Speak to Zerubbabel, governor of
Judah, saying, I will shake the heavens and the earth; And I will overthrow the
throne of kingdoms, and I will destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the
heathen; and I will overthrow the chariots, and those that ride in them; and
the horses and their riders shall come down, every one by the sword of his
brother. In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, will I take thee, O Zerubbabel,
my servant, the son of Shealtiel, saith the Lord, and will make thee as a
signet: for I have chosen thee, saith the Lord of hosts. (Hag 2:21-23)
. . . we have exceedingly few cases of vaticinium ex eventu
in the Hebrew Bible before the third or second century B.C. How perilous this type
of reasoning may be can be shown in the case of Jeremiah's prophecies of a seventy-year
desolation of Judah (25:12; 29:10, etc.). In several passages in the inscriptions
of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria nearly a century before the fall of Jerusalem, he
states that after Sennacherib's destruction of Babylon in 689, Marduk, chief god
of Babylon, had intended to allow his city to remain in ruins for seventy years,
but the merciful god changed his mind and turned the cuneiform writing of "seventy"
upside down, when it automatically became "eleven" (vertical wedge + corner
wedge becoming corner wedge + vertical wedge). That "eleven" was only
approximately right did not disturb the Babylonian priests any more than the fact
that "seventy" was an inexact estimate of the period during which Judah
and Jerusalem lay waste worried the Jews. It thus follows that "seventy years"
was a recognized pattern for the period of destruction of cities or countries whose
gods still remained interested in their people.
It should be emphasized that fulfilment of prophecies was only one
important element in the validation of a "true" Prophet, and that it was
not always essential, as illustrated by the apparent failure of Haggai's prophecy
against the Persian Empire (2:21 f.). More important still
was the moral and religious content of a Prophet's message. Moreover, the Prophets
did not always follow a definite pattern; sometimes they undoubtedly shared in
the capacity for intuitive grasp of wide fields of perception which has characterized
certain figures of the last 250 years, at least in occasional moments of exaltation.
We need refer only to the famous prophecies of the future of Germany and France
by Heinrich Heine and Leon Bloy, or to the fantastic previsions of future technology
by Jules Verne, or to the glimpses into the future on the part of Emanuel Swedenborg
and Ellen White. It was no vaticinium ex eventu when Jules Verne described
the giant submarine Nautilus, operated by solar power, ninety years before the launching
of the U.S. submarine by the same name, powered by nuclear energy. On the other
hand, it is no accident that logically trained specialists are seldom able to predict
the future; this is notoriously true of physical scientists, historians, and other
academic folk. (William Foxwell Albright, From the Stone Age to
Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process [2d ed.; Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957], 18-19, emphasis in bold added)