It is helpful to see how the prophets of the Old Testament fit into the history of Israel. Their relationship to the people and their kings, as well as the events surrounding their prophecies provide us a better understanding of their words and deeds.
Rather than appearing in separate written records, the decrees of the earliest prophets are woven into the history of Israel in the books of Joshua through 2 Kings. Later, the words of the prophets were preserved in separate collections (making up the final seventeen books of the Old Testament), Isaiah through Malachi. These are often called the "literary prophets" since their words were written down as separate pieces of literature.
When the unified kingdom split after the death of Solomon, the northern tribes in Israel descended into idol worship. Elijah and Elisha, the last among the early prophets, challenged the idolaters to worship Yahweh alone. Amos and Hosea (the first of the literary prophets), challenged the apostate northern kings of Israel from Jeroboam II through Hoshea. Because so many refused to return to Yahweh, God allowed the Neo-Assyrian Empire to overthrow the kingdom of Israel in 722 BC. The Assyrians destroyed the cities and towns and took the people captive and dispersed them throughout the empire to destroy forever all sense of nationhood (2 Kings 17:1-23).
As Israel approached destruction, the southern nation of Judah vassilated between the worship of Yahweh and the worship of "foreign gods." Good kings brought the people back from idol worship while bad kings did the reverse. The first literary prophets for Judah were Obadiah and Joel who exhorted the people during the reigns of kings Jehoram, Ahaziah, and
Manasseh was followed by the good king, Josiah who instituted a thorough cleansing of the temple, ridding it of much pagan worship. The prophets in Jerusalem at this time included Nahum, Jeremiah, and Zephaniah. Josiah was followed by kings whose terrible political decisions brought the Babylonian conqueror Nebuchadnezzar II against Jerusalem (2 Kings 23:31-24:17). In 605 BC, Nebuchadnezzar took 10,000 Jews into exile in Babylon, among them, the prophet Ezekiel. Habakkuk joined Jeremiah and Zephaniah in their prophetic work in Jerusalem. When King Zedekiah allied himself with neighbor nations to fight off Babylon in 589, Nebuchadnezzar laid a 2-year siege of Jerusalem (2 Kings 24:18-25:21; 2 Chronicles 36). The city fell in 586 and was razed to the ground with its temple and palaces destroyed. Jeremiah remained to prophecy in Jerusalem among the impoverished remnant in Judah, but was later carted off to Egypt.
Ezekiel continued to prophesy in Babylon to the exiled Jews living there. Also, among the Jewish captives in the first deportation (605 BC) was the young man Daniel, whom God used in Babylon in the court of all the Babylonian emperors. Daniel’s prophecies covered the Babylonian exile (Daniel 1:1) and continued through Cyrus’s decree ending it (Daniel 10:1).When Babylon was overthrown by the Persians in 539 BC, the new Medo-Persian king Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Judah and rebuild their city and its temple. This was begun under Zerubbabel and then continued under Nehemiah.
Different Persian kings had different attitudes toward the Jews. Under Cambyses (530-522) the rebuilding of Jerusalem was stopped (Ezra 4), but under Darius I (522-486) the second temple was completed. Here the post-exilic prophets Zechariah and Haggai challenged the Jews: "You live in paneled houses while God’s house lies in ruins. Do something about it!" Darius was followed by Xerxes (486-464), whose reign is recorded in Esther 1-9. Following Xerxes came Artaxerxes (464-423), in whose reign Ezra returned to Jerusalem in 458 BC (Ezra 7-10), and Nehemiah followed in 445 BC (Neh. 1-2). It was in this period that the final post-exilic prophet Malachi wrote.
Jonah, another of the literary prophets, described his experience outside of Israel. (The text gives no indication of its date.) God's mission for Jonah sent him to Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, where he was to call the Assyrian people to repentance. The Assyrians were enemies of Israel, but God’s intent was to bless them nonetheless, consistent with his promise that Abraham’s people would be a blessing to all nations (Gen. 22:18).