Failed prophecy in the bible if one cares to look

[Nay_Sayer]

Already with the "The mods are bullies" route NZ?

[awty]

Already with the "The mods are bullies" route NZ?

Chickenshit way to back out.  It was either that or go nuclear.  meh

[GrandizerII]

[Angrboda]

[Angrboda]

[awty]

Prophecies are like horoscopes in that you can make them fit if you just bend them around enough.

[Nay_Sayer]

Prophecies are like horoscopes in that you can make them fit if you just bend them around enough.

Which also happens to be the philosophy of the adult film industry, only it isn't with horoscopes

[Paleophyte]

It's a bit of a problem that Tyre was never destroyed. The closest that it came was when it was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, when it was partially destroyed. If you live in a magic realm where 'partly destroyed' = 'destroyed and never rebuilt' I suppose it's close enough, but the rest of us will point and laugh. At no point was Tyre without inhabitants, or even less than a city. In no way was it rubble fit only for fishermen to dry their nets. Alexander himself worked to ensure that Tyre didn't suffer that fate, having recognised its strategic importance. Tyre was so not destroyed that we have coins produced in Tyre and issued by the city mint from the late 320s, just a few years after the conquest. Tyre is widely regarded as one of the most ancient continuously inhabited cities on Earth.

Somewhat more importantly, the prophecy in Ezekiel isn't about Alexander. It's about the siege of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar (Ezekiel 26:7), and it's pretty clear that it was old Neb who was supposed to destroy Tyre. Despite a 13-year siege, the Babylonians never managed to take the island portion of the city. The passage in Ezekiel 29:18 appears to acknowledge this, indicating that Neb and his army 'got no reward from the campaign against Tyre'. Amusingly, since Ezekiel was clearly written during or after the siege, this would count as failed current events rather than prophecy. You lot need better editors for your fiction.

[Paleophyte]

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.

[GrandizerII]

Exactly, we are getting sidetracked by the whole thing about Alexander the Great or modern Tyre. Ezekiel 26 was clearly about Tyre in the time the passage was authored, which would've probably been when Nebuchadnezzar was in the middle of besieging Tyre. It was never intended to be about some event hundreds or thousands of years later.

The only good argument NZ had in response was Ezekiel 26 mentioning "many nations" at the start, but even then when you look at the whole context, it was not meant to be taken literally. Here lies the challenge with understanding prophetic books in the Old Testament (like Ezekiel). You frequently see a mixture of verses meant to be taken figuratively and verses meant to be taken literally, and even sometimes both simultaneously.

That said, if you start from the very first verse and read all the way to the end of the chapter, you will see things more clearly (like why "many nations" is mentioned at the start).