BIBLICAL PROPHECY AS HISTORICAL OMENS?

In Mesopotamia, the assumption was that omens were the language of the gods which they used to communicate with mankind and that they constituted a warning which allowed humans to avoid the portended event.

In Mesopotamia we are generally talking about messages written in the stars or on the liver, which require a whole science to decipher. This would all be kesheph in Israel but there was still room for using historical events themselves as a sort of omen. It is to be remembered that not all divinatory practices were rejected in Israelite religion (lot oracles were actually mandated) and, given the fact that God was believed to give signs in the form of specific outcomes to political events, there would be, in theory, no objection to using past historical events affecting the community to divine the will of God.

As with Mesopotamian solicited omens, no harm would come to any king who listened to the prophets and took their advice, assuming that God’s anger was not too great. And even if it was great indeed, as with Mesopotamian solicited omens, there were procedures (modi­fied mourning rites such as dressing in sackcloth and ashes) that could be used to avert God’s wrath and the evil consequences that were sure to follow.

So, even though most other methods of divination were frowned upon in Israel, historical events could readily be seen as part of a code whereby Y ahweh communicated with his people and could, therefore, be used to decode and validate other messages delivered by other means, as by direct vision. A similar relationship existed in ancient Mesopotamia between solicited and unsolicited omens — one could use a solicited omen to gain clarification (not just that the god is angry but why and how many sheep is this going to cost) but also to check the veracity of an unsolicited omen.

We shall here examine two possible examples of biblical prophecies in which historical events that had already passed at the time of composition were either used to validate, or were actually the basis for, the prediction of what was going to happen in the future. One is Nahum, which has not infrequently been classified as false prophecy,^[145] and the other is Isaiah 36-37 (= 2 Kings 18:13-19:37 — the alleged two sieges of Jerusalem by Sennacherib).

fall of Nineveh, scholars have attributed a virulent nationalism to Nahum and have even alleged that he tends to exhibit the characteristics of false prophecy” (Cathcart 1992: 999).