After ending last week with the prophet Elijah’s dramatic ascension into heaven, we begin this week asking a crucial question: Is his disciple Elisha up for the task? Does he have it within him to pick up the prophetic mantle and carry God’s word forward into a new time with new rules and new challenges?

Those questions are quickly answered with a resounding “Yes!” in the book of 2 Kings, but the idea of prophets arising in a particular time and place and according to a particular need — claiming the prophetic mantle (whether literally or figuratively) — is an idea that we will return to over and over again in the weeks to come. 

One of the challenges of opening our Bibles and reading through the prophetic books is that we often have little sense of the eras and issues to which they are speaking — something certainly not helped by the biblical canon placing the fifteen prophetic books in nonchronological order (or sixteen books, if you include Daniel). So for this series, as much as we’re able, we’ll try to group each week prophets who were speaking to the same era — capturing some of the wider dynamics at play and how these “messengers from God” were looking to convey words of condemnation, challenge, and hope.

Following Elisha’s prophetic career in the middle of the ninth century, we’ll focus on three of the great eighth-century prophetic voices in Amos, Hosea, and Micah — each of whom prophesied in a time of economic inequality, political corruption, and a looming threat of invasion from the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Prophets are often viewed as merely making predictions about the future, but it is far more accurate to read them as urgently speaking to the present: God is speaking through them to insist on needed religious and societal changes. Having said that, their prophetic oracles of judgment against the Northern Kingdom of Israel would indeed come to pass in the decades that followed, with the Northern Kingdom being utterly demolished in 722 BCE, soon leading to an increased sense of urgency among prophets in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, hoping to steer the people in and around Jerusalem to a better fate.

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