Beyond that, in order to determine this more clearly (though still not conclusively), one would have to place the histories of all nations on an axis and see whether there is a reasonable pyramid with the Jewish people at its top, or whether it sits on an anomalous spike. If the spike is anomalous, then again this is not like a random result that just happened to come out the highest. But as I said, it’s hard to argue over impressions, especially when there is no real way to calculate it.

I understand. Thank you very much, Rabbi.

I didn’t understand.

If there are independent reasons to believe in the existence of the Creator, and then there comes an intelligent, humble, virtuous person, who has a tradition of an ancient revelation coherent with his words, and he claims to have been sent by that same Creator—and because of these circumstances the hypothesis arose, independently of the prediction, that the prophet speaks the truth—then on its face, the very fact that he says in God’s name a prediction that we would otherwise expect not to be fulfilled, and nevertheless it happens exactly as he said, constitutes confirmation for the hypothesis that the source of his messages is that same Creator.

So what didn’t you understand? You’re repeating what I said. At most, you add that the very willingness to take the risk, even before fulfillment, has some weight in assessing the credibility of the text. I partially agree, and I’ve written that here in the past as well, but its weight is not very great. Why? If it was fulfilled, then you don’t need the risk-taking; and if it wasn’t fulfilled, then the risk-taking says nothing. If there is doubt whether it was fulfilled or not—then maybe there is room for the factor of risk-taking. But even that is only if the prediction is very unambiguous (not like the various ancient oracles, or modern futurists in academia—who are nothing but oracles in disguise).

I was referring only to what was said, that “it’s hard to argue over an impression of this sort.” It sounds from that as though this is a matter of subjective assessment, but it seems self-evident that the apriori probability of observational data that fit the detailed prophecy about the history of the Jewish people until the end of days in Deuteronomy 28–32 is objectively greater in light of the hypothesis that Moses’ claim to prophecy is reliable (h1 below) than under its negation (h2), and this is not a matter of personal taste. Just like that, you take a nation, uproot it from its land, and scatter it throughout the world—that by itself is a recipe for extinction. There is no other nation to which something similar happened and which did not disappear. Certainly when one notes more and more additional details—for example, that it would have to remain small, that it would be endlessly persecuted, expelled from every place, that the conquering exiler would take masses of captives to Egypt in ships for sale, that it would be unknown to prior Jewish history, that it would come from far away, from the ends of the earth, and dozens of other strange details, and that in the end they would return to the land—and it all comes true.

In general, when O expresses an observation, h1 hypothesis 1, h2 hypothesis 2, and k background information,
if
P(O|h1 & k’) > P(O|h2 & k’)
then O favors/confirms h1 over h2.

As for the risk, it seems the practical significance is before the fulfillment. When a prophet takes a personal risk of being humiliated before the entire people, and in addition knows that the next day the king will gladly seize the opportunity to abuse him and put him to death (as in I Kings 22: “And Micaiah said: If you return at all in peace, the Lord has not spoken by me. And he said: Hear, all you peoples!”), that is a good reason to trust him already at the time the prophecy is uttered. But even after the confirmation, it is not entirely clear to me that the taking of risk has no significance. Popper saw importance in the very fact that theories withstand a high risk of refutation (according to calculations stemming from the prior theory), even after they have been confirmed, and in addition to the fact of confirmation.

I wrote that risk-taking matters only with regard to the situation before fulfillment, or when there is doubt. In the prophecies of the Torah or the prophets regarding redemption or the distant future, nobody is really taking a serious risk, and therefore it carries less weight.
As for general considerations, there is the issue of the amorphousness of prophecy and the possibility of interpreting it in different ways (the oracles), and that affects all the calculations you brought here. And that is definitely a personal matter.
The question is how special this really is, how unambiguous the prophecy is, and how many prophecies you are making (after all, if some are fulfilled and some are refuted, you can still come out looking okay), etc. etc. All this bears both on the taking of risk and the possibility of refutation, and of course also on examining the actual results (what was fulfilled and how much).
See very briefly here:
https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%A0%D7%91%D7%95%D7%90%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%9E%D7%9F-%D7%94%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%94-2/

It still seems that regarding most prophets who were respected figures already in their own lifetimes (Ezekiel, for instance), a clear refutation of a prophecy would have caused him to lose his status and esteem in the heritage of the people, and therefore would have been a kind of risk for him. In any case, what mainly wasn’t clear to me is what the difference is between this and Popper, who does seem to give significant weight to risk itself, and for whom that is what distinguishes scientific theories from non-scientific ones.

It is agreed and obvious that if there are amorphous elements, they reduce the confirmatory weight (if there is such a weight) of their fulfillment, and that there is room there for personal evaluation. (In a situation where some details of the prophecy were fulfilled and some were refuted, the whole prophecy would be refuted.) But in the prophecy of Moses under discussion, the matters are simple and clear, and there the emphasis is repeatedly placed on the fact that the Jewish people will be scattered and become wanderers throughout the world. Here one really has to uproot the plain meaning of the words in order to claim non-fulfillment. I collected here a considerable portion of the details, though not all of them, and every single one of them was fulfilled literally (some in an almost grotesque way) in the period from Rome’s conquest of Judea and its transformation into a client state in 63 BCE, through the exile, dispersion, and worldwide diaspora that followed:

1. “When you beget children and children’s children, and you have grown old in the land” (this will happen long after the entry into the land)

2. “The Lord will bring against you a nation from far away, from the end of the earth”

3. “A nation that neither you nor your fathers have known”

4. “A nation whose language you will not understand”

5. “A fierce-faced nation, which will show no regard for the old nor favor to the young”

6. “Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes… your donkey shall be stolen from before you… your sons and daughters shall be given to another people… and you shall serve your enemies… and he shall put an iron yoke upon your neck”

7. “The stranger who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower… he shall be the head and you shall be the tail”

8. “And he shall besiege you in all your gates until your high and fortified walls, in which you trusted, come down”

9. “And you shall eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and your daughters… in the siege and in the distress with which your enemy shall distress you”

10. “The Lord will bring you and your king whom you set over you… to a nation that neither you nor your fathers have known… and you shall be plucked from off the land that you are entering to possess”

11. “And the Lord shall bring you back to Egypt in ships, by the way whereof I said to you: You shall see it no more again”

12. “And there you shall sell yourselves to your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you”

13. “And the Lord shall scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth”

14. “And you shall be left few in number among the nations, where the Lord shall lead you”

15. “And among those nations you shall find no ease, and there shall be no rest for the sole of your foot; but the Lord shall give you there a trembling heart, failing of eyes, and languishing of soul”

16. “And you shall become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all peoples where the Lord shall lead you”

17. “And there you shall serve other gods, which neither you nor your fathers have known”

18. “And your life shall hang in doubt before you; and you shall fear night and day, and shall have no assurance of your life”

19. “Then the Lord your God will restore your captivity and have compassion on you, and will return and gather you from all the peoples… to the land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it”

There are also symbolic details, such as “as the eagle swoops,” meaning that the conquering nation would be marked by its speed—but that was also the specific emblem of the Roman legion in the relevant period. They had five different symbols until the first century BCE, but only the eagle remained in the first century.

In addition, one who analyzes the details can notice that some of them drastically reduce the chance of fulfillment of other details on the list. For example, a nation from far away cannot be Egypt—it is not far away, it has nothing to do with an eagle, its language is familiar to us, and it was known to us and to our fathers (17); yet the captives must specifically be led to Egypt. For this prophecy to be fulfilled, it was necessary to ensure that the Romans first conquered Egypt (otherwise it would have been logistically and politically impossible to send tens of thousands of slaves there in ships, certainly not in such quantities that no one would want to buy them), and that they chose specifically to transport large numbers there rather than to some other controlled land or to Rome itself.

You’re optimistic. Just look at the “prophets” accepted in our own day, who prophesy and fail, and nobody loses faith in them.
As for the fulfillment of the prophecies, to examine it seriously one has to go through all the prophecies, not just one example or another. In the examples you brought, there really are some details that were fulfilled clearly and even surprisingly. But even here there are points with quite a bit of ambiguity:
1. What is the nation “that neither we nor our fathers have known”? Were the Romans unknown to us? One can of course explain that they did not exist in the time of the patriarchs, but what about in our own time (=the generation of the destruction)?
2. What does it mean, “whose language you will not understand”? Was Latin specifically less common to us than other languages?
3. What is the criterion for “fierce-faced”? Were the Romans more cruel than every other empire? I don’t think so.
4. Did they serve other gods in exile? More than in the land?
As is well known, the medieval authorities disagree about the curses—which of them were said about the exile after the First Temple and which about the exile after the Second Temple. If the fulfillment is so clear, why is there room for disagreement?

By the way, what you did here was a reconstruction, where you connected verses from different places and built from them a story about the Roman exile. I have to say, that’s a somewhat dishonest trick.

Just regarding the Romans, the military historian John Keegan writes in his book A History of Warfare that Roman cruelty was fairly exceptional in history.

This business of “prophecies” by Kabbalists is not serious in so many ways compared to biblical prophecies that there is no place for comparison here beyond sharing the same name.

Regarding all the prophecies of Moses, as far as I know, everything that needed to be fulfilled by now has been fulfilled. Does the Rabbi have an example of a prophecy that has not?

1. The Jewish people knew the neighboring nations—Moab, Edom, Egypt, and so on. But the Roman people arose from a mixture of tribes, quite close to the exile of Aristobulus and the time of subjugation. Our fathers could not really have known it. If the conqueror had been Egypt, Edom, Moab, the Phoenicians in Tyre and Sidon, or Babylon striking again, and the like—the prophecy would not have been fulfilled.

2. The Semitic languages of the neighboring nations were not foreign to the Jewish people. The language of the Egyptian people was known to us and to our fathers, Greek was known as an international language, and Jews studied the Hebrew Bible in Greek translation, and Torah scrolls were also written in Greek. But Latin? The people never knew it, and nothing could be more alien to the structure and character of Hebrew.

3. In addition to Y.D.’s remark, if one reads a bit of Josephus, the questions about the force and dimensions of the cruelty vanish—something that no enslaver even until the Holocaust managed to replicate. The gap between them and the Babylonians, quantitatively and qualitatively—or even compared to the soldiers of Antiochus, who if you were a Jew suspected in their eyes of Hellenizing were actually gentle with you—is beyond doubt.

4. Serving other gods is presented as a punishment. And indeed it took place in exile in a way that did not occur in the land.

Most of the traditional commentators I have seen recognize the fact that chapter 28, and a bit of the chapters after it, describe the Roman exile. Leviticus 26 also describes an exile, but there it is limited in time to the number of Sabbatical years that were not observed (later Jeremiah gives the number of 70 years, which indeed was fulfilled exactly with the end of the Babylonian exile; in any case, that had to be roughly the order of magnitude and could not be much more than around 100 years). In Leviticus 26 it says, “And I will scatter you among the nations,” meaning a dispersion that can be local, whereas here it is about movement “from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth,” and there are other distinctions that tie the prophecy there especially to the Babylonian exile and our prophecy to the Roman exile.

I did not understand where the accusation comes from. Nearly all of them (16 out of 19) are verses from the same chapter (28) in Deuteronomy. Of the 3 that are not, two are taken from the same context in the book (Deuteronomy 4), where Moses speaks about this very issue—forsaking God, exile, and dispersion among the nations—which he returns to in chapter 28 and in the chapters that follow. And the remaining one is simply from chapter 30, bound up with the general motif woven throughout chapters 28–32, where the subject is the same condition of hiddenness in exile from one end of the earth to the other, at the end of which come the ingathering of exiles and the end of days.

The Kabbalists’ prophecies were brought here not in order to compare them to the Torah. This is an example showing that a prophet can prophesy, his prophecies can be refuted, and still nothing happens to him. He need not be afraid.

I don’t have an example of a prophecy that clearly did not come true, thank God (though I haven’t checked systematically). There are examples of ambiguous prophecies (most of them are like that). Also, the fulfillment happened in ways that are not entirely unambiguous. Each verse was fulfilled at a different stage or period. There are disputes over the periods and the fulfillments (some prophecies are assigned to the future to come). And so on. To formulate a systematic position, one would have to do a systematic study, which I haven’t done.
1. There were conquerors of all kinds, and among them were also the distant Romans. That is not an unambiguous fulfillment.
2. Greek became known as an international language after Greece became an empire. I assume that after the conquests, Latin did too.
4. That interpretation is very far from necessary. You didn’t point out where this was fulfilled and how it was different. This (like everything else here) is an example of the ambiguity I was talking about.

Most—so that implies there is a minority. And from here it follows that even if this had not happened in any way, you would find an interpretation that keeps the Torah alive. We’re back to the question of falsifiability.

True, nowadays a false prophet has nothing to fear, but it is not clear whether someone like Ezekiel could have known that we would sink to such disgrace.
I do not see how the existence of ambiguous prophecies could affect the possibility that other prophecies, which are not ambiguous, might confirm a prophet’s authenticity.

1. I didn’t understand what the problem is. What is needed is that out of the two exiles in our people’s history, everything said in this prophecy should be fulfilled specifically by a distant conqueror unknown to us and to our fathers, and one that fulfills its other conditions as well. As mentioned, the prophecy in Leviticus 26 cannot deal with the Roman exile, since it is time-limited, whereas our present prophecy is not time-limited and ends only with the events of the end of days. (In general, the very fact that there the exile is of the order of magnitude relevant to the number of Sabbatical years not observed also constitutes confirmation of Moses’ prophecy. If, for example, it had been an exile of 200 years, the prophecy there would explicitly not have been fulfilled, and that would have been a tremendous difficulty for the hypothesis that Moses is a true prophet, since there would be almost no connection between what he describes and the exile in fact—but that is not our subject here.)

The Babylonian exile was not by a conqueror “from the end of the earth” like the Roman exile. Its language was not entirely foreign to us, and it is not correct to apply verses like “your sons and daughters shall be given to another people,” since the Babylonians took whole families (unlike the Romans, who took the sons to die in gladiatorial battles or into slavery), not to mention that there was no taking in ships for sale as slaves in Egypt (which at that time was our ally). That is, after the Babylonian exile fulfilled the admonition of Leviticus, the only conqueror who could come in order for our prophecy to be fulfilled was one very much like Rome. It could not have been someone like Seleucid Greece, which was near, nor any of the neighboring kingdoms of Judah. What prevented someone like Antiochus from being the conquering exiler? Yet Zechariah and Daniel already prophesy the defeat of the Greeks.

2. What is required is that *at the time of the conquest* it be “a nation whose language you will not understand.” If afterwards Latin became spoken, that is irrelevant. In the time of Antiochus we knew Greek (the Hebrew Bible had already been translated into that language in the previous century, and it seems the Jewish people spoke it roughly as an American Jew speaks English). If someone like him had been the exiler, the prophecy would not have been fulfilled. In any case, Latin always remained foreign to the Jewish people, and later became a technical language of scholars and remained foreign even for the European peoples.

4. It seems to me that biblical critics would say that the plain sense is that the very fact that the Jewish people is subjugated abroad to another nation is tantamount to serving the gods of the enslaving nation. And there are biblical sources for this. If they are right, then this detail was fulfilled simply by our being in exile among foreign peoples, and it adds nothing to the evidential weight of the general prophecy. In any case, the prophecy was also fulfilled in its literal form, since already in very early centuries, and indeed in quite a few periods, the Jewish people was forced to choose between expulsion and forced conversion. Most of the forced conversions in Christian lands were carried out by Catholics, where a Jew had to demonstrate loyalty by kneeling before the cross (wood) and praying before a statue of Mary (stone)—Holy Rosary. In my opinion, it is plausible that in the plain biblical sense, forced conversions in Muslim lands also count as service of other gods, but I won’t get into that.

By “minority” I mean that there are some commentators who attribute certain phenomena from the Babylonian exile to some of the verses here. But that does not detract from the significance of the prophecy to say that there are principles both here and in the admonition of Leviticus that are fulfilled in both exiles. For example, we see that the verse “And your land shall be desolate, and your cities shall be waste” (Leviticus 26:33) was also fulfilled in our present exile. I do not see how that possibility relates to the fact of the prophecy’s fulfillment as confirmation. In general, the Rabbi demands of the confirmations here what he demands of almost no other theory. When there are good reasons for a theory and things that clearly confirm it, even if one does some experiment in which it is apparently refuted, one first tries to attribute the problem not to the theory but to a suboptimal measuring device, frictional forces, and the like. The very possibility that at first glance a theory may be refuted and yet you still won’t throw it away does not undermine the principle of refutation. The philosopher Hilary Putnam dealt with this in several of his articles (for example, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy).

Take, for example, the theory of evolution. We would expect from it the absence of superfluous traits in animals, such as crests or peacocks’ tails. Yet nobody says the theory is refuted because of them; rather they try to find answers that reconcile them with it, such as sexual selection or the “handicap principle.” And by the way, here it seems that this really is a poor answer, since if the female wants to see that the male can survive despite having a huge tail, evolution could still have made do with just a large tail, without the need for complex DNA specifications whose origin is unclear, which cause an astonishingly beautiful tail with all its colors and symmetrical forms. Likewise, even if there were one verse that seemed not to be fulfilled, the fact that this would not necessarily cause me immediately to abandon the theory does not undermine the validity of the confirmation. In any case, from examining historical sources I find that every single verse without exception was fulfilled literally and clearly in the Roman exile.

We don’t really have a disagreement, only regarding the degree of certainty. In my view, the fulfillment is not so unambiguous, certainly not with respect to all the prophecies.

Copenhagen, the symbol of the Romans was not an eagle but a vulture. That’s a common mistake.

The question is what is called “nesher” in the Bible. Isn’t it actually the vulture?

No…
The Bible also writes many times “vulture/bird of prey” and not only “nesher”:
“And the bird of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away.”

Agreed. But what matters for the evidential weight of the prophecy’s fulfillment is not what is technically correct, but whether this is a standard biblical usage of the term. I’ll quote:

“Already in the Hebrew Bible one finds interchange between the nesher and the ayit. True, both are giant birds of prey, but only the vulture has a bare neck, as Micah says. By contrast, when the prophet Ezekiel mentions the nesher as great-winged and ‘full of feathers’ (17:3), there is no doubt that the intention is an eagle and not a vulture. And when it says, ‘And the ayit came down upon the carcasses’ (Genesis 15:11), the meaning is apparently a general term for a large bird of prey, and not the name of a specific bird.

And there are other verses that mention nesher, but the description fits the eagle and not the vulture.
For example, the verse ‘Will you set your eyes upon it, and it is gone? For riches certainly make themselves wings; like an eagle that flies toward heaven’ (Proverbs 23:5) fits the golden eagle that vanishes from sight in its flight opposite the sun: the eagle is equipped with a membrane over its eyes that allows it to fly toward the sun.
Likewise, the verses ‘And I bore you on eagles’ wings’ (Exodus 19:4), and ‘As an eagle stirs up its nest… he bears him on his pinions’ (Deuteronomy 32:11) cannot refer to the bird we call a vulture, because it does not carry its young on its back. Only the golden eagle carries its young on its back and on its wings when teaching them to fly.
By contrast, the griffon vulture is heavy and slow in flight, whereas when the texts speak about the swift flight of the nesher (II Samuel 1:23; Jeremiah 4:13; Lamentations 4:19), they are probably indeed speaking about a vulture.”

https://www.safa-ivrit.org/fauna/nesher.php