Conservative and critical commentators read prophecies anachronistically. They see the ‘fulfilment’ in later Biblical history and read it back into the prophecy. They see in 1 Kgs 13:1-3 a prophecy about a future king, Josiah, and they correlate this prophecy with the later birth of a descendent of David who was named ‘Josiah’ – some 300 or so years later. Bible critics dismiss such a prophecy as a later interpolation into the text; conservative commentators accept the prophecy as proof of prophetic inspiration.
The critic is incredulous because s/he believes prophets prophesy relevant things to their own generation. The conservative response is that divine inspiration means a prophet can prophesy long range events. Both stances are making the same mistake and this is the mistake of letting the later ‘fulfilment’ control the reading.
The mistake is easily seen in the case of the critic. S/he needs to ask whether a prophet could have uttered what he did at the time. The simple answer is: Yes. He prophesies a future king who will destroy Bethel. In the politics of the day and compared to what we know about Near Eastern prophecy, the speech act of the prophet is unexceptionable and this is precisely because it has no time reference. When it was uttered, its fulfillment could have been as soon as the next king on the throne of David. His listeners would have had no other expectation and no conception of the actual time for fulfillment in the purpose of God. The fact that the prophet names the son is no problem. It’s a perfectly good Hebrew name for a future king. The prophecy is couched in the right way: ‘a child shall be born’.
The conservative commentator makes the same mistake when s/he defends this Bible text by an appeal to divine inspiration. The actual fulfillment is not the problem to be explained. There is in fact no problem for an appeal to divine inspiration to address. The prophecy is entirely plausible in its historical context. The fact that it was not made true for 300 years has nothing to do with the historical veracity of the prophecy.
We are making a point of logic. Another example of this mistake is the example of the Cyrus oracles which are often compared to this prophecy about Josiah.[1] The fact that the Cyrus oracles were not fulfilled for 150 years is irrelevant to their historical veracity as prophecies by Isaiah of Jerusalem. All that is relevant to this question is how the Cyrus oracles would have made sense to the Jerusalem of Isaiah’s day. On this, Ken Kitchen makes the point that because there is a known Cyrus of Parsua from 646, fifty years after Isaiah,
…there is nothing untoward in an Isaiah being moved to proclaim that a ‘Cyrus’ (identity of his kingdom not stated) would reach power and free Hebrew captives in Babylon (whether of Merodach-Baladan’s time or indefinitely later). His prophecy was to be fulfilled, as we know now, but we in hindsight know more now than he personally ever did—simply because that hindsight has been gifted to us by our living in a much later day.[2]
The historical veracity of the Cyrus prophecy vis-à-vis Isaiah of Jerusalem has nothing to do with our hindsight, to use Kitchen’s term; it only has to do with whether it was plausible for Isaiah to have uttered it in the Jerusalem of his day. Given the documented alliance of Elam and Babylon in Isaiah’s day, it is no coincidence that a Cyrus prince should have been mentioned in the context of the visit of the Babylonian princes to Hezekiah.
1st Peter: Some New Testament Allusions