ventin

Hi, i am new here and have been reading many difficult questions posted by the learned atheist here. Indeed i dont have all the answers as well. i know this would seem a feeble attempt to convince u all that the Bible is God's word. But just hold ur horses yet. For me, the strongest evidence that there is a God and this God is reveal in the Bible is through creation, fulfilled prophecies and sciences unknown to men then turned out to be true today.

Prophecies: can be divided to general and specific to Israel. i would just like to limit to Israel for now. how about that?


1. God warned the Jews that if they disobey Him, He would destroy their nation and scattered them into all the earth.

2. Deut 28: 64 And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other;...

3. Levi 26:33 And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.

4. The Assyrians destroyed the Northern kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C.

5. The Babylonians, under the king Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed the Southern Kingdom of Israel between 606 BC - 586BC. However, they returned to their land after a 70 year captivity in Babylon.

6. The Romans, under General Titus, destroyed Israel in AD 70. Some one million Jews perished in that destruction. They never came back until 1948.

some questions to ponder:
1. Where does Jaffa orange come from?
2. How is it possible for Israel to be rebuilt?
3. Yet the walls of Jerasalem is not built by Isralites. Who built it then?
4. Jerasalem has 8 gates. Why is it of all gates, only the Eastern Gate is sealed?
5. The Hebrew language is revived after being lost so many years? The Israelites started speaking Hebrew. During Jesus time, Aramic. During Roman rule, Greek. Now? back to Hebrew?

ok... better not drag too long

GunnerJ

This should really be in Biblical Crit. and Arch.

Orpheous99

Most prophecies are written in such a broad way that they can be made to predict just about anything you want, some are self-fullfilling, and others are made up long AFTER the event in question.

DamagedGoods

This is something I've wondered about before: although untold thousands of religious sects have formed through the ages, most of them have faded away, never to be heard from again. I'm sure all of them had wonderful prophecies about the things that would happen in the future.

So for every group like the Jews or Christians, how many thousands of groups (and their prophecies) have vanished away? I'm sure that if another group had survived to today, they would have preserved (and/or manufactured) prophecies that would appear to have "been fulfilled." It's almost like they win just for showing up.

not a theist

I would be glad to start a dialogue with you on anything that you believe are fulfilled prophecies.

It is my contention that almost all of the alleged prophecies of the Bible either:
a.) Are not prophecies at all.
or
b.) Are sufficiently vague that they could refer to many people or events.
or
c.) Occured after the fact of the event to which they are thought to be a prophecy of.
or
d.) Could have been fulfilled by someone familiar with the prophecy by deliberate action.
or
e.) Were easily predicted.
or
f.) Were not fulfilled at all.

Are most of the nations that existed 2000+ years ago still in existence? Also, please quote the exact passages to which you refer.


The Assyrians also destroyed other peoples and carted off the inhabitants of those lands.

And...

the Romans also destroyed the Carthaginians. So? What's your point.

Your point is?

Please be more specific on what prophecies you think are being fulfilled and on how you think they are being fulfilled.

[ December 24, 2001: Message edited by: not a theist ]</p>

SingleDad

To understand claims of "prophecy", we should first have a good definition of the term. It seems to me that to qualify as prophecy, a statement must fulfill the following criteria:

• The statement must be a prediction of the future.
• It must be neccessary that the prediction could be made only by supernatural means.
• It must be determinable that the prediction actually came true.
• It must be provable that the prophecy must be non-self-fulfilling; that it was proven true independently of its own existence.

For instance if I were to predict that the North would win the Civil War, that would not be a prophecy; we must be convinced that the prediction occured before the event.

If I were to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, that would not be a prophecy; ordinary foreknowledge adequately explains my prediction. We also have the Jeanne Dixon Effect: If a lot of people are making a lot of fairly random guesses, and only the ones that later prove true are preserved, we have no way of knowing if just pure chance (another adequate naturalistic explanation) accounts for their supposed accuracy.

If I were to predict that a thousand years from now (a future unknowable to me now), "some guy were going to do something", my 'prophecy' is so vague as to be indeterminate.

If I were to predict that some member of this board would post a message consisting only of "Yabba Dabba Do" (a prior, surprising and determinable prediction), and some II member were to do so merely because he or she has read this 'prophecy', one would not be overly impressed with my supernatural powers of prediction.

I will leave the verification of prior prediction to the professional historians, but we can look at this so-called 'prophecy' according to the other criteria.

The time period in question was one of continual conquest and genocide, with the survivors scattering. It seems natural that one could predict the substantial possibility that one's nation would indeed be conquered and dispersed.

It also seems likely that other prophecies existed to the effect that Israel would endure forever. It seems obvious that any could prophesy out of one side of his mouth that the nation would be destroy and out of the other that the nation would endure. No matter what happened, he would have been right.



A U.N. Resolution and, labor of millions and billions of dollars of support from the West, especially the United States, and one of the best trained and well-equipped armies in the world. Nothing surprising or supernatural about that.



They wanted to put the couch in front of it?

The Torah is written in Hebrew. The Jews obviously put quite a lot of investment into their history and traditions. The modern use of Hebrew is entirely unsurprising.

[ December 24, 2001: Message edited by: SingleDad ]</p>

Apikorus

Some responses to ventin's opening post:

1. Israel and Judah were thoroughly minor kingdoms which never achieved any real prominence in the ancient near east. Compared with giants like Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, they were well-nigh insignificant. Had the Israelites not produced the Hebrew Bible, they would be little more than an archaeologist's curiosity today, comparable in importance to other minor ancient kingdoms such as Hamath and Moab. Living at a crossroads and between powerful states in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Israelites knew that their tiny nation could be obliterated at any moment. It is hardly surprising, then, that the biblical authors wielded this palpable uncertainty as a club in order to incentivize obedience to Yahweh.

2. "Core Deuteronomy" (chapters 5-28) is virtually universally recognized among bible scholars to be of late Iron II provenance. It is conventionally dated to ca. 630 BCE and is believed to be the scroll that Josiah's high priest, Hilkiah, "found" in the Temple (see 2 Kings 22). This identification is based on the remarkable similarity between many regulations described in the Book of Deuteronomy and the description of Josiah's reforms in 2 Kings 23 (cult centralization in particular). Thus, by the time Deuteronomy 28 was written, the Northern Kingdom had already been conquered and many of its inhabitants resettled.

3. Leviticus 26 comes at the end of a coherent unit known as the "holiness code", the source-critical siglum for which is H. Most critical scholars, starting with Wellhausen himself, have assigned H a postexilic provenance (i.e. it was written after 586 BCE).

4. Indeed.

5. While there is some emotional attachment to the figure of 70 years from Jeremiah, history is not quite so obliging. The destruction of Jerusalem came about in two phases, in 597 BCE and 586 BCE. Judeans who had been exiled to Babylonia came under Persian rule in 539 BCE, when Cyrus the Great took Babylon. The Edict of Cyrus, which allowed exiled populations to return to their native lands, followed in 538 BCE.

6. The Temple was destroyed in 70 CE and the Jews were emphatically defeated. But there was another revolt during the 130's under bar Kokhba.


Bonus Questions
---------------

1. Jaffa oranges originally come from Portugal. The trees were imported to Palestine in the 18th century.

2. With much blood, sweat, tears, and money. However, biblical Israel is not what has been rebuilt. There is no Davidic ruler.

3. Which walls are you talking about?

4. The eastern gate was sealed by the Arabs in the early 9th century. There are some charming Jewish traditions about mashiach ben david entering through that gate. In the Fall of 1999, a fundamentalist Christian group, expecting Jesus to make his triumphant return through the very same gate at the stroke of midnight of December 31, erected a camera to continuously monitor the eastern gate. Needless to say, nobody passed through.

5. The Hebrew language has been used for liturgical purposes by Jews continuously since biblical times. It also had been used in medieval rabbinic writings, in poetry, sometimes in correspondence, and in other ways as well - all prior to its resurgence as a national spoken language in early 20th century Palestine.

Cheers!

[ December 24, 2001: Message edited by: Apikorus ]</p>

copernicus

Actually, despite the traditional view that it was all due to the perseverance of Ben-Yehuda, the reality is that Hebrew was a good compromise between the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi culture and the non-Yiddish Sephardi culture. The unfortunate result of Hebrew's rebirth was the death of a great literary language--Yiddish.

Apikorus

Had the Holocaust never transpired and European Jewry not been decimated and resettled (largely in Israel), Yiddish might not have experienced such a precipitous decline. Nowadays you learn Yiddish only if you are a yeshiva bochur. Ech.

Ladino, which has a less distinguished history than Yiddish, is also virtually extinct.

[ December 25, 2001: Message edited by: Apikorus ]</p>

bgponder

To Ventin: Welcome!

To all posting--thanks, I had faith that the learned would jump on this while I was yet formulating my answers. I will add what I have come to regard as my obvious axiom of prophecy (I do not doubt that this has been formally stated in many places heretofore): The only true prophecy is that which is exact and unknown, such that it cannot be generally and/or metaphorically applied, and/or intentionally manifested by those with an interest in the prophecy. Of course, barring supernatural intervention...

Peace, Joy in the Season and 2002--Barry