Septuagint: Zephaniah

The Book of Zephaniah is generally considered one of the older surviving books of the Hebrew Scriptures, with most scholars dating it to before the Torah was written, or at least heavily redacted in the time of King Josiah. Most scholars accept that Zephaniah was written by a prophet called Zephaniah between 630 and 612 BC, however, very little is known about him. His world was very different from the later Kingdom of Judea that emerged in the 2nd-century BC, as the Israelites of his time were still polytheistic, worshiping the Canaanite gods, as well as statues of Iaw (Masoretic Yahweh), the God the Jews and Samaritans would later worship.

Based on the contents of Zephaniah’s writing, the work must have been composed before the Fall of Nineveh, in 612 BC, and almost certainly before Josiah’s reforms, which began in 622 BC, shortly after the Chaldean revolt of 626 BC. The Chaldean revolt against the Assyrians captured Babylon in its first year and coronated Nabopolassar as King of Babylon. King Josiah switched allegiances quickly from Assyria to Babylon, and four years later began his religious reforms, banning the worship of all gods other than Yahweh, several of which Zephaniah mentioned as being worshiped in Jerusalem in his writing, confirming that he was writing before 622 BC.

Zephaniah mentioned several gods in his book which were explicitly mentioned in 4th Kingdoms (Masoretic Kings), during King Josiah’s religious reforms. The open verses denounce the worship of Ba‘al, which is treated as a proper name, and therefore is a reference to Hadad, the Canaanite storm-god, commonly called Ba‘al. He then denounced those who those worshiped the army of Shamayim, which, based on the Book of Jonah, appears to have been the Canaanite (and Hebrew) name of the Assyrian god Asshur, who by the 7th-century BC had become known as Ansar, which translates as the ‘Whole Sky.’ Shamayim was the name of the Canaanite god of the ‘skies,’ and the god Jonah identified as the god of his Assyrian owner when he went to prophesy in Nineveh. As all of the geographic references in the Book of Jonah locate his life in Assyrian-occupied Samaria, and later the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, it is likely he was a Samaritan slave shortly after the Assyrians had occupied Samaria, as it is recorded that they reduced the entire population to slavery.