It seems to me that it can’t be used as evidence the prophecy is invalid. Perhaps all these unfulfilled things might one day happen in short time of one another and seem very impressive. In my opinion generally, these sorts of open ended prophecies lose points for vagueness. But they are specific enough, if say an earthquake shifts the lay of the land, that the red sea may be destroyed, and the Nile and Euphrates come onto entirely different courses after drying up. My knowledge of plate tectonics makes it an academic question, we know it could happen for this reason, and if I say it will happen and it does, no one thinks I am in touch with God, after all, nearly everybody knows a little of plate tectonics.
But the fact that Isaiah did not know about plate tectonics leaves a gaping question, if one day an earthquake destroys the Nile Euphrates and Red Sea, how did he know? Perhaps he saw an earthquake one day, saw a small body of water, and reasoned one day it will happen to a larger body?
Another poster suggested, outside the O.P. that any prophecy that seems fulfilled in the past is worthless, too.
Except, it can’t be used as evidence the prophecy is valid either. And also it seems unlikely to me that Isaiah would be setting it so far in the future. How’s that comfort anybody? To go back to our occupied France example, lets say you tell one of the occupied Frenchmen. “Those Germans that are persecuting us? Don’t worry. God’s on top of this one. Sometime, more than 2500 years from now, Germany is going to be a barren wasteland.”
Or, if, you know, after 9/11 happened, George Bush had gone on TV and said, "Our nation has just been attacked by forces belonging to the terrorist group al-Qaeda. And you have my word, we will wipe al-Qaeda out for what they did to us. We have a plan to make sure that sometime in the next 3000 years, al-Qaeda will be no more.
I just don’t see that that’s really going to comfort many people. Germany is an oppressor now and in the near future, and they want to see the Germans get theirs now. They don’t want to wait 2500 years for Germany to be punished. Americans want something done about al-Qaeda now, not 3000 years from now. It just doesn’t make sense to assume he’s making predictions of an unknown future date.
I think he’s meaning when he says that, if I were to come up to you today and say, “God has told me that on December 7, 1941, Japan will strike at Pearl Harbor.”, that’s not very impressive.
I don’t think Isaiah claimed that the entire Red Sea will disappear. It was more like some well known area of Red Sea near the coast will get eliminated, or something like that.
Captain Amazing is correct at observing that this does not sound like an “interesting” claim - not to the people of Isaiah’s time and not to us right now. But hey, this stuff was not being written for maximum entertainment value. Assuming that Isaiah was for real, God must have had His reasons for announcing these changes to Red Sea geography beforehand.
Captain Amazing is not correct in saying that prophecies about events centuries after the prophet’s time are of no use to anybody. They can certainly be of big use to people who happen to live in the interesting times that they refer to. E.g. if Isaiah 45 prophecy was well known among Jews in Babylon before Cyrus crushed Babylonians in the battle of Opis, it would have been pretty useful knowledge, right? Like don’t invest in doing business with the existing regime, because a regime change is coming right up . Or, looking at issues closer to modernity, if the shit described in Ezekiel 38 starts happening (hard to miss stuff, I would say), the prophecy of the outcome of that war will probably get to be popular reading in Israel.
Yes, I know the arguments against it, but Daniel 9:24-27, predicting the arrival & killing of the Messianic Prince 483 years after the Persian decree to rebuild Jerusalem, and the subsequent desecration of the Temple & destruction of the City seals the deal for me.
And Ezekiel 37- the restoration of Israel from global dispersion & near slaughter may be in the process of fulfillment. Of course, that would mean that a Northern-led invasion, its subsequent routing & a Davidic leadership with a rebuilt Temple are still to come (Ezek 38 onward). (I am open to this whole prophecy referring to the Restoration under the Persians with Haman as Gog also.)
There are no objections to the authorship of 2 Kings 19:22.
This passage attributes the phrase “Holy One of Israel” to Isaiah, and it is the only place in the Bible where this phrase is attributed to another person by an outside witness.
This is an evidentiary argument. With evidence, I do not need to employ Occam’s razor. I believe the evidence shows that the second portion of Isaiah was written by Isaiah. The presumption that Isaiah is unified because it claims no other idea is backed up by evidence of 2 Kings and Josephus. Nothing but speculation is presented that Josephus specifically made up something he didn’t know. I may enjoy the same or similar speculations about Josephus, but speculation is not evidence. I tend to believe that Josephus may have been recounting oral stories.
With this in mind, I conclude the limited portions of Isaiah 45 identify Cyrus the Great with a high degree of specificity, as well as his actions in liberating the Hebrews from bondage under Babylon. I do not find Isaiah’s relevant statements to be mundane observation. This appears to be a valid predictive prophecy. I do not see how Isaiah could have known.
While somewhat arbitrary, I give it a 95% likelihood of being valid. I reserve 5% because Isaiah said a lot of other things relevant to this prophecy, and I have no way of knowing.
Any poster is invited to suggest another supposed prophecy for consideration. Please post the text of the predictive element, and any evidence that it happened.
I’d have had to apply Ockham’s razor and come to the opposite conclusion but for a lack of anyone showing evidence 2 Kings has a questioned authorship.
You made post after post saying that you don’t find scholarship based on higher criticism convincing. But suddenly, wonder of wonders, you come to your “objective conclusion” (which I miraculously prophesied after reading your first post) because Second Isaiah uses the same phrase as 2 Kings.
By the same logic, the Book of Mormon must have been written by Moses, because it says “and it came to pass” about every third sentence.
If somebody is writing after Isaiah, and wants what he is writing to be accepted as being from Isaiah, don’t you think he would stick in some phrases that made him sound like Isaiah?
Ah, the old “it’s wrong because it is inconsistent, but it’s also wrong because it is consistent” I want my cake but I’ll eat it too reasoning.
No, I wouldn’t think the book of Mormon was written by Moses because the Book of Mormon does not claim such an identity.
The thread asks the question “Is prophecy valid?” All the scholarship presented begins with an assumption that prophecy is not valid, therefore to apply it to the question at hand is begging the question, or circular reasoning, which would lead us into “It can’t be prophecy, because Isaiah was written after the fact. How do we know Isaiah is written after the fact? It had to have been, because prophecy does not happen.”
You’re correct that such reasoning does not demonstrate the invalidity of prophesy.
However, there remains the task of proving the validity of prophesy. Even if we could say with confidence exactly what claims are made in the book of Isiah and when they were made, it’s unclear to me how we establish prophesy when lucky guesses (or even educated guesses) are more probable.
Your argument really only makes sense if Isaiah had made multiple guesses on the name.
When the ratio of “guesses” to hits is 1:1, or 100%, the probability is high that it is not “guessing.” Ockham’s razor and other reasoning techniques are presumptions to be used when there is no evidence or the evidence for and against weighs evenly. It is not to be used in the stead of evidence, for such a reasoning says that your educated guess of what is more likely is more reliable than evidence. This is not so.
To keep it simple, the alleged prophesy is that the author of Isaiah predicted the rise of Cyrus the Great and some of his actions? Thing is, I can think of several alternate explanations that don’t require the extremely impressive (if it exists) gift of prophesy, one of them being, for better or worse, guessing. It need not be wholly blind guessing - whoever wrote Isaiah may have been very well-versed in contemporary politics and had reason to expect (or just reasons to hope) the next Persian king to be relatively nice to the Hebrews, coupled with selection bias in that had the book of Isaiah been completely wrong, it could have long-since been ignored and forgotten.
So long as you ignore evidence, any reasoning is possible, pretty much.
If you will show that the majority of Hebrew prophets who attempted to predict the future were ignored but Isaiah wasn’t, I will consider selection bias. So far as I know, all the prophets who attempted to predict the future are represented in the Hebrew scripture. Do you know of any who weren’t? This is a necessity before arguing selection bias.
Well, based on what I’ve gleaned from this thread:
Claim: Isaiah predicted the name and actions of a future Persian king.
Possibility #1: Isaiah had the gift of prophesy.
Possibility #2: The book of Isaiah was (in whole or in part) written or rewritten during or after the events described, not necessarily by Isaiah himself, about whom details are sketchy.
Possibility #3: The book of Isaiah does indeed contain predictions, but of a more prosaic sort such as any politically-aware person might make about the next few decades, such predictions may or may not come true.
Possibility #4: Numerous predictions may have been made during that period, as numerous people today make various predictions about our own near-future. Isaiah’s apparent accuracy is due in large part through chance, and was preserved. Various other less-accurate predictions were not.
And there are other possibilities as well. As far as I know, all of them are sufficient to explain the phenomena, but the likelihood of #1 is far more remote than #2, #3 or #4 (as well as requiring some sort of mechanism to explain how prophesy works, while the others are readily explainable as prosaic human actions), so it will not be my preferred hypothesis. I’m not sure why it would be anyone’s, unless they had a pre-existing desire to believe that prophesy existed, though I remain open to other explanations.
You are suggesting that you start with a presumption. Presumptions are ok but they should not be used to exclude evidence, and do NOT prove evidence to be wrong.
In this case there is no evidence that a)Isaiah guessed many many times b)that other people wrote the book after the fact.
On the other hand, there IS evidence that Isaiah wrote the book when the book claims to have been written. This pretty much leaves 1 and 3.
I’m not claiming the prophesy idea is wrong (although I comfortably could, I figure, with little fear of contradiction). I’m simply pointing out that it’s less plausible than several alternative suggestions.
Well, there’s no evidence that prophesy exists, either, or at least none that I’m aware of (and you can’t use Isaiah itself to prove that Isaiah is prophesy, I gather). And if I have to choose between someone making educated guesses about future politics and someone having the actual power of prophesy, the former is a much simpler and more plausible explanation.
Even the so-called Deutero-Isaiah chapters? Well, if I had to bet on #1 or #3, I’ll go with #3, barring some evidence that rules out #3, or additional hypothesis #5, #6, #7 etc. that seem more plausible than #3, because at the moment #1 has nothing going for it that I’d call evidence.
that they refer to. E.g. if Isaiah 45 prophecy was well known among Jews in Babylon before Cyrus crushed Babylonians in the battle of Opis, it would have been pretty useful knowledge, right? Like don’t invest in doing business with the existing regime, because a regime change is coming right up 
. Or, looking at issues closer to modernity, if the shit described in Ezekiel 38 starts happening (hard to miss stuff, I would say), the prophecy of the outcome of that war will probably get to be popular reading in Israel.