Minor Prophets
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Bible Trivia: Assyria and the Bible
Twelve questions on the empire that ended the northern kingdom and besieged the southern one — with every answer worked through against the Assyrian records themselves.
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Bible Trivia: The Temple
Twelve questions on the temple: who built it, who rebuilt it, what the prophets said about it, and why the first temple has left no direct archaeological record at all.
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Bible Trivia: Jerusalem
Twelve questions on Jerusalem: who took it and when, why 597 BCE is a date and 587 is a dispute, and what the ground can and cannot tell us about the temple.
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Malachi
Malachi: a disputation with a post-exilic community, dated by the Persian office it names and the temple it assumes, and what the Elephantine papyri show about the same decades.
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Zechariah
Zechariah as two books in one: dated visions from 520–518 BCE, an undated second half whose date is argued across four centuries, and why the seam matters for anything built on the later chapters.
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Haggai
Haggai: two chapters carrying five date-stamped oracles from 520 BCE, a temple rebuilding programme, and one of the few biblical chronologies that can be checked against an external royal record.
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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.
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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.
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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.