When the Jews were carried away captive to Babylon it occurred in three phases. Likewise, they left their place of bondage in three stages. In 538 B.C., Darius, the Persian king, issued a decree for the Jews to go back to their homeland—to Judah. The first returnees were led by Zerubbabel (536 BC), the second by Ezra (458 BC), and the third by Nehemiah (444 BC). Haggai was in the first group. He began to prophesy 16 years later, during the second year of King Darius (1:1) in 520 BC.

Zephaniah prophesied “in the days of Josiah” (1:1), between 641-610 BC. Not only was Zephaniah of the tribe of Judah, but his ancestry was of royal blood. His great-great-grandfather was king Hezekiah (727-698 BC).

Zephaniah warned, “the great day of the LORD is near,” a day of noise and wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of devastation and desolation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of trumpet and alarm (1:14-16).

We know nothing about the man Habakkuk except he was a prophet of God. Habakkuk doesn’t tell us who was king in Judah when he wrote, but from 1:5-6, we can determine it was sometime before Babylon had risen to prominence as a world power (626 BC), but after the Lord had decided the condition of Judah warranted destruction and captivity which happened in the reign of Manasseh (2 Kings 21:1-16).His reign was from 698 to 643 B.C..

Two of God’s prophets were commissioned to address the Assyrian capital of Nineveh directly. Jonah was sent to proclaim a message of judgment and to provoke repentance (approx. 760 BC). God would then employ the Assyrians to judge Israel for her sins, resulting in the eventual destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 BC. Approximately 100-150 years later, Nahum proclaimed “the burden against Nineveh” (1:1). Unlike the former prophet, Nahum’s message was not to provoke repentance. Nineveh had returned to her old ways, and so the prophet pronounced judgment upon them. There are two details which help us know the timing of the book; the prophet mentions the destruction of the Egyptian city No Amon (3:8, better known as Thebes) which took place in 663 BC, and Nahum foretold Nineveh’s fall, which happened in 612 BC. Thus, the book was written sometime between these two dates.