Scripture & RecordScripture & Record

Bible prophecy checked against the historical record

Book overviews

  • Zephaniah

    Zephaniah: a superscription that dates itself to Josiah, an announcement against Nineveh made while Nineveh still stood, and what the external record says about the collapse that followed.

  • Habakkuk

    Habakkuk: a complaint rather than an oracle, dated by its reference to the rising Chaldeans, and preserved in the Qumran pesher — the clearest surviving example of an ancient community reading a prophetic text as being about itself.

  • Obadiah

    Obadiah, the shortest book in the Hebrew Bible: the charge against Edom, how the reference to the fall of Jerusalem anchors its date, its overlap with Jeremiah 49, and what is known of Edom’s end.

  • Joel

    Joel and the problem of a book with no date-markers: what it says, why proposals for its composition span six centuries, and what it means for method when a text gives an examiner nothing to work with.

  • Song of Songs

    The Song of Songs as love poetry rather than allegory: how it is built, why its Hebrew points to a late date, what Egyptian love poetry shows about the genre, and why the allegorical reading arrived when it did.

  • 2 Chronicles

    2 Chronicles from Solomon to Cyrus: what the Chronicler adds to Kings, what he removes, where an Assyrian and a Babylonian record touch the account, and why the ending is the strongest evidence for its date.

  • 1 Chronicles

    1 Chronicles as a deliberate rewriting of Samuel with a source we can still read: what it adds, what it removes, how its post-exilic date is argued, and why comparing it with Samuel is a rare controlled experiment.

  • Leviticus

    Leviticus read as a working priestly manual rather than a story: how it is put together, why its dating is argued from vocabulary rather than events, and what the surrounding ancient ritual literature does and does not tell us about…

  • Micah

    Isaiah’s contemporary from a small town — and the clearest case of one prophet being quoted by name in another book, with the effect of his words described.

  • Amos

    A herdsman from Judah with the sharpest social criticism in the Hebrew Bible, and an earthquake in the superscription that may have left a layer in the ground.