Quick questions on The prophets in Israelite society: HSC Ancient History

Elijah the Tishbite emerges abruptly in 1 Kings 17, announcing a Yahweh-sent drought as direct punishment for Ahab's toleration of Baal worship, since Baal was worshipped as the god who controlled rain and fertility. The confrontation reaches its climax at Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18), where Elijah challenges 450 prophets of Baal to a public contest: whichever god sends fire from heaven to consume a sacrificial bull is the true god. Baal's prophets fail after a full day of ecstatic ritual; Yahweh's fire consumes Elijah's soaked altar instantly, and Elijah has the assembled crowd seize and kill the defeated prophets at the Wadi Kishon. The episode is a religious reform in the most direct sense, a public demonstration intended to reclaim exclusive Yahweh worship for the whole of Israel, not just to rebuke the royal court.

Elisha receives Elijah's mantle and a "double portion" of his spirit (2 Kings 2:9-15) after witnessing Elijah taken up in a whirlwind. Where Elijah is a dramatic, solitary confronter of kings, Elisha's ministry is more socially embedded: he moves among ordinary Israelites, multiplying a widow's jar of oil so she can pay her debts and keep her sons out of slavery (2 Kings 4:1-7), restoring a Shunammite woman's son to life (2 Kings 4:8-37), and healing the Aramean military commander Naaman of leprosy (2 Kings 5), an episode that also extends Yahweh's reputation beyond Israel's borders. Elisha is also drawn into Israel's wars with the Aramean kingdom of Damascus, advising the king of Israel during a siege of Samaria (2 Kings 6-7), a prophet acting as a de facto royal adviser in matters of state and warfare, not merely religion.

Hosea's ministry (Hosea 1:1 places him from the later years of Jeroboam II through several successive kings of Judah) spans the political disintegration that followed Jeroboam II's death, in which six kings held Israel's throne in roughly 25 years, several seizing power by assassination. Hosea dramatises Israel's covenant unfaithfulness to Yahweh through his own marriage: commanded to marry Gomer, "a wife of whoredom" (Hosea 1:2), he names their children symbolically, Jezreel (recalling and condemning Jehu's bloodshed there), Lo-Ruhamah ("not pitied") and Lo-Ammi ("not my people"), turning his domestic life into a living oracle of national judgement.

Read together, Amos and Hosea give historians one of the clearest ancient pictures of eighth-century BC Israelite social structure, refracted, as it is, through a hostile moral lens.