Why is Daniel a Major Prophet, But Hosea a Minor Prophet?

This week, I’ve been editing the final books of Chapter By Chapter, my guide to all 1,189 chapters of the Bible, and a question occurred to me: Why is Daniel a Major Prophet when it has only twelve chapters, but Hosea is a Minor Prophet with fourteen? It turns out the answer is really simple, but the reason the question arose reminded me of something interesting about how we read the Bible. How Long is Daniel? It turns out the distinction between Major and Minor Prophets comes from the lengths of the books, not their importance. The twelve shorter books were traditionally collected not as “Minor Prophets” but as the “Book of the Twelve.” Daniel himself is a little weird: Christian Bibles group it with the Major Prophets, but Jewish Bibles put it with the Ketuvim (Writings). The thing that threw me off is that Hosea has more chapters than Daniel, but Daniel is a lot longer. Here’s a very obviously ChatGPT-generated chart of the difference (the math is right, I promise). With 11,272…