Unit 11 · The Latter Prophets and the Writings

The Hebrew word for prophet is navi. The word is usually explained as "one who is called" or "one who speaks for another." In the Tanakh a prophet is not mainly a person who predicts the future. A prophet is a messenger. The books often begin a speech with the words "Thus saith the LORD," which is the way a royal messenger in the ancient world opened a message from a king.

Jewish tradition divides the prophetic books into two groups. The Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) tell history. The Latter Prophets collect the speeches of named prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve. Together they are the second part of Nevi'im, the Prophets, and the middle of the Tanakh’s three parts.

The prophets spoke to their own time. Amos spoke to the northern kingdom of Israel around 750 BCE. Isaiah spoke in Jerusalem when Assyria was the great power. Jeremiah watched Babylon destroy the city in 586 BCE. Ezekiel spoke to the exiles in Babylonia. Knowing the moment helps a reader understand the message.

Historians note that other peoples in the ancient Near East also had prophets. Letters found at Mari, on the Euphrates River, record messages from gods delivered by such people around the eighteenth century BCE. The Tanakh’s prophets are unusual because their speeches were collected into books and read by later generations as scripture.

Many prophetic books open with a call narrative, a scene in which the prophet is chosen. Isaiah 6 describes a vision in the Temple, with winged creatures crying "Holy, holy, holy." Jeremiah 1 says God knew him before he was born and touched his mouth. Ezekiel 1 describes a storm and a chariot of fire. In each case the prophet hesitates or is afraid, and is told to go anyway.

The main body of a prophetic book is made of oracles. An oracle is a message, usually in poetry, addressed to a nation, a king or a city. Some oracles warn: they name a wrong, such as cheating the poor, and announce a result. Others comfort: they promise a return, a rebuilt city or peace. Readers learn to notice the shift from warning to comfort inside a single book.

The most surprising building block is the sign-act. Isaiah 20 says the prophet walked barefoot and stripped for three years as a sign about Egypt. Jeremiah wore the yoke. Ezekiel 4 says he lay on his side for many days and cooked over a fire as a picture of the coming siege. Hosea’s marriage, which you will read about later, is a sign-act that lasted years.

Why act a message instead of saying it? Scholars point out that a sign-act cannot be ignored. A crowd may tune out a speech, but not a man with a yoke on his neck. Jewish commentators such as Rashi and Radak read these acts as visions or as public teaching, and they discuss which ones happened in public and which in the prophet’s mind.

In a synagogue on Shabbat morning, the Torah scroll is read first. Then a second reading follows, taken from the Prophets. This reading is called the haftarah, a word that means something like "completion" or "taking leave." Each weekly Torah portion, or parashah, has its own haftarah, usually chosen because it shares a theme or a phrase with the Torah reading.

No one knows exactly when the custom began. The rabbis of the Talmud already treat it as old (tractate Megillah discusses its rules). One traditional explanation says it started at a time when reading the Torah in public was banned, so communities read the Prophets instead. Historians treat that story as a possibility, not a settled fact. Either way, the practice is more than two thousand years old.

Some haftarot are tied to the calendar rather than to the parashah. The three Shabbatot before Tisha B’Av, the day that mourns the Temple’s destruction, have haftarot of warning from Jeremiah and Isaiah. The seven Shabbatot after it have haftarot of comfort, all from Isaiah 40 to 66, beginning with Isaiah 40, "Comfort ye." On Yom Kippur afternoon the whole book of Jonah is read.

This means the prophets are not only studied in a classroom. For Jewish communities, from ancient synagogues to those in Chicago today, they are heard aloud, chanted to a special melody, week after week. A teenager becoming a bar or bat mitzvah often chants the haftarah as part of the ceremony.

The book of Isaiah is the first and longest of the Latter Prophets, with 66 chapters. Its opening verse places Isaiah son of Amoz in Jerusalem during the reigns of four kings of Judah, roughly 740 to 700 BCE. This was the age of Assyria, the empire that took the northern kingdom’s capital, Samaria, in 722 BCE and later marched on Judah.

Isaiah’s message to the kings was consistent. When King Ahaz wanted to call on Assyria for help against two neighbors, Isaiah 7 says the prophet told him to stay calm and trust God, and gave him a sign: a young woman would bear a son named Immanuel, "God is with us." Christian readers later read this verse as a prediction of Jesus, and the King James Version translates the word as "virgin." JPS 1917 and most Jewish readers translate "young woman" and read the sign as a child born in Ahaz’s own time. Both readings are old.

Later, when the Assyrian king Sennacherib surrounded Jerusalem around 701 BCE, Isaiah 36–37 says the prophet told King Hezekiah the city would not fall. Sennacherib’s own record, a clay prism now in museums, boasts that he shut Hezekiah up "like a bird in a cage" but does not claim to have taken the city. Historians use both texts together.

Isaiah’s oracles also attack injustice at home: leaders who take bribes, the rich who add house to house, worship without fairness. Isaiah 1 says God is tired of sacrifices from people who ignore the orphan and the widow. This pairing of trust in God with care for the weak runs through the whole book.

Near the start of the book, Isaiah 2:1–4 describes a day when all nations stream to the mountain of the LORD’s house to learn Torah, and God settles their disputes. Then comes the famous line: swords hammered into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and nations that no longer learn war. A plowshare is the blade of a plow; a pruning hook trims vines. The image turns weapons into farm tools.

Almost the same words appear in Micah 4:1–3, a book from the same period. Scholars debate which prophet said it first, or whether both drew on a shared saying. The prophet Joel turns the image around: "Beat your plowshares into swords" (Joel 4:10 in the Hebrew numbering; 3:10 in the KJV), a call to arms. The same picture can carry opposite messages.

Jewish tradition reads Isaiah 2 as a picture of the messianic age, a future time of peace that has not yet come. The words are carved on a wall across from the United Nations headquarters in New York, and a bronze statue given by the Soviet Union in 1959, called "Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares," stands in the UN garden. The verse has become a shared symbol far beyond the synagogue.

Readers notice what the verse does not say. It does not say war ends because people become nice. It says nations come to be taught and judged, and then put down their weapons. For Isaiah, peace follows justice. This is the same link the prophet makes in chapter 1 about worship and fairness.

Isaiah 40 begins with a new tone: "Comfort ye, comfort ye My people." The chapters that follow speak to people in exile in Babylon, name the Persian king Cyrus (Isaiah 45:1), and promise a road home through the desert. Cyrus ruled about 150 years after Isaiah of Jerusalem. Many scholars therefore think chapters 40–66 were written later, during and after the exile, by one or more anonymous prophets they call "Second Isaiah." Jewish tradition read the whole book under Isaiah’s name, though the medieval commentator Ibn Ezra hinted at the question.

These chapters contain four poems about a figure called the servant of the LORD. The longest is Isaiah 52:13–53:12, which describes a servant who suffers, is despised and bears the pain of others. Who is the servant? The text itself says "Israel, My servant" in Isaiah 41:8 and 49:3. Rashi, Ibn Ezra and most Jewish readers understand the suffering servant as the people of Israel among the nations.

Christian readers, from the New Testament onward, have read Isaiah 53 as a description of Jesus. The passage is read at Christian services, and it has been a center of Jewish–Christian debate for centuries. Some Jewish sources, including a passage in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b), connect it to the messiah, and some scholars think the poem first described the prophet himself. This course describes the readings side by side; it does not choose among them.

For Jewish communities the strongest life of these chapters is in the calendar. Isaiah 40 is chanted on the Shabbat after Tisha B’Av, called Shabbat Nachamu, "Shabbat of Comfort," from its first word. Six more Shabbatot of comfort follow, all from these chapters, so that mourning turns toward hope over seven weeks.

The book of Jeremiah opens in the thirteenth year of King Josiah, about 626 BCE, and follows the prophet through the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BCE. It is the longest book in the Tanakh by word count. Much of it is oracles in poetry, but it also has long stories about Jeremiah’s life, which tradition credits to his scribe Baruch (Jeremiah 36).

Jeremiah’s most dangerous speech is the temple sermon in chapter 7, retold with its aftermath in chapter 26. Standing at the gate of the Temple, he told the crowd not to trust the chant "the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD." He said that a people who stole, murdered and oppressed the stranger could not hide in God’s house, and he reminded them of Shiloh, an earlier shrine that had been destroyed. Chapter 26 says the priests and prophets demanded his death, and that elders saved him by citing the prophet Micah.

The yoke of chapters 27–28, which opened this chapter, belongs to the same message: do not rebel against Babylon. Jeremiah even wrote a letter to the exiles already in Babylon telling them to build houses, plant gardens and seek the peace of the city where they lived (Jeremiah 29). That letter has been quoted by Jewish communities living outside the land ever since.

The book also shows the prophet’s pain. In passages readers call his "confessions," Jeremiah complains that he is mocked, that he wanted to stop speaking but the word burned inside him (Jeremiah 20). He was put in stocks, thrown into a muddy cistern and finally taken to Egypt against his will. Jewish tradition remembers him as the weeping prophet.

Not all of Jeremiah is warning. In chapters 30–33, sometimes called the Book of Consolation, the prophet promises a return. One passage speaks of a new covenant that God will make with Israel and Judah: not written on stone but placed inside them, written on their hearts, so that everyone will know God. The verses are Jeremiah 31:31–34 in most English Bibles; the Hebrew numbering differs by one verse.

Jewish readers understand this covenant as a renewed bond with the same Torah, kept from within rather than broken. Christian readers took the phrase "new covenant" as the name of their own scriptures, the New Testament, and read the passage as fulfilled in Jesus. Here again one text carries two long traditions of reading. In the same chapter, Jeremiah buys a field in his hometown of Anathoth while Babylon besieges the city (Jeremiah 32), a sign-act meaning that houses and fields will be bought again.

Jerusalem fell in 586 BCE. The short book of Lamentations mourns it in five poems. In the Tanakh it stands among the Writings, but Jewish tradition and the Greek Bible connect it to Jeremiah, who watched the siege. Four of its five chapters are acrostics: each verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, as if grief had to be given an order to be bearable.

Lamentations is chanted by candlelight on the night of Tisha B’Av, with the congregation seated on the floor. Its Hebrew name, Eikhah, is its first word, "How." The book ends by asking God to turn the people back, and it is customary to repeat the second-to-last verse after the last so that the reading does not end in despair.

Ezekiel was a priest who was carried to Babylonia in 597 BCE, ten years before the Temple burned. The book says his visions began by the river Chebar, an irrigation canal near the city of Nippur, in 593 BCE. His book is carefully dated, more than any other prophetic book, and it moves from warnings before 586 to comfort after.

The book opens with the most detailed vision in the Tanakh. Ezekiel 1 describes a storm cloud, four living creatures each with four faces, wheels within wheels that move in every direction, and above them a throne with a human-like figure surrounded by fire. Jewish readers call this the merkavah, the chariot. The rabbis of the Mishnah ruled that this chapter should not be taught to a student alone (Chagigah 2:1), and it became a source of Jewish mystical thought for centuries.

Ezekiel’s most famous vision is in chapter 37. The prophet is set down in a valley full of dry bones and asked whether they can live. He is told to prophesy to them. The bones rattle together, grow flesh and skin, and then breath enters them and they stand up, a vast army. The text explains the meaning: the bones are the whole house of Israel, who say their hope is lost, and God promises to bring them back to their land.

Readers have taken the vision in more than one way. In its own setting it is a promise of national return from exile. Some later Jewish readers, and a passage in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 92b), connect it to the resurrection of the dead. In the twentieth century the image was used for the survival of the Jewish people after the Holocaust, and the African American spiritual "Dem Bones" turned it into a song.

Jewish tradition counts twelve short books as one, Trei Asar, "the Twelve," written on a single scroll. In English they are often called the Minor Prophets, but "minor" means short, not less important. The Twelve span about three hundred years, from Amos in the 700s BCE to Malachi after the exile, and the Tanakh counts the whole scroll as one of its 24 books.

Amos was a herdsman and fig farmer from Tekoa in Judah who, the book says, went north to speak at Bethel around 750 BCE, when the northern kingdom of Israel was rich and confident. His oracles attack those who sell the poor for a pair of sandals, who cheat with false weights, who lie on ivory beds while the nation rots. Amos 5 says God rejects feasts and songs and wants justice to flow like water. A priest at Bethel told him to go home (Amos 7).

Hosea spoke in the north a little later, as Assyria closed in. His book opens with a sign-act that lasted years: the prophet is told to marry a woman named Gomer who will be unfaithful, and to name their children with words of judgment. The marriage is a picture of God and Israel. Israel has chased other gods the way a spouse chases other lovers, yet God, the book says, cannot give Israel up (Hosea 11).

The end of Hosea turns to teshuvah, return or repentance: "Return, O Israel, unto the LORD thy God" (Hosea 14:2 in the Hebrew numbering). That passage is the haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so Hosea’s closing words are heard each year during the days of repentance.

Jonah is unlike the other books of the Twelve: it is a story, not a collection of oracles. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, Israel’s enemy, and warn it. Jonah sails the opposite way. A storm rises, sailors throw him overboard, and a great fish swallows him for three days. Spat out on land, he finally goes to Nineveh, says one short sentence, and the whole city, from king to cattle, repents in sackcloth.

Then comes the surprise. Jonah is angry that God forgave Nineveh. He sits outside the city, and God makes a plant grow to shade him, then sends a worm to kill it. Jonah grieves for the plant. The book ends with God’s question: if Jonah cares about a plant he did not grow, should God not care about a city of more than 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? The book ends without Jonah’s answer.

Jewish tradition reads the whole book on Yom Kippur afternoon, because it shows that repentance is possible for anyone, even Israel’s enemies, and that God prefers mercy to punishment. Scholars note the book’s humor and its dates: it is set in the 700s BCE but many think it was written after the exile. Readers of every kind agree that the last question is the point.

Micah, a prophet from a small town in Judah in the same years as Isaiah, is remembered above all for one verse. Micah 6 stages a court case: God asks what wrong he has done the people, and the people ask what they should bring, thousands of rams, rivers of oil, even a firstborn child. The answer in 6:8 is that God has already told them what is good: to do justice, love kindness (chesed) and walk humbly with God.

The last books of the Twelve come from after the return from Babylon. Haggai and Zechariah urged the returned community to rebuild the Temple, which was finished around 516 BCE. Malachi, whose name means "my messenger" and may be a title rather than a name, spoke perhaps a generation or two later, around 450 BCE, when the new Temple was standing but people had grown careless.

Malachi’s book is built as a set of arguments. God makes a claim; the people ask, "Wherein?"; the prophet answers. He accuses priests of offering blind and lame animals, and the people of cheating on tithes and breaking faith with the wives of their youth. Malachi 3:10 invites them to bring the full tithe and see whether God will not open the windows of heaven. The tone is a courtroom, not a storm.

The book, and with it the Prophets, ends with two promises: remember the Torah of Moses, and expect the prophet Elijah, who will come before the great day of the LORD and turn the hearts of parents to children and children to parents (Malachi 3:22–24 in the Hebrew numbering; 4:4–6 in the KJV). Jewish tradition therefore sets a cup for Elijah at the Passover seder and sings of him as Shabbat ends.

The rabbis of the Talmud taught that with Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi the holy spirit of prophecy departed from Israel (Yoma 9b). After them, tradition says, guidance came through study of the written text and the sages. Historians describe the same shift in their own terms: the prophetic books closed, and the age of interpretation began. The Tanakh’s next part, the Writings, shows what that looked like.

The book of Psalms, in Hebrew Tehillim, "praises," opens the Writings in most Jewish Bibles. It holds 150 poems, divided into five books, each ending with a short blessing (after Psalms 41, 72, 89, 106 and 150). The rabbis of the midrash compared the five books of Psalms to the five books of the Torah: Moses gave Israel five books, they said, and David gave five books of songs.

Many psalms carry a heading. About half name David; others name Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon and Moses. Jewish tradition credits David with the collection, and the Talmud (Bava Batra 14b–15a) says he included songs by ten elders. Scholars think the psalms were written over many centuries, some before the exile and some after, and gathered for use in the Temple and later the synagogue.

Hebrew poetry does not rhyme. Its main tool is parallelism: a line is said in two halves, and the second half echoes, sharpens or contrasts with the first. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork" (Psalm 19:2 in the Hebrew numbering). The second half restates the first with new words. An English bishop, Robert Lowth, gave this pattern its name in 1753, but Jewish commentators had long noticed it.

Once you see parallelism you can read any psalm more closely. Ask what the second half adds. Sometimes it is the same idea in a new image; sometimes it is the opposite, as in Psalm 1, where the righteous are a planted tree and the wicked are blown chaff. The pattern also made the psalms easy to sing and to remember, which is why so many are still sung today.

Not every psalm does the same job. Scholars, following the German scholar Hermann Gunkel in the early 1900s, sort them by type. A hymn praises God for creation or history, like Psalm 8, which wonders at the moon and stars and asks what a human being is. A thanksgiving psalm gives thanks for a rescue that has happened. A royal psalm, such as Psalm 2 or 72, concerns the king.

The largest group is the lament, a cry for help in trouble. Laments have a shape: an address to God, a complaint, a plea, and often a turn to trust at the end. Psalm 13 begins "How long?" four times and ends by promising to sing. Psalm 22 begins "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" (verse 2 in the Hebrew numbering) and ends in praise. Jewish readers have used these psalms for personal grief and for national disaster.

Psalm 22 is also a place where Jewish and Christian reading part ways. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark report that Jesus spoke its first line on the cross, and Christians have read the psalm as a picture of his suffering. Jewish tradition connects the psalm with Esther and reads it on Purim in some communities, and Rashi reads it as the voice of Israel in exile. Both readings start from the same Hebrew words.

Two other kinds are worth knowing. Wisdom psalms, like Psalm 1 and 119, teach about Torah and the good life. Songs of ascents (Psalms 120–134) are short poems that tradition links to pilgrims going up to Jerusalem. Knowing the type helps a reader hear the voice: is this a crowd praising, one person begging, or a teacher instructing?

The Jewish prayer book is called the siddur, from a word meaning "order." Open one and you find the book of Psalms scattered through it. Morning prayers include a group of psalms called Pesukei Dezimra, "verses of song," ending with Psalms 145–150. Psalm 145, called Ashrei from its opening word, is said three times a day in traditional practice.

Some psalms mark the week and the festivals. Psalm 92 is titled "a song for the Sabbath day," and it is sung on Friday night. Kabbalat Shabbat, the service that welcomes Shabbat, opens with Psalms 95–99 and 29, six psalms for six workdays, a custom shaped by the mystics of Safed in the 1500s. On festivals such as Passover and Sukkot, the congregation sings Hallel, Psalms 113–118, and the Passover seder ends with it.

Psalms are also the words for grief and for hope. Psalm 23, "The LORD is my shepherd," is read at funerals and in houses of mourning. Psalm 121, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains," is said for travelers and the sick. Traditional Jews may recite the whole book in a week or a month. At the Western Wall in Jerusalem and in hospital rooms in Chicago, the same words are said.

This is why the Psalms matter beyond literature. They are a book that Jewish communities did not just read but performed, aloud, over centuries, so that the words shaped how people spoke to God. Christian churches took the same book into their worship, which makes the Psalms the most shared text in Jewish and Christian prayer.

Wisdom literature is the name for biblical books that teach how to live rather than telling Israel’s story or law. Three books in the Writings belong to it: Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. Reading them together is like listening to three teachers who disagree. Proverbs speaks first, and its voice is confident.

The book of Proverbs, Mishlei in Hebrew, opens under the name of Solomon, whom the book of Kings calls the wisest of men. It has 31 chapters. The first nine are longer speeches from a father to a son, in which Wisdom is pictured as a woman calling in the streets and Folly as her rival. The rest is mostly two-line sayings, each one a small piece of parallelism: a lazy person versus a diligent one, a soft answer versus a harsh word.

The book’s view is that the world usually makes sense. Work hard and you will eat; lie and you will be caught; honor your parents and you will do well. "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge," says the opening (Proverbs 1:7): wisdom starts with respect for God. Similar collections existed in Egypt, and scholars note that Proverbs 22:17–24:22 closely resembles an Egyptian text called the Instruction of Amenemope.

Proverbs ends with a poem about a "woman of valor" (Proverbs 31:10–31), an acrostic praising a capable wife who runs a household and trades in the market. In many Jewish homes it is sung at the Friday night table. The book is loved because it is practical. But its confidence raises a question the next two books will press: what about when the good suffer?

The book of Job begins with a prose story. Job is a rich and upright man in the land of Uz. In the heavenly court, a figure called the satan, the accuser (not a proper name in this book), says Job is good only because he is blessed. Job loses his flocks, his servants and his ten children in one day, and then his health. He says, "the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD" (Job 1:21).

Then the book changes into poetry, and Job changes too. Three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, come to comfort him. They sit in silence seven days, and then they argue: you must have sinned, because God is just. This is the voice of Proverbs. Job refuses. He insists he is innocent and demands that God explain. A younger man, Elihu, adds his own speeches. The debate fills more than thirty chapters.

At last God answers Job out of a whirlwind (Job 38–41). But God does not explain the suffering. God asks questions: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Can you bind the Pleiades? Who feeds the raven? Job says he will be silent. In a short prose ending, God says the friends did not speak rightly, as Job did, and Job’s fortunes are restored.

Readers have argued about this book for ages. The Talmud (Bava Batra 15a) records rabbis who thought Job never existed and the book was a parable, and others who placed him in various eras. The medieval philosopher Maimonides read it as a lesson about the limits of human knowledge. Modern readers, Jewish and not, see it as the Bible’s most honest book about pain. Whatever the reading, its poetry is among the finest in the Tanakh.

The third wisdom voice belongs to Koheleth, a name meaning something like "the one who gathers" or "the preacher." The book calls him a son of David and king in Jerusalem, and Jewish tradition identifies him with Solomon in old age. Its Greek and English name is Ecclesiastes. It has twelve chapters and one of the most famous openings in the Bible: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

The Hebrew word is hevel, which means breath or vapor. Newer Jewish translations often render it "futility" or "mere breath." Koheleth says he tried wisdom, pleasure, building and wealth, and found that all of it passes: the wise die like the fool, and the sun rises and sets on the same tired world. He looks at the injustice around him and refuses to pretend it makes sense. Against Proverbs, he says the race is not always to the swift.

But the book is not only gloom. Koheleth repeatedly advises eating bread with joy, wearing clean clothes, enjoying life with the one you love and doing your work well, because these are the portion God gives. Chapter 3 lists a time for every purpose: a time to be born and a time to die, to weep and to laugh. The book ends by telling the reader to fear God and keep the commandments.

The rabbis debated whether Ecclesiastes belonged in the Bible at all; the Mishnah (Yadayim 3:5) records the argument, and the book stayed. Jewish custom reads it on the Shabbat of Sukkot, the harvest festival when families eat in a temporary hut, a fitting season for a book about what passes and what lasts.

The Megillot, the five scrolls, are grouped together in the Writings because each is read on a holiday. The order in most printed Bibles follows the calendar from spring: Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther. Each is short enough to chant in one sitting.

Song of Songs, Shir ha-Shirim, is a set of love poems between a young woman and a young man, full of gardens, spices, deer and the coming of spring. God is not named in it. The rabbis debated its place in the Bible, and Rabbi Akiva is recorded in the Mishnah (Yadayim 3:5) as saying that all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies. He and later tradition read it as an allegory of the love between God and Israel. Scholars also read it as what it appears to be, ancient love poetry, and both readings are taught.

Ruth is a four-chapter story set in the time of the judges. A famine sends Naomi’s family from Bethlehem to Moab. Her husband and sons die, and she returns home with one daughter-in-law, Ruth, a Moabite, who refuses to leave her. Ruth gleans barley in the field of Boaz, a relative; Naomi arranges a meeting; Boaz marries Ruth. The last verses list their descendants down to David.

Ruth is read on Shavuot for several reasons that tradition gives. The story happens at the barley and wheat harvests, and Shavuot is the harvest festival. Ruth’s choice to join Naomi’s people is read as accepting the Torah, which Shavuot celebrates. And David, said to be born and to have died on Shavuot, descends from her. The book is also a quiet lesson about chesed, kindness beyond duty, shown by a foreigner.

You have met Lamentations and Ecclesiastes already in this unit. Here the question is how they work as Megillot, scrolls tied to a day. Jewish custom does not read these books at random. Each is placed where its mood matches the season, so that the year itself becomes a teacher.

Tisha B'Av, the ninth of the month of Av, falls in July or August. Tradition says both Temples were destroyed on that day, the first by Babylon in 586 BCE and the second by Rome in 70 CE. It is a full fast. In the evening the synagogue is dim, people sit on low stools or the floor, and Lamentations is chanted in a mournful melody. Three weeks of lighter mourning lead up to it, and the seven Shabbatot of comfort from Isaiah follow it.

Sukkot comes in the fall, five days after Yom Kippur. Families build a sukkah, a hut with a roof of branches through which the stars show, and eat their meals in it for a week. It is a joyful harvest festival, yet the scroll read on its Shabbat is Ecclesiastes, the book that says everything is breath. Commentators explain the pairing in more than one way: the fragile hut matches the book’s message that possessions pass; or the book’s advice to enjoy your bread with joy matches the festival’s happiness.

Notice the pattern across the five scrolls. Spring brings love poems, early summer a story of kindness at harvest, midsummer a lament, fall a meditation on what lasts, and late winter a story of rescue. A Jewish child who grows up hearing the scrolls each year learns them not from a page but from a season.

The book of Esther is set in the Persian capital of Shushan (Susa) under a king the text calls Ahasuerus, whom many scholars identify with Xerxes I (ruled 486–465 BCE). A Jewish girl named Esther, raised by her cousin Mordecai, becomes queen after the king dismisses Queen Vashti. The king’s official Haman is enraged when Mordecai will not bow to him and plots to kill every Jew in the empire, choosing the date by lot, in Hebrew pur.

Mordecai asks Esther to go to the king, which could cost her life. She answers that she will go, and if she perishes, she perishes. In the end Haman is hanged on the gallows he built for Mordecai, and the Jews are allowed to defend themselves. The book is a fast-moving story with feasts, reversals and comic timing, and it is the only book of the Tanakh in which God’s name never appears.

That silence has been discussed for centuries. Jewish commentators point to Mordecai’s words that help may come to the Jews "from another place" (Esther 4:14) and read the whole story as God working behind events. The rabbis also questioned whether the book was scripture (Megillah 7a records the debate), and it became one of the most loved.

The book ends by establishing Purim, a festival of feasting, gifts of food and gifts to the poor. On Purim the megillah is chanted from a scroll, and every time Haman’s name is read, children spin noisemakers to blot it out. People dress in costume, and a festive meal follows. Purim is the only holiday in the Tanakh that a book of the Writings itself creates.

The book of Daniel has two halves. Chapters 1–6 are court tales: Daniel and his three friends are young Judeans carried to Babylon who keep kosher food, refuse to bow to a golden statue and survive a fiery furnace, read the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, and come out unharmed from a lions’ den. Chapters 7–12 are visions: four beasts rising from the sea, a ram and a goat, and a count of weeks of years.

Daniel is unusual in language. From Daniel 2:4 through the end of chapter 7, the book is written in Aramaic, the language of the Persian empire, rather than Hebrew. Parts of Ezra are also in Aramaic. Aramaic was the everyday language of Jews for many centuries afterward, and it is the language of most of the Talmud and of the Kaddish prayer.

In the Tanakh, Daniel stands among the Writings, not the Prophets. In Christian Bibles it follows Ezekiel as a prophetic book. Jewish tradition places Daniel in the Babylonian exile of the 500s BCE. Many scholars date the book’s final form to around 165 BCE, in the time of the Maccabean revolt, because its visions describe events of that era in close detail. Both views are taught, with the evidence for each.

Daniel 12:2 speaks of many who sleep in the dust awakening, which is the clearest statement in the Tanakh about resurrection of the dead. The rabbis of the Talmud built on it, and the belief became part of traditional Jewish prayer. The book’s stories of loyalty under foreign kings have also been read, by Jews and others, as a guide to living as a minority.

In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus took Babylon. The next year, according to Ezra 1, he issued a decree allowing the Judean exiles to go home and rebuild the Temple of the LORD in Jerusalem. Jewish tradition counts Ezra and Nehemiah as one book, and it tells the story of the return in stages, with lists of names, letters in Aramaic and memoirs in the first person.

The first group returned under Zerubbabel and rebuilt the altar, then the Temple, finished around 516 BCE after delays and opposition. Decades later Ezra, a priest and scribe "skilled in the Torah of Moses," came with royal permission to teach the law. Later still, Nehemiah, cupbearer to the Persian king, was sent as governor and rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls, the book says, in fifty-two days despite enemies who mocked and threatened.

The heart of the book is Nehemiah 8. On the first day of the seventh month, the people gather in the square by the Water Gate. Ezra stands on a wooden platform and reads the Torah aloud from morning to midday, while Levites help the people understand. The people weep, and then are told to eat, drink and share with those who have nothing, because the day is holy. Jewish tradition sees here the beginning of public Torah reading and of the scribe as teacher.

The book also records hard measures. Ezra 9–10 and Nehemiah 13 describe leaders demanding that men send away foreign wives, out of fear that the community would lose its identity. The book of Ruth, with its Moabite heroine, is often read as taking a different view, and scholars debate whether it was written partly as a reply. The Tanakh keeps both voices.

The last book of the Tanakh in the traditional order is Chronicles, Divrei ha-Yamim, "the words of the days." It is one book in Jewish tradition, printed as two. It begins with nine chapters of genealogies starting from Adam, then retells the reigns of David, Solomon and the kings of Judah, ending with the fall of Jerusalem and the decree of Cyrus. Much of it repeats Samuel and Kings, sometimes word for word.

But Chronicles is a retelling, not a copy. It leaves out David’s sin with Bathsheba and the rebellion of his son Absalom. It says almost nothing about the northern kingdom. It adds long passages about the Temple, the Levites and the singers, and it gives David a large role in planning the Temple that Solomon built. Scholars read Chronicles as written after the exile, perhaps around 400 BCE, for a community whose center was the rebuilt Temple, and they compare it with Kings to see what each author cared about.

The last two verses of Chronicles repeat the opening of Ezra: Cyrus says that the LORD has charged him to build a house in Jerusalem, and that whoever among the people belongs to God may go up. The Hebrew word for "go up" is the root of aliyah, the word Jews use for going up to Jerusalem, being called up to the Torah, and moving to the land of Israel.

So the Tanakh ends with an open door. The Torah ends with Moses looking at the land from a mountain; the Prophets end with Malachi telling the people to remember the Torah and wait for Elijah; the Writings end with a king saying "go up." The Talmud’s list of the Writings (Bava Batra 14b) puts Chronicles last, and many readers have felt that the choice was deliberate: a book that begins with Adam ends with a journey home not yet taken.