Prophecy seems more fundamentally misunderstood at all levels than G-d Himself, despite being essential to the existence of a Divine Being.
What is prophecy to begin with? Casually paging through the books of the Bible might give some answers. Jeremiah, the archetypical prophet of doom, begins his book by labeling them as his “words”. Obadiah, the expatriate prophet, has his revelation termed a “vision”. Moses and Habakkuk both have their divinity manifest through songs.
Each of them varies in their style. Jeremiah’s prophecies lean towards the abstract, on account of being words, while Obadiah’s is “vision” is, as the name says, more visual. His 21-verse prophecy, the shortest book in the Bible, has material components like messengers, grapes, thieves, mountains and human legions, all acting in his vision of the future.
The future? Isn’t that what makes a prophet what he is? Not just anyone can have G-d tell him or her what will happen in the future—that’s what a prophet is for, correct?
There is a hole in that piece of logic. Ezekiel did have a prophecy that predicted an occurrence that never actually took place. The famous incident in which “Ezekiel called to them dry bones”, immortalized through a Negro spiritual, was a parable for the rising of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which Sennacherib quashed in his campaigns.
The Kingdom was not only not revived, but Judah, its sister kingdom, was sent into exile afterwards, having been conquered by Nebuchadnezzar II.
There are two possible solutions to this prophecy and others like it. One is to interpret the predicted result differently. The modern-day State of Israel has control over the Galilee, so perhaps that could be construed as a fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy. Some might consider the flourishing of Samaria during Roman control to be a manifestation of Ezekiel’s words, though that is a stretch.
The second solution is to redefine prophecy as it stands. There is a fundamental difference between the prophecy made solely for the sake of the future, and the prophecy made as a link between the present and the future.
The former is exemplified through ambiguous prophecies like the Oracle of Delphi. Ultimately these depend more on the interpreter more than they do on the message themselves. In Pyrrhus’s war between Greece and Rome, for example, the Oracle says, “I tell you the Romans you can win” (Latin: “Aio te…Romanos vincere posse”).
In my English rendition, if Rome wins, it will be punctuated: “I tell you, the Romans, you can win”. If Greece wins, it will be punctuated: “I tell you: the Romans you can win”, indicating that Greece will “win (over)” the Romans. (In the Latin, the indirect statement can make “Romanos” either the direct object or the subject of the sentence).
As far as monotheistic religions are largely concerned, this does not constitute a prophecy. It merely delivers a shaded statement about the future without saying anything particular that will come to pass.
Compare this to Chapter One of the Book of Amos, the first prophet in Biblical Israel to write his own book. Without a doubt, his predictions are more specific than those of the Oracle. Consistent with other prophets in the Bible, he describes something in the present before he describes the future.
Before telling what will befall each nation in time to come, Amos describes the state of the present, with each nation having three sins, but also a fourth one that shall not be overlooked. After the present is described, he tells of the fate of each nation as a result of the current state.
Prophecy is, in the monotheistic sense, something that enables a prediction to be made based on the present. The scientist’s role is very similar, almost identical: tell what will happen based on criteria already established. A combination of Divine favor, knowledge, and political know-how ensured that the prophets in the Bible were able to predict that which no other human being could.
This does not apply to the prophets that each religion deems the greatest—primarily Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad. Their revelations were so grand and so divine that no other human being could possibly understand how they came about or hope to replicate what they did.
These are not to be judged on the same level as the prophetic greats such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, but on a level that transcends everyone else—prophet or not.
All in all, prophecy is not to be understood as something strange. According to both Judasm and Islam, the age of prophecy has passed on. While this occurred probably for the sake of stabilizing the religions, something like prophecy still exists in our world. Consider scientists to be the modern equivalent of the prophets.
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