I liken the prophetic texts as narratives and words of arbitration (condemnation/bashing and or praise) by agents of God on the deeds of men. On the other hand, the wisdom texts, are musings and instructions to the people of God by wise men of society – I imagine a wise and aged uncle with a small crowd of kids at his feet listening to his pronouncements.
For this essay, I will compare Hosea to Proverbs. In Hosea, the first three chapters are a vividly and violently depicted story of a relationship-gone-bad - between a husband (God) and wife (Israel). The wife is sleeping around with other men (other Gods) and the husband (God) is very angry and jealous and seeks violent retribution. Hosea is condemning Israel’s shying away from the one God that delivered it again and again and sees that Israel’s actions will lead to retributions until it gets back to loving the one and only God. God is merciless and exacting in his punishment with disgrace and destruction of Israel that leads to illegitimacy of her children awaiting Israel and its people (Hosea 2). As Hartsfield astutely points out in his essay on Hosea, God’s love “is based not on unconditional but compulsive love” (TAB 168)
Proverbs, on the other hand, is tame by comparison and also doesn’t feign to have the authority of God in its pronouncements nor does it reference Israel. It teaches and instructs on what one must do to stay in the straight and narrow but it is the wise people telling you all that and not because God told them to share the teachings. Most of those teachings are observational and are obvious and, mostly, common knowledge and apply to every society, not only Israel. One good example I like is the one that instructs you on how to start of a child in the right way (Proverbs 22:6). There is nothing in it that talks about God or his laws and it can be successfully applied in our times and in our raising of our own children.