A misanthropic view at the societies of the Old Testament in the books of smaller prophets

Abstract

The subject of work is a value relationship that is established towards the society in the books of the prophet of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Malachi. Their attitude toward the current state of social organization of the Jewish people is negative. They see the social and cultural life as morally bad, where the roots of that evil are in deviation from God's laws given to Moses, and its manifestations are all of those actions that, from an eschatological perspective, lead to punishment, not salvation. We call this relationship a misanthropic one, since it is not a simple view of society as morally distorted, but such distortion is set in a kind of teleological perspective, in which it turns out that given sociability for the prophets is a systematically organized way of human existence contrary to the basic interests of man - life in in accordance with God's laws for salvation.