The Major Prophets are called major because they are long, and the twelve shorter books after them are the Minor Prophets. English Bibles follow the Greek and Latin order, which sets Lamentations directly after Jeremiah. The Hebrew Bible arranges the books another way. Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel stand among the Latter Prophets, and Lamentations and Daniel stand in its third division, the Writings.
These prophets spoke across two centuries of crisis. Isaiah preached in Jerusalem while Assyria carried the northern kingdom into exile and laid siege to Judah. A century later Babylon took Assyria's place, and Jeremiah watched it empty the land in three deportations over twenty years. The exile ended when Persia took Babylon and Cyrus let the captives go home.
A prophet in these books is a messenger who speaks the words the LORD gives him. Most of what they say is addressed to their own people. They charge Judah with breaking the covenant made at Sinai, with worshiping idols and with oppressing the poor, and they warn that the curses of that covenant will fall. They also speak to the nations around Judah, and each of the three longest books carries a run of oracles against those nations.
The books are written in more than one form. Isaiah and Jeremiah set poetry and prose side by side, and Jeremiah gathers his sermons with accounts of his own sufferings. Lamentations is five poems, and four of them are acrostics. Ezekiel acts out his messages in signs and dates them by the years of the exile. Daniel tells six stories of the court and then records four visions, and part of the book is written in Aramaic.
The hope in these books is tied to events the prophets lived through. Jeremiah buys a field in his home town of Anathoth while the Babylonian army surrounds Jerusalem, and he tells the exiles that their captivity will last seventy years. Daniel reads that word in Babylon and prays for his people as the seventy years run out. Ezekiel sees the glory of God leave the temple before the city falls and later sees it return to a new temple.
The New Testament draws on these books again and again. Matthew reads the sign of Immanuel in Isaiah 7 as fulfilled in the birth of Jesus, and Jesus reads Isaiah 61 in the synagogue at Nazareth and says it is fulfilled that day. At the Last Supper Jesus speaks of the new covenant Jeremiah promised. He calls himself the Son of Man, the title of Daniel 7, and Revelation takes many of its images from Ezekiel and Daniel.
