Prophets are not Prognosticators

I have been thinking a lot about prophecy lately and what it might mean to prophesy. A lot of folks, including the writers of some Gospels, reckon that it involves foretelling future events. Nostradamus was a prophet in this sense. I don’t believe this, however. I reckon that a prophet is a truth teller, a soothsayer. A prophet tells inconvenient truths relevant to the moment that the prophecy is given. Accordingly, the author of Revelations was talking about the situation in which he or she was living at the time, and Daniel was writing about his times and the circumstances of his people.

I reckon this is so because it would be otherwise difficult to know which prophets to include as truthful and which to identify as false. If Daniel were writing about things that would not happen for hundreds or even thousands of years, how would anyone judge whether his prophecy was correct? It would be best to confine oneself to predictions about the far distant future so that you could never be gainsaid until long after you were dead. Also, you could make your predictions pretty ambiguous and use a lot of metaphors so that nobody could ever be sure that your predictions didn’t come true. How could a prophet be accountable if his utterances related to the distant future? What good would he be to his fellows?

I reckon that the prophets would make a lot more sense if we read them as writing about the world in which they lived instead of prognosticating.