some will be surprising. There are only 79 names in this short volume, 312 occurrences.

Hosea

Chapter 1

¹ The word of Yahweh that happened to Hosea, child of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah,

and in the days of Jeroboam, child of Joash, king of Israel.

HOSEA_001_002-1

Score 3 Yahweh in Hosea

² The commencement of the word of Yahweh in Hosea.

And Yahweh said to Hosea, Go, take for yourself a wife of prostitution and succession of prostitution, for in prostitution the land is prostituting itself from following Yahweh.

³ So he went and he took Gomer, daughter of Diblaim,

and she became pregnant, and she gave birth for him, a son.

⁴ And Yahweh said to him, Call his name Jezreel,

for yet a little, and I will visit the blood of Jezreel over the house of Jehu, and I will eradicate the kingdoms of the house of Israel.

⁵ And it will happen in that day,

that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of