God’s Truth
Biblical Prophecies 1—Prophecies about the Jews
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Prophecies about the Jews
Phibber starts aiming to refute criticisms of biblical prophesy. One such criticism is that the reason prophecies in the bible seem to come true is that—like those in astrology pages—they are so general that they cannot be other than true. In reply, Phibber says far from being general, though many people might dislike Jews—and “that is beside the point”, Phibber tells us—the bible has foretold “the entire history of the Jewish people” since the crucifixion of Jesus.
Phibber says he will explain it all to us. Regrettably, when he does, he proves his ignorance—or is it deceit?—in almost every line.
He begins innocently enough, “In the days of Jesus Christ there was a thriving Jewish nation in the land of Israel”. Really? A “thriving” nation? Let the doctor remove the word “thriving” and we could agree but then he would be just saying that Jews lived in Israel. The word “thriving” is the whole point of the sentence. Thriving means prosperous, successful, growing vigorously, flourishing. It takes some considerable creativity with the truth to apply these words to Israel then, and our tutor tells a different story only a few sentences later.
For most of the previous five hundred years the country had been occupied by foreign powers, Persians, Egyptians, Syrians and Romans in succession. When the foreigners were not ruling, it was because long and costly wars had been fought against them. And between periods of foreign occupation the country was in civil war. Civil war had eventually been stopped by the Roman puppet King Herod. He was hated by most people although he had brought in some measure of relief with his schemes of public works like the construction of the Temple. Nevertheless, the people were taxed both by their own ruling class of priests and by the occupying power, and many had been forced off the land to become day labourers. Many more had been carried to distant lands or had chosen to go there to escape the chaos in Palestine.
It might seem relatively unimportant that Israel was not thriving but this minor untruth shows that the doctor typically lies when describing the time of Jesus and the reason is, if not simply ignorance, that the truth belies the gospel setting. Phibber is already showing us God’s Truth.
Phibber does tell us that hundreds of years earlier the country had been independent, but “long before Jesus was born” it had become part of the Roman Empire. I wonder if he is reading the same bible as the rest of us. When Jesus’s birth is described in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, we are told that it occurred either in the reign of Herod or during the taxation of Quirinius. The latter was in 6 AD the year that the Romans took over the country of Judaea. The former ended in 4 BC just ten years earlier. Whenever Jesus was born, the Roman occupation did not begin “long before” it. Almost certainly it began after his birth.
Doubtless, Phibber meant the invasion of Judaea by Pompey in 63 BC but the kingdom of the Jews remained a client state nominally independent until 6 AD. I can see little point in this error if it is deliberate and so take it to be inadvertent. Phibber, in other words, is a careless writer, if not a careless scientist.
A Habit of Rebelling
Phibber continues that the Jews did not like being under the foreign yoke and had a habit of rebelling. After the rebellion of 135 AD Jerusalem was razed by the Romans and the Jews dispersed from Palestine. The Jews were then harassed all over Europe for the next eighteen centuries culminating in Hitler’s holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel after World War II.
This is all indisputable but who did the harassing? None other than the Christians! Strangely, Phibber does not say this. The point is, according to Phibber, that the Jewish scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, prophesied it all to the last detail. But he depends upon us not looking to the texts he quotes. When we do, we find it is the critics who are correct, not Phibber.
Looking carefully at some prophecies we find that the bible actually offers the Jews a choice of two opposites. This the accounts in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, quoted among others by our tutor, are warnings by God to the Jews. In essence, God says:
If you are good then a long list of happy events will occur. If you are bad then a long list of unhappy events will occur.
The happy events are the sort of things that happened when the Jews were independent and relatively prosperous, supposedly under David and Solomon. The unhappy events were what happened at other times when the Jews were oppressed and carried into captivity. So the Jewish scriptures offer both of two mutually exclusive possibilities to choose from, if you care to consider them as prophecies. One or the other was bound to be true.
In Leviticus 26, Moses prophesied that the land would lie desolate, an astonishing thing for a “land of milk and honey”, Phibber tells us. He doesn’t tell us that God promises rains in their season, fruitfulness, peace and plenty for the Jews in the self-same passage. God is again offering the Jews a choice of outcomes.
Anyway, if any country is depopulated and its land is neglected, it will become desolate. When the Babylonians captured the land of Judah not all Jews were carried off but the skilled workers and administrators were. The depleted and deskilled population which remained could not cope and so the land fell into desolation. Phibber tries to counter this, assuring us the conquerors would want to take full advantage of the pleasant land they had conquered. But the conquerors of the time lived in one of the most fertile and agriculturally advanced places in the world. Why should they have bothered about a tiny country, half the size of Wales, only partly fertile valley or coastal plain, half of the rest being desiccated wilderness, and the other half being limestone mountain crags?
Historical Accounts
Which brings us to another criticism of scriptural prophesies—they were actually historical accounts of what had already happened to the Jews when they were written, but applied falsely to similar later events. For example, most Christians and their potential converts do not know, and, Phibber, our scientific instructor fails to inform them that the Jews had already been scattered by the invasions of the Assyrians in the eighth century BC when the Jewish kingdom of Israel was destroyed and ten of the twelve tribes of Israel, the bible tells us, disappeared from history, and again in the sixth century when the Babylonians invaded the other Jewish kingdom of Judah and carried off the best elements of its population.
Much Jewish scripture bewails these calamities caused by the wrath of God over the transgressions of his people. The bits of scripture Doctor Phibber quotes are some of the many bits describing what had already happened—the people would be scattered, the land would be desolate, the Children would return.
They would return because Cyrus the Persian had defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Israelites, exiled lamenting by the Rivers of Babylon, to return to Palestine in 539 BC. The prophesies the analytical mind of our doctor thinks apply to the history of the Jews since the crucifixion were actually written about the real history of the Jews hundreds of years before. Scholars know this, even Christian scholars, but it spoils a good story to tell it to gullible congregations.
Our instructor, Phibber, concludes:
It is absolutely certain that the prophecies about the Jews were written hundreds of years before they were fulfilled.
Hundreds of years after… would have been more honest. Phibber says “fantastic untruths” have been told about the bible. He should say that again!
Sins of Omission
As we know, there are sins of omission and sins of commission. The former are no less absent in the crimes of our Christian doctor in persuading us of God’s Truth in the bible. Thus Phibber quotes Jeremiah 30:11 to show us that God had prophesied that he would not destroy Israel and he quotes Hosea 3:4 to show us that God promised that the Children of Israel would return.
In Jeremiah God says:
I will not make a full end of thee.
Nor did He. The Jews today are still a “thriving” community in the world—successful prophecy.
However, in the same verse God says:
I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have scattered thee.
Oh dear! A seriously wrong one! The major nations whither the Jews were scattered in the last two thousand years still exist, indeed, perhaps the main one, the USA, is the most powerful country in the world. However all the nations to which the Jews had been scattered before Jeremiah’s “prophecy” have been destroyed—Assyria, Babylonia, the Persian Empire—all gone!
As for the quotation from Hosea—the reference is not to the Children of Israel having no country of their own and returning from a global scattering but of their returning to the fold of God after consorting with false gods. Even the most negligent bible reader would not have missed that had he read the quoted passage. Phibber seems remarkably ignorant or deliberately does not tell us the truth.
Other passages Phibber cites are Ezekiel 11:17 and 36:24:
Thus saith the Lord God, I will even gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel… For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.
and Jeremiah 30:10:
For, lo, I will save thee from afar, and thy seed from the land of their captivity, and Jacob shall return, and shall be in rest, and be quiet, and none shall make him afraid.
In each case, God promises to restore the Jews to Israel. All however pertain to the return of the Jews from captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah 30:10 is explicit about this, referring to “the land of their captivity”. Ezekiel goes on to the famous bones passage, a reference to the Persian custom of leaving corpses to be picked by birds so that the earth is not defiled, and again serving to indicate that the prophet meant Babylon.
Ezekiel 11:17 is fully explained in verses 11:24 and 25 when the prophet is carried aloft to Chaldea (Babylonia) where he is able to speak to those in captivity of the hopeful visions he had seen.
Afterwards the spirit took me up, and brought me in a vision by the Spirit of God into Chaldea, to them of the captivity. So the vision that I had seen went up from me. Then I spake unto them of the captivity all the things that the Lord had shewed me.
Why does Phibber, an instructor in God’s Truth, feel it necessary to hide all this and instead tell us that it is “absolutely certain” that these prophecies were written hundreds of years before they were fulfilled?
Christians Denied Truth
Richard Holloway, Bishop of Edinburgh, has written:
Christians have often denied new truth because they thought it contradicted their loyalty to Christ.
Holloway means by “new truth” the discoveries of science which have rendered many traditional Christian beliefs false. But what about old truth, Bishop Holloway? These biblical truths are over two thousand years old but Christians convert them into modern lies by making them prophesy modern events. At least the Bishop is being honest in accepting that Christians “often” prefer something other than truth. It is God’s Truth, but if it is not true, it must be lies.
Our personal tutor in truth, Phibber, then mentions Deuteronomy 28:37 where the Lord, speaking through Moses, says:
Thou shalt become a proverb and a byword among nations,
a prophecy which cannot be gainsaid. Except that it was not a prophecy because, as we saw above, both sides of the coin were given so one must have become true, and because it referred to what had already happened when the Jews were carried off captive.
In the previous verse and verse 41 of the same chapter the period being referenced is clear:
Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them, for they shall go into captivity.
The honest scholar—there are some, perhaps even Christian ones—knows that the Jewish scriptures were written after the “return” from captivity in Babylon. So, although they appear to be the writings of prophets who lived centuries earlier, they were really the work of much later Jewish scribes who, knowing what had really happened in the intervening years could put it in the mouth of the prophet as a “successful” prophecy.
Incidentally Phibber is now using the expression “the Jewish exile”, an expression which means the exile to which we have been referring—that in Babylonia from 586 BC to 539 BC, and not the dispersion (diaspora) of the Jews in the last two thousand years, He does not explain the difference so an unwary reader would take it to mean the latter—as he intended.
Still on he goes briefly to mention that God promised to do away with the nations to which Israel was scattered. He tells us of one—the Roman Empire. Sure enough it has gone. But that’s enough of that—he skates quickly on. We have already noted that in two thousand years Jews have spent some time in many countries, the most powerful of which still exist. If our Christian doctor really believes this “prophecy” then God has still to destroy us all as he promised. Is that what a Christian really wants to say?
Now we come to further explanation of the passage Ezekiel 36:22-24, a prophecy, the learned Phibber tells us, just fulfilled when God brought the Jews back to their own land—despite their continuing ungodliness. He illustrates the point by narrating an anecdote in which a prominent Israeli statesman confesses modern Israelis have no strong religious convictions.
Phibber asks us what ordinary writer—I take it he means one not guided by the Holy Ghost—could say, about his countrymen, what the scribe had written—that they were sinners. But any bible scholar knows that the whole point of the post exilic rewriting of the legends of the Jews was to oblige them to be a holy people. The state that was built through the kindness of Cyrus, the Persian Emperor, was a theocracy. The priesthood were to rule on God’s behalf. The people were considered as sinners striving to live up to God’s image of them.
The scripture writers could write that God allowed them to return despite their sins precisely because the objective offered to the Children was to strive for perfection. God was perfect but the Children were not. Having suffered God’s wrath, they now had to try really hard to live up to God’s expectations. Our tutor had studied the bible all his adult life and yet apparently did not know these things. Is he qualified to tell us the truth? It seems not, but that is no disqualification from telling us God’s Truth.
Next Phibber informs us that the reason why Hitler failed to murder every living Jew was not because millions of people gave their lives in determining to defeat an evil tyrant but because, four thousand years before, a blind man blessed the wrong son through his wife’s and the son’s deception! Hitler was cursed because the blind Isaac had said to his younger son, Israel, who was pretending to be the elder son, Esau:
Cursed be everyone that curseth thee.
God was happy with the deception because He did not want Esau to be blessed but Israel. Nevertheless, Phibber tells us, God did not approve of the dishonest means of obtaining the blessing. So, he is telling us that dishonest means are justified by God although He did not “really” approve of them!
Anyway, nobody should have bothered fighting Hitler and his Nazi inhumanity—God would have sorted it all out because he had promised to—through this curse! Phibber gloats that when the Nazi party determined to wipe out the Jews, it signed its own death warrant because of blind Isaac’s blessing. The Nazi’s were directly challenging God. That is why they lost the war.
Not only that but the blessing of blind Isaac goes on to say:
He that blesseth thee blesseth be.
So because the German people paid reparations to Jews who had survived the death camps they were blessed and Germany finished up winning the peace! Never mind the injustice to all those who had fought the Nazis from the beginning. Never mind all those Christians who had persecuted the Jews for two millennia and apparently got away with it by finishing up the richest institutions and prelates on earth.
God’s curse applied to the Nazi’s who persecuted the Jews. Gods curse did not apply to the Christians who persecuted the Jews. God’s blessing applied to those “obliged” to compensate for their national madness but God’s blessing is withheld from those who resisted the evil from the start.
Well, God moves in peculiar ways…
