1. Discuss the three beginning questions of prophesy. The three beginning questions of prophesy are: (1) who could be a prophet among all the Israelites, (2) how could the Israelites know a genuine prophet, and (3) what is prophesy? Some common answers are that a prophet would have to be of a particular gender, age, training (mentorship), and/or family. This is consistent with being a priest because one have to be a Levite of the family of Aaron. However, the Bible says that a prophet simply had to be called by God. In Amos 7:14-15, Amos, from the southern kingdom, told Amaziah in the north that he was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. Amaziah had told him to go back to the south to be a prophet, and the above was Amos' response. Amos was not a trained prophet, but he was a called prophet. The Israelites could recognize a genuine prophet if their prediction came true every time. But the person also had to have the right content to their message. Deuteronomy 18:22 discussed the accuracy aspect, and Deuteronomy 13:1-5 discussed content by saying that a prophet could not endorse idolatry. Most people think that prophesy is prediction, but it is more. It is foretelling (prediction) and also forthtelling (proclamation - calling people to repent). One way to forthtell is to foretell.

2. Discuss an example of prophesy. In Isaiah 30:2 and Isaiah 31:1, the prophet pronounces woes on those during Hezekiah's day when they talked about going down to Egypt for safety. But the warning is more forthtelling than foretelling. In like manner, Jeremiah wrote about Babylon coming, but he also tried to move the people to repent.

3. Discuss the overlap of prophesy and poetry. Most prophesy is poetic. Prophesy is image "oriented", where images are dreams, visions, and burdens. A non-historical word picture (Isaiah 5:1-7) tells about a man that planted a vineyard and cared for it. But it would not produce, so he tore it down. This story was an Old Testament parable about Israel. A historical illustration word picture (Isaiah 51:3) is an instance when the prophet is describing the great blessings of the future. Prophets look back to past events, like creation, paradise (the Garden of Eden), the flood and Sodom, Egypt for bondage and deliverance, wandering in the wilderness, and Joshua's conquests to use them as parallels.

4. Provide some principles for interpreting the prophesy genre. First, the time element is often unknown due to the vision nature, the so-called mountaintop experience. The prophet look to the event but cannot see the valley's distance. It is not known. Sometimes, the mountain tops are very close and many tops can be seen. Sometimes, God lets the prophet see the multiple events, but sometimes, He does not. Sometimes, it just looks like one mountain. For example, Zephaniah talks about general judgment, but it actually covers several judgments. Second, though worded in extremes, God often allows for repentance (absolutism). In Jeremiah 22, the prophesy for Jeconiah does not come true because the king apparently repented. In Jonah 3:4, Nineveh was not destroyed because they repented. Adding the qualification of repentance is called a "dynamic equivalent". Zephaniah 1:3 is a third example. Third, prophets often use non-verbal communication to supplement their verbal communications. Non-verbal cues often tip off the receiver about the communication. In Jeremiah 28, the prophet wears a yoke to symbolize Babylon coming on Jerusalem. In Jeremiah 16:2, he was deprived of a family because the coming judgment on Jerusalem would destroy families anyway. In Ezekiel 24:15-24, the prophet was told to not mourn the loss of his wife because his action would show the lack of remorse by God for the coming fall at the hands of the Babylonians.

				Tom of Bethany

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