Prophecy and Interpretation

Abstract

Abstract We have frequently had occasion to comment on the timelessness of biblical prophecy, its forward-looking dimension, and the role of prophetic legends in later Jewish and Christian tradition. Elijah became the solver of Talmudic puzzles (see p. 78). The suffering servant in Isaiah 53 came to be identified with Christ. The ox and the ass at the beginning of the book of Isaiah appear on our Christmas cards. It is the nature of prophetic literature and indeed of the Bible as a whole that this phenomenon be given some emphasis if we are not to leave the texts in the dusty context of the ancient Near East, surrounded by uncertainties and probabilities. What Isaiah actually meant when he first uttered the words of the Immanuel prophecy (7: 14) will always remain a matter of probabilities. It will also be largely a matter of historical interest. But how his words were understood by Christians down the ages can be established with a fair degree of certainty and objectivity and, what is more, can readily be shown to have had the deepest possible influence on Christian theology and Church history ever since. The fact is that later interpretations of the Prophets, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, right down to the present day, have gone far beyond the biblical sources themselves, looking for hidden meanings and allusions and devising ingenious methods of exegesis relating the texts to their own experience and bringing them alive in their own day. It is this dimension of biblical prophecy that we shall be examining in the final chapter.