Zephaniah 3:4

"Her prophets are light and treacherous persons; her priests have profaned the sanctuary, they have done violence to the law."

"Her prophets ..." The New English Bible renders this concerning the prophets of Jerusalem as, "Her prophets were reckless, no true prophets."[7] Carson said of the priests and prophets:

"The prophets trimmed their message to court popularity; and the priests profaned their sacred task of teaching the law, violently altering its precepts ... They were extravagant and arrogant in their own conceits."[8]

This word from Carson is especially appropriate today, when God's people must again struggle with the arrogant and conceited imagination of God's enemies.

"They have done violence to the law ..." Thus, in Zephaniah, as in all the prophets, there is the most emphatic evidence of the prior existence of the Pentateuch, the Torah, as being not merely in existence, but generally known by all the Hebrews. In fact, as repeatedly stated in this series, none of the prophets makes any sense at all apart from the certainty that all of them presuppose the existence of a covenant relationship between God and Israel, a relationship that had long existed, and which through centuries of neglect and abuse, Israel was in the process of rejecting.