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Q&A: Knowing the Future in Samuel's Prophecy to Saul

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This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Knowing the Future in Samuel's Prophecy to Saul

Question

Hello Rabbi,
I saw that the Rabbi argues that a prophet does not really know the future, but rather makes an assessment based on the present situation. 

  1. According to this, is the prophet's uniqueness compared to all other human beings only that he calculates more moves ahead, is a better psychologist, a better geopolitical strategist, etc.? From the biblical verses it seems that the qualities required of a prophet are mainly spiritual. 
  2. Why is it that when a prophet is wrong, even just once, he is considered a false prophet and put to death? According to your approach, there cannot be such a test that distinguishes a true prophet from a false one.
  3. Your explanation seems applicable mainly to prophecies of the type of Jonah's, "Forty more days and Nineveh shall be overturned," where indeed this did not happen in reality and yet the prophet was still a true prophet—rather, he assessed based on the current situation, and the situation really changed. How can one explain prophecies like Samuel's prophecy to Saul immediately after he anoints him king, where he describes to him three things that are supposed to happen and they indeed happen?
  4. A follow-up to #1: what is the meaning of "prophecy ceased"? Why can't there be prophets today?

Thank you very much!

Answer

  1. He does not calculate; rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, calculates and reveals it to him. A person cannot calculate on that level.
  2. As part of the attempts to determine whether he is a true prophet, the Holy One, blessed be He, makes sure that his prophecy comes true (that is, He gives him such prophecies that He intervenes to bring them about).
  3. Either it came true even though it was not necessary for it to do so (good assessments also come true), or the Holy One, blessed be He, saw to it.
  4. Because the Holy One, blessed be He, does not reveal this information to people after the end of prophecy.

Discussion on Answer

Avishai (2021-04-18)

From your answers I understand that my assumption about your explanation of prophecy was incorrect. I assumed that because you argue that no one, including the Holy One, blessed be He, knows the future, and that this is necessary in order for there to be free choice. That can fit with prophecies that the Holy One, blessed be He, can make sure happen—when their fulfillment does not involve free choice, for example, that someone will die of illness. But how does this work in places where there is choice? For example, in Samuel's prophecy to Saul mentioned in the third question, that people will ask how he is doing and give him two loaves of bread?

Michi (2021-04-18)

If it was predetermined, then apparently free choice was removed there.

Copenhagen Interpretation (2021-04-18)

Regarding prophecies like Nineveh,

Researchers and commentators on the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) usually present it this way: in Deuteronomy 18 the law of the prophet is stated in general language, and Jeremiah, in his confrontation with Hananiah son of Azzur (chapter 28), makes an interpretive qualification only for positive prophecies.

However, the Holy One, blessed be He, does not send His word to a prophet for no reason. It therefore makes sense to understand it this way: every prophecy without exception is true in the plain sense of the law of the prophet. When a prophet is sent to warn a nation, the very fact of his mission teaches that his prophecy is presented as a conditional statement: if you do not repent, Nineveh will be destroyed. For that is precisely the success of his mission—that the people repent and the warnings are not fulfilled. But when the condition is not met (the antecedent of the conditional statement is false), the whole statement is true in any case. And all that remains is the counterfactual that says: if you had not repented, Nineveh would have been destroyed—which is indeed true, assuming this is a true prophet.

This explains all the cases in Scripture where even a negative prophecy must be fulfilled. As for Gog and Magog, where it says that God will force him to attack: "And I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army…" The context itself teaches that the prophecy is not presented as a conditional statement and therefore must be fulfilled. Likewise Moses regarding Korah and his congregation: "If these men die the common death of all men, and the common fate of all men befall them, then the Lord has not sent me"; or the words of Micaiah to Ahab: "And Micaiah said: If you return at all in peace, the Lord has not spoken through me. And he said: Hear, all you peoples"; and many more like these.

The Last Decisor (2021-04-18)

"He does not calculate; rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, calculates and reveals it to him"—how do you know what a person cannot do with his intellect?

In a moment you'll say that the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed the correct move to Kasparov, since it cannot be that a person can see and understand so far into the future.

Copenhagen Interpretation (2021-04-18)

No human being can know things like: Nebuchadnezzar will come and devastate Tyre, and afterward other nations will come and scrape the city's dust, its stones and its timbers into the sea, and make from it a surface from which fishermen will later come to fish. And then Nebuchadnezzar comes and devastates the city and turns it into a vassal, and after him Alexander the Great comes and builds a land bridge from the mainland to the island using the ruins of Tyre, which Alexander completely scraped into the sea in an operation unlike anything in any other conquest in history.

The Last Decisor (2021-04-18)

You'd be surprised—there are many who know things you think cannot be known.

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