Promises of Israel's restoration appear throughout the Latter Prophets. This chapter argues that modern interpreters have overlooked the surprising amount of attention specifically paid to the fate of the northern tribes of Israel throughout the Latter Prophets, even in books by prophets who lived long after the destruction of the northern kingdom.Whereas many have suggested a narrowing in the scope of Israel such that prophecies such as those of Second Isaiah refer to the restoration of Judah, this chapter argues that the prophets consistently take a more expansive view of Israel and that Second Temple period readers would have—and in fact did—read these prophecies as referring not only to those from Judah exiled by the Babylonians but also to the northern tribes scattered by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. The prophets' promises therefore remained unfulfilled so long as the northern tribes had not returned.

Chapter 5 tests the claim that the biblical god Yhwh is uniquely aggressive by reading a sampling from several biblical prophets, specifically eighth-century minor prophets such as Hosea and Micah, though also more briefly from Amos and Zephaniah. These texts share several features with the royal psalms of preceding chapters: they are focused on the king, and they are short and non-narrative. Like the royal psalms of defeat in chapter 4, they witness to Yhwh’s aggression against his own client country and its king; and, although this destructiveness is future in the literary presentation of the prophets and not past as in the psalms, the former, too, merit description as texts of defeat. The chapter finds that prophetic defeat texts do not make divine aggression against the king the focal point of the theological crisis they articulate. Rather, the king is one among other leaders caught up in judgement, and the monarchy is but one institution suffering divinely wrought harm.

Chapter 1 examines the drama of Abel’s blood returning to the ground and crying out on behalf of the slain victim ‘from the ground’. Genesis 4 indicates that bloodshed harms the relationship between Cain and the ground, such that the ground refused to yield its produce. Cain then had to leave the land and God’s presence. I examine the portrayal of shed blood ‘crying out’ from the land, a phrase that suggests an appeal for judicial vengeance. That vengeance is never meted out, leaving the cry of the land in an unaddressed state. The image of blood on the ground may suggest blood pollution, which likely remained unresolved in Genesis 4. The pattern of injustice > outcry > the land’s refusal to yield produce finds striking resemblance to several other texts in the Hebrew Bible.