The biblical story begins with so much promise: God creates everything that is, and it’s all pronounced good. God creates human beings in his image, places them in paradise, makes them full-time gardeners, and provides for their needs. They live in a world that is abundant with provision, a world without shame.

And unfortunately, it’s downhill from there.

The long drama of creation, fall, and restoration spans millennia, and we still await its final conclusion. Along the way, the story takes numerous twists and turns. In the Old Testament, for example, the conflict between Saul, the tragic first king of Israel, and David, the one anointed to take his place, sets up a meandering tale of good kings and bad kings, of blessing and punishment. The monarchy, after all, was never God’s idea; for the people to clamor for a human king to lead them was implicitly a rejection of God as their king (1 Sam 8:7). Even the best of kings had feet of clay: one thinks easily of David and his tortured relationship with Absalom, or the scandal of Bathsheba and Uriah.

The opening verse of the book of Micah locates it squarely in this up-and-down history of kings:

The word of the Lord that came to Micah of Moresheth during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah—the vision he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. (Micah 1:1, NIV)

If one were to keep score, Jotham and Hezekiah would be counted as good kings, as ones who did “right in the eyes of the LORD” (2 Ki 15:34, 18:3). Ahaz, however, would not (2 Ki 16:2). Jotham was the son of Uzziah (another “good” king) and the father of Ahaz. Ahaz in turn was the father of Hezekiah, who was particularly faithful to God. As the writer of 2 Kings says of him, “There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him” (18:5).

All of these men were “kings of Judah,” that is, of the southern kingdom. Though Saul, David, and Solomon were in theory the first kings over the entire people of Israel, there was always some tension between the northern and southern tribes. Solomon’s heavy taxation of the people, which supported his lavish, ostentatious reign, brought that tension to a head, causing the nation to split into northern and southern kingdoms when his son Rehoboam took his place. To the north lay the kingdom of Israel, with Samaria as its capital; to the south lay Judah and its capital, Jerusalem. Isaiah and Micah were prophets to Judah, though Micah foretells the disaster that awaited Samaria as well.

Imagine, if you will, being the king of a powerful but tiny nation, involved in constant skirmishes with surrounding nations, and living in the shadow of a growing powerhouse that threatened to engulf them all. That powerhouse was Assyria. When Uzziah was king of Judah, Assyria had not yet overrun Israel. But the Assyrians kept expanding aggressively, so that sometime during the reign of Jotham in Judah, the northern kingdom of Israel became a vassal state.

And Judah? When Ahaz was king, the kings of Aram and Israel united against him and tried to take Jerusalem (2 Ki 16). Ahaz made a deal with the devil by reaching out to Assyria for help, making Judah a vassal state. The king of Assyria, Tiglath-Pileser III, agreed and routed Ahaz’s enemies. Eventually the next Assyrian king, Shalmaneser V, would lay siege to Samaria (2 Ki 18:9). Historians generally agree that the city fell in 722 BC; many Israelites were taken captive and deported.

There is a puzzle, though, regarding who was king of Judah at the time Samaria and Israel fell to the Assyrians. The account in 2 Kings 18 clearly states that it was during the reign of Hezekiah, while the actual dates assigned by historians would put it during the reign of Ahaz. Which is correct? We may never know for sure.

What is more certain, and probably more important for our purposes, is that the fall of the northern kingdom happened during the ministry of Micah, and that he foresaw it. Moreover, Micah also seems to foretell the fall of Jerusalem and the southern kingdom to the Babylonians, which happened well over a century later.

Micah’s prophecies are given in a context of politics and power, to a nation always under the threat of invasion. Even Hezekiah, the most faithful of the kings listed, had mixed success in resisting Assyria (2 Ki 18–19). Near the end of his life, in ill health and no doubt exhausted from the responsibilities of his reign, he listens to Isaiah prophesy that Judah will be exiled to Babylon as Israel was exiled to Assyria — and Hezekiah calmly takes the news in stride because the disaster won’t happen in his lifetime (2 Ki 20:19)!

Such is the saga of earthly kings, men who were sometimes faithful but always fallible. It is to them and their fallible subjects that prophecy comes. And it is in our own fallibility and faithlessness that these ancient oracles still meet us today.