Word Finder - prophecies

definition

A prediction, especially one made by a prophet or under divine inspiration.

example

French writer Nostradamus made a prophecy in his book.

definition

The public interpretation of Scripture.

He is instead to write down the new book of prophecies.

A development of ideals and a growth of spirituality can be traced which render the biblical writings with their series of prophecies a unique 1 This is philosophically handled by the Arabian historian Ibn Khaldun, whose Prolegomena is well worthy of attention; see De Slane, Not.

As the main support of his proof of the truth of Christianity appears his detailed demonstration that the prophecies of the old dispensation, which are older than the Pagan poets and philosophers, have found their fulfilment in Christianity.

When, as often, the great figures have been made the spokesmen of the thought of subsequent generations, the historical criticism of the prophecies becomes one of peculiar difficulty.

The period under review, with its relations between Judah and Egypt, can be illustrated by prophecies ascribed to a similar situation in the time of Hezekiah.

The ass was a hollow wooden effigy, within which a priest capered and uttered prophecies.

On the other hand, he came to look upon the Old Testament prophets as approved by their antiquity, sanctity, mystery and prophecies to be interpreters of the truth.

Cobden has left a deep mark on English history, but he was not himself a "scientific economist," and many of his confident prophecies were completely falsified.

We know but little of Isaiah's predecessors and models in the prophetic art (it were fanaticism to exclude the element of human preparation); but certainly even the acknowledged prophecies of Isaiah (and much more the disputed ones) could no more have come into existence suddenly and without warning than the masterpieces of Shakespeare.

It seems, in short, to have originally formed the preface to the small group of prophecies which now follows it, viz.

The Sennacherib prophecies must be taken in connexion with the historical appendix, chaps.

I, 1-2), to the Septuagint version of the book (produced between 260 and 130 B.C.), in which the disputed prophecies are already found, and to the Greek translation of the Wisdom of Jesus, the son of Sirach, which distinctly refers to Isaiah as the comforter of those that mourned in Zion (Eccles.

There is only one of these prophecies which may, with any degree of apparent plausibility, be referred to the age of Isaiah, and that is chaps.

There is an equally striking difference among the disp uted prophecies themselves, and one of no small moment as a subsidiary indication of their origin.

In the same work, chap. x., he speaks of " the Sacrament of the Passion foreshadowed in prophecies."

Hence the new phenomenon of written prophecies.

Mr Fraser lived to see the fulfilment of these prophecies.

It is evident from these facts that the book of Isaiah did not assume its present form till considerably after the return of the Jews from exile in 537, when a compiler, or series of compilers, arranged the genuine prophecies of Isaiah which had come to his hands, together with others which at the time were attributed to Isaiah, and gave the book its present form.

Jeremiah was keenly conscious of his people's sin; and the aim of most of his earlier prophecies is to bring his countrymen, if possible, to a better mind, in the hope that thereby the doom which he sees impending may be averted - an end which eventually he saw clearly to be unattainable.

Prophecies of restoration are contained in chs.

The prophecies of the first twenty-three years of his ministry, as we are expressly told in ch.

But the chronological disorder of the book, and other indications, show that Baruch could not have been the compiler of the book, but that the prophecies and narratives contained in it were collected together gradually, and that it reached its present form by a succession of stages, which were not finally completed till long after Israel's return from Babylon.

His prophecies (which are regularly dated) are assigned to various years from 592 to 570 B.C. The theme of the first twenty-four chapters of his book is the impending fall of Jerusalem, which took place actually in 586, and which Ezekiel foretells in a series of prophecies, distinguished by great variety of symbolism and imagery.

The book of Ezekiel bears throughout the stamp of a single mind; the prophecies contained in it are arranged methodically; and to all appearance - in striking contrast to the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah - it received the form in which we still have it from the prophet himself.

There is little noticeable in Hobbes' dating of the prophets, though he considers it " not apparent " whether Amos wrote, as well as composed, his prophecy, or whether Jeremiah and the other prophets of the time of Josiah and Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai and Zechariah, who lived in the captivity, edited the prophecies ascribed to them.

The starting-point of this newer criticism of the prophets is the clearer practical recognition of the fact that all pre-exilic prophecy has come down to us in the works of post-exilic editors, and that for the old statement of the problem of the prophetic books - What prophecies or elements in Isaiah, Jeremiah and the rest are later than these prophets ?

Her whole history rests on the flimsiest authority, but her alleged prophecies have had from the 17th century until quite recently an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination.

In Stuart times all ranks of society believed in her, and referring to her supposed foretelling of the Great Fire, Pepys relates that when Prince Rupert heard, while sailing up the Thames on the 10th of October 1666, of the outbreak of the fire "all he said was, ` now Shipton's prophecy was out.'" One of her prophecies was supposed to have menaced Yeovil, Somerset, with an earthquake and flood in 1879, and so convinced were the peasantry of the truth of her prognostications that hundreds moved from their cottages on the eve of the expected disaster, while spectators swarmed in from all quarters of the county to see the town's destruction.

Ostensibly it is written in opposition to Whiston's attempt to show that the books of the Old Testament did originally contain prophecies of events in the New Testament story, but that these had been eliminated or corrupted by the Jews, and to prove that the fulfilment of prophecy by the events of Christ's life is all "secondary, secret, allegorical, and mystical," since the original and literal reference is always to some other fact.

To these, but with special reference to the work of Chandler, which maintained that a number of prophecies were literally fulfilled in Christ, Collins replied by his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (1727).

This conception, however, is not one of the constant elements of prophecy; other prophecies of Isaiah look for the decisive interposition of Yahweh in the crisis of history without a kingly deliverer.

The scribes were mainly busied with the law; but no religion can subsist on mere law; and the systematization of the prophetic hopes, and of those more ideal parts of the other sacred literature which, because ideal and dissevered from the present, were now set on one line with the prophecies, went on side by side with the systematization of the law, by means of a harmonistic exegesis, which sought to gather up every prophetic image in one grand panorama of the issue of Israel's and the world's history.

In 1863, however, Bah& declared himself to be " He whom God shall manifest " (Man Yuz-hiruhu'llah, with prophecies of whose advent the works of the Bab are filled), and called on all the Babis to recognize his claim.

At the end of 1794 he began to print his interpretations of prophecy, his first book being A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times.

It included also a number of forgeries, circulated under the names of famous Greek authors, verses fathered upon Aeschylus or Sophocles, or books like the false Hecataeus, or above all the pretended prophecies of ancient Sibyls in epic verse.

When railways were first started in England dismal prophecies were made that the end of hunting would speedily be brought about.

Especially the wild ecstatic character and the prophecies of the Montanists recall the old type of religion.

Among the visionary Franciscans, enthusiastic adherents of Joachim's prophecies, arose above all the conviction that the pope was Antichrist, or at least his precursor.

Accordingly, some years after the fall of Jerusalem - we cannot tell the exact date or the author's name - the book which we call the Gospel according to St Matthew was written to give the Palestinian Christians a of St full account of Jesus Christ, which should present Him as the promised Messiah, fulfilling the ancient Hebrew prophecies, proclaiming the kingdom of heaven, and founding the Christian society.

He was also famous for his prophecies and the support he gave to visionaries.

On the whole, the question must be left open, and with it both the problem of the extension of the name Musri and Mizraim outside Egypt in the Assyrian and Hebrew records of this period and the true historical background of a number of the Isaianic prophecies.

Yet no interpretation or rearrangement of the text of Old Testament prophecies will secure a fair and non-allegorical correspondence between these and their alleged fulfilment in the New Testament.

The inference is not expressly drawn, though it becomes perfectly clear from his refutation of William Whiston's curious counter theory that there were in the original Hebrew scriptures prophecies which were literally fulfilled in the New Testament, but had been expunged at an early date by Jewish scribes.

Collins indicates the possible extent to which the Jews may have been indebted to Chaldeans and Egyptians for their theological views, especially as great part of the Old Testament would appear to have been remodelled by Ezra; and, after dwelling on the points in which the prophecies attributed to Daniel differ from all other Old Testament predictions, he states the greater number of the arguments still used to show that the book of Daniel deals with events past and contemporaneous, and is from the pen of awriter of theMaccabean period, a view now generally accepted.

This was the First Captivity, and from it Ezekiel (one of the exiles) dates his prophecies.

He writes of it with despondency as a degenerate and declining age; and, instead of triumphant prophecies of world-wide rule, such as we find in Horace, Livy contents himself with pointing out the dangers which already threatened Rome, and exhorting his contemporaries to learn, in good time, the lessons which the past history of the state had to teach.

We have also a number of genuine prophecies which admit us into Jeremiah's inner nature.

They add that in the next year Jeremiah's scribe Baruch read the prophecies of Jeremiah first to the people assembled in the Temple, then to the " princes," and then to the king, who decided his own future policy by burning Baruch's roll in the brazier.

Conceivably enough the story of Jeremiah's journey to Egypt (or Mizrim) may have been imagined to supply a background for the artificial prophecies ascribed to Jeremiah in chs.

The first of these sense-divisions deals only with narratives regarding the reign of Nebuchadrezzar and his supposed son Belshazzar, while the second section consists exclusively of apocalyptic prophecies.