Talk:Nevi'im

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What method of transliteration are you using for Hebrew. You seem to be showing all the alephs but not noting all the shva na's. BTW, the name is Malakhi, with a patach under the mem. Finally, what exactly is the purpose of this piece, besides giving Hebrew names to biblical books? Danny

If you have a better transliteration, fix mine. The proper transliteration of shva is an upside-down e, but I can't type that. There is no perfect transliteration of Hebrew vowels into English without using diacritics. The purpose, so far, is to list what books are in this section of the Bible and in what order. Christian Bibles generally have them arranged differently, so Christians may not be familiar with the sections of the Hebrew Bible. If you have more to add, add it. -phma

From this entry i don't know what is that nevim anyway. I can guess of course, but encyclopedia entries should be made so guessing is not necessary, right? szopen

Have made a couple of changes to transliteration, and have added the Hebrew: נביאים. Can't find a solution to the schva na thing, though. -Avi

I just fixed this up to make it look better and clearer and easier to read. Hope people approve of the changes.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.179.188.81 (talk) 23:10, 25 November 2003

Removed text

Hi. The text you removed on cantillation is, as you said, duplicated in Haftarah. But when you removed it, you left the following paragraph completely out of context! Furthermore, there is no reason why the material belongs more in Haftarah than in Nevi'im - it is equally relevant to both from opposite angles.

I suggest either fixing the article up without the material or else putting it back. Dovi 23:01, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I fixed up this article. The info about the rare trop is not relevant to haftarah, but is relevant here, so I included it here, not there. —msh210 04:09, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

isn't Daniel in Ketuvi'im, not Nevi'im?

The list in the article includes Daniel at roman numeral IV. But he's also listed in the Ketuvi'im. I think the latter is correct. I didn't make the edit myself because I'm not sure about the fix, I just know that the wiki is contradicting itself about Daniel's place in the canon.

Msvitale 22:52, 25 February 2007 (UTC)mark

Daniel is definitely in Ketuvim as stated in the Talmud (Bava Batra 14b). -- -- -- 23:32, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Merge with Nebim

These two articles discuss the same subject. They should be merged. Neelix (talk) 22:57, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

External link

I would suggest adding the following External link:

• Nevi'im (Judaica Press) translation at Chabad.org

-- -- -- 21:05, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

N'bhi'im vs. Nəḇî’îm

I've changed the secondary spelling given in the article to "nəḇî’îm" for the same reasons given for the similar change in the Ketuvim article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ketuvim). Cevlakohn (talk) 05:49, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

Prophets disambiguation

I just discovered that adding a wikilink to Prophets redirects to a disamb page which had no option to the common (in Google Books, check please) use of "The Prophets" to mean the prophets in the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh/Old Testament:

• The Prophets Nevi'im, which is the name in Hebrew for the second of the three major sections in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible)
• Prophets (Old Testament), a description for the third of three major sections in the Christian ordering of the Old Testament.

This is a bit weird isn't it. The same 16(15) books cannot share the same article simply because in one ordering they, minus Daniel, come in the second bit, in another ordering the third? (note also Minor Prophets and Major Prophets.) In ictu oculi (talk) 14:34, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi, as someone who contributed to the early versions of this article years ago, I understand what you mean, especially when you look at this Nevi'im article as it currently stands, which unfortunately contains a long (and unnecessary) summary of the biblical books. As such, I think this is an unfortunate example of how some Wikipedia articles degenerate over time instead of improving.

In that sense, I think you are correct that there is no important difference between this article and Prophets (Old Testament).

However, that was not the original intent of the article, nor does it even reflect the last part of the article as it currently stands. The point of Nevi'im is to deal with the unique characteristics of the exactly eight books of Nevi'im specifically as they are reflected in the Jewish tradition. These unique aspects which only apply to Nevi'im specifically still do appear in the current article: Unique Targum, unique liturgical use in the Haftarah, unique history in the canonization process of the Hebrew textual tradition of the Bible, and unique halakhic status. To these may be added unique textual characteristics that come into play when editing the details of the masoretic text. For none of these purposes can the books be counted as 15-16, be re-ordered, be anything but the second tier, or include Daniel.

I move that the article be redone to return the focus to the unique history and characteristics of the books of Nevi'im. Thoughts anyone? Dovi (talk) 18:15, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Focus on the Nevi'im

This article contains a lot of off-topic material concerning the concept of prophethood in Judaism. It needs to be rewritten to focus on the Nevi'im, the second section of the Tanakh. Most of the off topic material should be at Prophet#Judaism, not here. Editor2020 (talk) 03:52, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

It seems to me that the revision "17:47, 1 June 2016‎ 81.137.204.237 (talk)‎ . . (20,711 bytes) (+2,430)" includes some helpful and informative additions about the nature of Nevi'im that could be added to this article. Unfortunately they were a bit untidy and have been reverted by Isambard Kingdom (were there good reasons to revert them?). If there are no objections I'm planning to add them back in, but would like to get some feedback first. Ulgarg (talk) 21:28, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Former "Prophets"?

Nevi'im is divided into the Former Prophets and Latter Prophets.

In colloquial English, prophecy is generally understood to have a significant aspect of foretelling. So the "Prophets" description of the "Latter" group (Isaiah, etc.) can easily be appreciated because of the foretelling or "future warning" aspect of the writing. But why are the "Former" group (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) labelled as "prophets"? There seems to be very little in the way of "prophecy" in them.

Could the article clarify the reasons behind this "Prophets" description, please?

And, as a related aspect, if these books are are labelled "prophets" why is the very similar Chronicles not labelled as "Prophets"?

As a reader, I'm trying to grasp the reasoning that led to these books having been classified and labelled in this manner.

Feline Hymnic (talk) 15:00, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

@Feline Hymnic: Perhaps someone will give you a better answer than this one, or what is found at Tanakh § Nevi'im. And perhaps this discussion will lead at some point to some edits. But here's a first shot:

• In Jewish tradition, the "age of prophecy" (or "age of prophets") runs up to about the time the Second Temple was created—around the time of Zechariah, Haggai and Malachi. There is a tradition that there were consistently prophets throughout the period. Not all have books named after them, or course, but all of these books contain some prophecy. Consider not only Joshua and Samuel, but also people like Deborah in the book of Judges, or Elijah and Elisha in the book(s) of Kings. (And this doesn't even consider people also said traditionally to have prophecy, like King David.) So in any event, these are books of the "age of prophets", all of which contain prophecy.

  Former/Latter is mainly a chronological division, although to be sure the books of the "Former Prophets" also have much historical content, while the books of the "Latter Prophets" have much less.

• Why Chronicles in one place and Samuel/Kings in the other? That's a good question. I do not know the answer for sure, but it's fair to say that there is more prophecy in Samuel/Kings than in Chronicles. Given that the Ketuvim (writings) are generally more about the content of the writing than about passing along prophecy per se, that's potentially the reason.
• Why put Daniel in Ketuvim, then? For starters, the earlier part of the book is more about the historical consequences of his prophecy than about the prophecy itself. (Example: "Mene, mene ...": the next day the ruler was overthrown.) Beyond that, while the eschatological bits of Daniel are surely prophecy, the prophecy happened outside land of Israel, so was somewhat downgraded by the subsequent redactors. (Some of Ezekiel's prophecy was also exilic prophecy, but he had a career as a prophet in the land of Israel before that.)

All that said: don't necessarily assume that the Men of the Great Assembly, who are the ones who (tradition says) finalized the canon, used the same logic of consistency that we would use now. StevenJ81 (talk) 16:39, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

@StevenJ81: Many thanks for your reply. As you probably spotted I struggling even to frame the question! Your reply is helping. Let me focus on just the "Former Prophets"; references outside that are secondary in this context, so let's also leave aside the complicating wrinkles of Chronicles, Daniel, etc.

In modern-day terminology, the natural inclination is to think of the genre of the Joshua-Kings as some sort of journalism, news-reporting, documentary or similar. The words "prophet" and "prophecy" seem a most strange way to describe this documentary activity. Sure, there is the tradition that there were consistently prophets in the land throughout the period. But the genre of the books themselves is, in essence, of journalism or reporting, not of what a modern reader would call "prophecy". Contrast the genre of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve, etc., for which the claimed "prophets" description does fit. So:

• for the "Latter Prophets", we modern readers can readily, even subconsciously, accept that "Prophets" label; the label is concordant with the genre.
• for the "Former Prophets", we modern readers, by contrast, scratch our heads and say "huh?" when we see that "Prophets" label; the label is discordant with the genre.

My basic query then becomes something like: While I readily accept the the label 'prophets' attached for the 'Latter Prophets', it seems totally weird to have that word (as the modern reader understands it) attached to the 'Former Prophets'. I'm hoping to read something like, "The Former Prophets are described as 'prophets' because...".

Feline Hymnic (talk) 12:33, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

@Feline Hymnic: I'm sorry I let this slip for a bit.

If I wasn't entirely clear above, I do want to mention, briefly, that even if the books in this section are more [history/​documentary] than prophetic, the books do directly report and state prophecy. See, inter alia, Judges 5 (Deborah's song) or 2Sam 22 (David's song, substantially repeated in Psalms 18).

Now, that said:

It seems as if the terminology "historical books" and "prophetic books" is used more in the articles on the Christian Bible at this point. And in many ways, those are entirely appropriate descriptions—maybe more accurate than "Earlier Prophets" and "Later Prophets". But please understand that there is a lot of history associated with the terms "Former Prophets" and "Latter Prophets"; these are far from recent coinages, and they have plenty of history, both in Judaism and in Christianity, and both in Hebrew and English (and other languages?). So part of what is going on here is that there is a term with a lot of history—one whose specific meaning many people are quite familiar with—and people use the terms today. So even if the descriptor is not your favorite, it's one that works for people, because it's already pretty well known.

Also, please keep in mind that whatever you might prefer to call things, the section of Tanakh called Nevi'im absolutely does contain the books of Joshua, Judges, (1/2) Samuel, (1/2) Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve. There is no ambiguity within Judaism; these are called the books of Prophets (Nevi'im). In liturgical use (Haftarah), each is represented at least once at some point during the year. (I don't think that each of "the Twelve" is, but they constitute a single book in our canon.) These books are collectively "The Prophets". There is no ambiguity about that at all. We wouldn't (even can't) change that.

So once you say that, the question becomes "If these need to be divided for some purpose, how do we do it?" And the main breaking point chosen was between Kings and Isaiah. It may very well be that the division was drawn that way because the nature of the one set of books is [history/​documentary] and the other straight prophecy. (That seems likely to me; most of the "Latter Prophets" were actually prophesying during the later years of the Book(s) of Kings, so the chronology actually overlaps.) But when a title was given to the sets as a whole, they were titled Nevi'im Rishonim (Early [lit. First] Prophets) and Nevi'im Acharonim (Later [lit. Last] Prophets). And overall, the one set of books reports from an earlier point in history, while the other reports from a later point in history, even if the Book(s) of Kings tend(s) to overlap in chronology. So it's a reasonable set of terms to use. Whether it's "the best"? Who knows? Who cares? It's the established terminology, though. And within the Jewish world, we have no need to exclude "Prophets" from the title of the earlier one, because it's still part of the larger section of the canon that we call "Prophets".

Maybe it will be easier for you to consider that the term "Nevi'im" could refer to [actual] "Prophets" or "Books within the section called 'Prophets'" equally easily. So perhaps you might more comfortably translate this as "Earlier books within the section called 'Prophets'" and "Later books within the section called 'Prophets'". But in practice, that's not the translation used in English.

Hope that was useful. StevenJ81 (talk) 18:08, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

References

Many thanks. Much appreciated! Feline Hymnic (talk) 12:39, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Etymology missing

Why does this article not have any Etymology? As it is the most-controversial section title of the Hebrew Bible, it should have the most-extensive etymology, showing where this word came from. Misty MH (talk) 10:17, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Sons of the Prophets

Why does "sons of the prophets" redirect here? They were a group of people exclusively referenced in the Elisha story of 2 Kings, and have nothing to do with this page's topic, as far as I know. 141.156.182.177 (talk) 14:14, 19 March 2023 (UTC)