As part of my daily scripture reading, I read Ezra 1-5. While reading Ezra 1:1, it struck me that there is strong evidence for the "Open Theist" understanding of how prophecy works:
Now in
the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth
of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of
Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also
in writing, saying,
In this verse, God acts in space-time to bring about the word he promised/prophesied through the prophet Jeremiah. For God, at least in this verse, prophecy was not simply him looking down the corridors of time and telling Jeremiah what would happen; instead, this prophecy was a promise by God to Jeremiah in how God would act in time and space to bring about his promised and, as a result, demonstrate his power, even using a pagan king (Cyrus) as an instrumental means of fulfilling such.
This jives rather well with my
proposed interpretation of 2 Nephi 3:15 (cf. Alma 37:18)--prophecy
being more of a promise of how God will act to demonstrate his abilities and
his fidelity than simply predicting what will happen. Further, such an approach
of God and his foreknowledge tends to result in a "simple
foreknowledge" view, which is super problematic (e.g., one who holds it,
if they were consistent, would have to argue God is determined by his
foreknowledge). On the problems of this model of foreknowledge, see William
Hasker, God, Time,
and Knowledge.
Interestingly, however, the prophecies
from Jeremiah, the 70-year prophecies, further supports contingent, not
exhaustive foreknowledge.
Assuredly, thus said the Lord of Hosts: Because you would not listen to My words, I am going to send for all the peoples of the north -- declares the Lord -- and for My servant, King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon, and bring them against this land and its inhabitants, and against all those nations roundabout. I will exterminate them and make them a desolation, an object of hissing -- ruins for all time . . . This whole land shall be a desolate ruin. And those nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. When the seventy years are over, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation and the land of the Chaldeans for their sins -- declares the Lord -- and I will make it a desolation for all time. (Jer 25:8-9, 11-12, 1985 JPS Tanakh)
For thus said the Lord: When Babylon's seventy years are over, I will take note of you, and I will fulfill to you My promise of favor -- to bring you back to this place. For I am mindful of the plans I have made concerning you -- declares the Lord -- plans for your welfare, not for disaster, to give you a hopeful future. When you call Me, and come and pray to Me, I will give heed to you. You will search for Me and find Me, if only you seek Me wholeheartedly. I will be at hand for you -- declares the Lord -- and I will restore your fortunes. And I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places to which I have banished you -- declares the Lord -- and I will bring you back to the place from which I have exiled you. (Jer 29:10-14, 1985 JPS Tanakh)
As Christopher M. Hays notes:
So, Jeremiah prophesied that Babylon would conquer Judaea and rule the Israelites and their land for seventy years, after which God promised to restore them. But did things turn out as planned? Not exactly. The Old Testament is littered with texts trying to account for the way in which subsequent history did not line up with Jeremiah’s timeline. Initially, the biblical authors needed to explain why the exile began to wind down too early; then, they had to reverse their tactics and explain why restoration from exile was taking too long; and finally some of them just threw up their hands and denied that the prophesied restoration was ever even inaugurated (however abortively or impartially). In short, the Hebrew Bible seems a veritable cacophony of voices trying to explain why things did not turn out as Jeremiah had prophesied. (Christopher M. Hays, “Prophecy: A History of Failure?” in Christopher M. Hays, ed. When the Son of Man Didn’t Come: A Constructive Proposal on the Delay of the Parousia [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016], 23-58, here, p. 26, italics in original)
While Hays’ entire essay should be read, as one example of the reinterpretation of Jeremiah’s original prophecy by Ezra-Nehemiah, he writes:
[The editor of Ezra-Nehemiah has to] explain why the restoration from exile had been so sluggish! Even seventy years after the invasion of Judea, things still hadn’t come together as Jeremiah had prophesied. Jeremiah 29:10-14 (cf. 25:11-12) promised that after the seventy years God would return the Israelites from exile and restore their fortunes. But it is not as if all the Israelites had returned to the Promised Land by the time the Temple had been rebuilt. Only a portion of the Israelite population hobbled back to Judaea under Cyrus’s decree (Ezra 2:1-65). When Ezra’s ministry began around 458 BCE, a solid 130 years into the exile, he was still only leading a modest contingent of Israelite exiles to Jerusalem (see Ezra 8:1-20), and even then, their travel required the gracious permission of King Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:11-28). A dozen years after that, Nehemiah undertook his ministry (Neh. 2:1-10), and he too lamented that the exile was far from over (Neh. 1:1-11). Thus, in about 446 BCE, some 141 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, Nehemiah was still in Persia; the walls of Jerusalem lay in ruins; and those who had supposedly escaped captivity remained “in great trouble and shame” (Neh. 1:3). To compound matters, Nehemiah the governor of Judah, Nehemiah’s predecessors had been exploiting and oppressing the Israelite residents. To put it mildly, the restoration of Israel after seventy years that Jeremiah promised had proven an overstatement; God’s “plans to prosper them and not to harm them” (Jer. 29:11) were not coming to pass as advertised.
So, the editor of Ezra-Nehemiah had to back-pedal. Although he wanted to read the prophecy of Jeremiah as being fulfilled in more-or-less literal, chronological terms, he was obliged to see 515 BC as the beginning of a fulfillment that remained quite incomplete even seventy additional years later. The editor of the book, summoning a pitiably quixotic optimism, seemed to hope that, with men such as Ezra and Nehemiah at the helm, Israel might steer a course toward complete restoration. (Ibid., 28-29, comment in square brackets added for clarification)
Commenting on another example of a biblical prophet reworking Jeremiah's prophecy, James L. Kugel wrote:
Such is further proof of the contingent nature of scriptural promises and prophecies.
Daniel the Re-interpreter
Certainly the best biblical example of the tendency of later prophetic figures to reinterpret the existing Scripture is found in the book of Daniel. Daniel relates that on one occasion he “consulted the books concerning the number of years that, according to the word of the LORD that had come to Jeremiah the prophet, were to be the end of Jerusalem’s desolation, seventy years” (Dan 9:2). This introduction in itself is surprising. The book of Jeremiah does indeed report that the prophet had said that in seventy years, the Babylonians would be punished and Israel’s fortunes would be restored (Jer 29:10; cf. 25:12)—and this, give or take a few years, is exactly what happened. So what was Daniel consulting the books for? Seventy years are seventy years. But then the angel Gabriel appears and informs Daniel on the real meaning of Jeremiah’s promise: he didn’t mean seventy years, but seventy groups of seven years apiece, making for a total of 490 years:
While I was still speaking, praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, setting my supplication before the LORD my God on my God’s holy mountain—while I was still in the midst of praying, the “man” Gabriel, whom I had seen in the earlier vision, was sent forth in flight and reached me at the time of the evening offering. He spoke to me enlighteningly and said: “Daniel, I have come to you now to give you insight and knowledge. A the start of your prayer, a word went out, and I have come to tell it . . . Seventy groups of seven years have decreed for your people and your holy city. (Dan 9:20-24)
As we have seen above, the notion of 490 years exactly was not unique in Second Temple Judaism, and the reason is not hard to find. Biblical law stipulates that the jubilee year is to come around once every forty-nine years (Lev 25:8); the number 490 is simply one jubilee multiplied by ten (which comes out to be the same as Daniel’s seventy “weeks of years” that is, the seventy units of sevens in Dan 9:24). So it came about that 490 years also appears here and there as a mega-unit of time in the Dead Sea . . .In any event, this last-cited passage from Daniel recalls a number of themes already seen above: (1) the prophets of old (in this case, Jeremiah) had prophesied, but them themselves didn’t understand the hidden message of their prophecies; (2) this in turn reflects the fact that most prophets are actually long-range predictors, their predictions having to do with times far distant from their own; (3) an angel (here, Gabriel) is needed to explain the significance of ancient prophet’s (here, Jeremiah’s) words . . .thereby also turning his book into yet another collection of long-range predictions, some of which had already occurred or where coming to pass in his own time. (James L. Kugel, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times [New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017], 252-53)
