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Prophets can be found throughout human culture. Prophets are found in cultures as remote from each other as Siberian and Indonesia - even in our own day. In ancient times, prophet-like figures were found all over the Ancient Near East. There are some very close parallels in Mesopotamia, many hundreds of years before Isaiah.

So the Old Testament prophets stand within a particular tradition. Interestingly, it's not an exclusively Israelite tradition at all. Within Israel, they come at certain particular times because they were people of God who responded to the need of the hour - they crop up when the nation is in crisis.

There are two great waves of prophesy in Ancient Israelite times and they're linked with two great imperial conquests - funnily enough both by nations from the territory we think of as Iraq - Ancient Mesopotamia. The Assyrian crisis, when the northern peoples of Mesopotamia spread to the West in the 8th century, called forth Isaiah and Micah, working in the south in what we call Judah; and Amos and Hosea working in the north - what was actually called Israel. All four interpret this threat to the national life as the powerful act of a just national God - the God of Israel.

About a hundred or a hundred and fifty years later, there was another great wave of imperial conquest from Mesopotamia. This time it's the more southerly Mesopotamian power, Babylonia, and this calls forth a second great wave of what's called classical prophecy - the great figures being Jeremiah, who works in Jerusalem, and Ezekiel, who is exiled to Babylonia and works as a prophet there.

Dr Paul Joyce, lecturer at St. Peter's College Oxford

Regarding prophesy, you have to remember that it was a profession. The prophets seem to have been trained. They had a specific kind of language - they talk about the 'oracle of God' and there are references to them being influenced by music being played; there are references to the 'sons of the prophets', which doesn't mean their children - it means they were actually apprentices. So there must have been some training through which they all went, and they were officially employed by the court.

Some references say "the Kings had 400 prophets sitting at their table", which meant that they were employed by the court. They also probably acted privately, so if people had questions of God they would come and talk to them. Out of that apparatus, which seems to have been a common profession, or at least not uncommon, there emerge the few that we know of as 'The' prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and so on, who speak with a kind of dissident voice - who are not just the 'yes men' for the court, as many of them obviously seem to have been - who would have been labelled by them as the 'false' prophets.

The prophets felt constrained to make their point in a language which is highly poetic and complicated and expresses the kind of passion that perhaps only poetry can express. It's difficult to imagine this, because one tends to think of the prophets as hairy men with loincloths, running around screaming in the streets. But they were a highly intellectual bunch, and they were trained, but out of them emerged these special figures who are quite different.

Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, principal of the Leo Baeck College Centre for Jewish Education

I think in Isaiah's teaching and preaching that the most extraordinary thing is what the theologians call the 'suffering servant'. The idea that the way that God will most ably express and demonstrate his love and concern is not through majestic acts of power and might but by humility and by being broken that by his stripes we are healed.

Within the Christian tradition this is understood in terms of what Jesus Christ did, that his death and his resurrection demonstrate for us most clearly the power of God, that God is revealed on the cross in the most extraordinary way. But it seems to be beyond and bigger than the Christian religion. It seems to be something more profound than that. That the task of creativity - the God who is the Creator actually costs, that here is God, who shapes the world at immeasurable cost to Himself - that God is caught up in the pain and the suffering of the world.

God doesn't stand separate from it, not feeling the pain in a sort of glorious isolation, bubble-wrapped away from the world surrounded by divine powers and looked after by the angels - but actually He is a God who is engaged in the mess and the dirt of life. That God is the one who is involved in our humanity and involved in our suffering. And the moment you start saying that, you start unravelling a lot of the philosophical ideas of God who is beyond pain and doesn't care because he can see everything and everything's known. We actually have a God who seems caught up in our weaknesses.

And the remarkable thing that Isaiah argues is that actually that is an effective way of being. That there is redemption; that there is healing in God's hurting. That by God's pain, our pain, to some extent, is alleviated.

How can this be - that God who suffers, alleviates my suffering? How can this be, that God hurts, so that my hurts are made less? But I believe that to be the case and I think Isaiah's passages are wonderful when he talks about the God who stands in for my suffering and because He is prepared to suffer, I don't need to suffer.

Mark Wakelin, director, North Bank Centre

Amos is the first of all the writing prophets. He began to prophesy about halfway through the eighth century BC. Amos was somebody who came from the southern kingdom and prophesied in the northern kingdom. He's the only one of the prophets who prophesies outside his territory which makes him quite an interesting person. And his major criticism of the religion of the northern kingdom is the abuse of the poor people in the land, so Amos's major criticism that exists over and over again in his letter is that they are stealing things from the poor, they're not giving the poor wages, they're continuing to worship God in the temple but they're ignoring the needs of the poor and the oppressed in the land.

Hosea is a writing prophet who prophesies in the eighth century and Hosea comes from the north and prophesies in the north. Hosea prophesied slightly later than Amos, beginning just as Amos stops. Hosea, like Amos, criticises the citizens for their abuse of the poor and also for something else which is very important: he criticises them for not worshipping God alone. One of the things that seems to be happening during Hosea's reign is that people seem to be turning more and more to different religions particularly Baal' religion which is native Canaanite religion and they seem to be worshipping Yahweh that would be the name for the God of Israel alongside the Canaanite gods.

Perhaps one of the most striking things of Hosea's prophecy is the image that he uses of Israel as a wife. He uses his own situation with his relationship with a woman called Goma, as a parable of Israel's relationship with God.

Dr Paula Gooder, tutor at the Queen's Foundation in Birmingham