James Hall Brookes (February 27, 1830 – April 18, 1897) was an American Presbyterian pastor, Christian leader and author.

[2] After becoming established in Saint Louis, he received the honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1864 from both the University of Missouri[3] and Westminster College.

[2] Soon after returning to Ohio, on April 20, 1854, James Hall Brookes was ordained and installed as the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Dayton.

Benjamin B. Warfield, then professor of theology at Princeton Seminary, wrote of Brookes: "Large in figure, commanding in carriage, fluent and forceful in speech, fired with intense convictions, infused with emotion, whether in pulpit or on platform his oratory not only caught the attention but dominated the feelings and controlled the convictions of his audience ... [He had] the voice of a lion and the vehemence of an Elijah ... His was no anæmic Christianity.

"[9] During this thousand year period, Christ will reign and "Israel will see the fulfillment of its covenants that were unconditionally promised in the Old Testament.

"[10] The millennium will follow the "resurrection and rapture" of believers and a period of "culminating wickedness" before Christ returns with his church to reign over the earth.

[9] James Hall Brookes was considered a "founding father" of dispensationalism in the United States along with men like Dwight L. Moody, Adoniram Judson Gordon, C. I. Scofield, William Eugene Blackstone, and Arno C. Gaebelein.

"[11] Among their beliefs, dispensationalists hold that the Bible is inerrant, verbally inspired, and must be consistently interpreted with a normal literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic, views that were foundational for Brookes.

He was a well-known Bible teacher and the editor of The Truth or Testimony for Christ, a periodical which served, along with the journal Watchword, as the official organ of the premillennial movement until his death in 1897.

In 1854, after returning from his brief study at Princeton Theological Seminary and accepting the call to ministry at First Presbyterian Church of Dayton, Ohio, Brookes married Susan Ann Oliver.