(July 25, 2025 at 9:56 pm)arewethereyet Wrote: Prophecies are like horoscopes in that you can make them fit if you just bend them around enough.
Well, to a degree. When the prophecy pretty clearly states that 'X will happen and King Y will do it', but X doesn't happen and King Y has been worm food for a few millennia, it's pretty safe to say that no amount of bending will do the job.
Much of the difficulty with Biblical prophecy arises from the fact that they aren't even supposed to do that. We treat them that way because we understand them through the lens of Hellenistic prophecies that we're familiar with through the Oracle of Delphi and such. The difficulty is that all of the prophecies in the Old Testament are from a Hebrew tradition, which treats prophecy in a totally different way. To them, the passage in Ezekiel reads as instructions that 'If Nebuchadnezzar destroys Tyre then...' And if he doesn't then it won't. The Jews didn't have a problem with this because the prophecies weren't failed, just unfulfilled. People hadn't done their part and nothing more was expected to happen. It's just a story of some heathen king fucking it all up.
Then along comes Jesus, and his little sect gets spun into a Roman mystery cult, and along the way, a lot of Hebrew prophecy gets misinterpreted through a completely different cultural lens. The resulting cultural confusion produces the incoherent rambling now known as Biblical prophecy.
