Okay, this is the last post in this series.
Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe (an old-earth Creationist ministry) claims that the Bible has thousands of fulfilled prophecies, and he gives us his top 13. Let’s continue our critique (part 1 here).
12. “Jahaziel prophesied that King Jehoshaphat and a tiny band of men would defeat an enormous, well-equipped, well-trained army without even having to fight. Just as predicted, the King and his troops stood looking on as their foes were supernaturally destroyed to the last man.”
2 Chronicles 20 tells of a great army approaching Judah. King Jehoshaphat prayed to God, and the prophet Jahaziel reported that God would deliver them. The next day, God caused the individual tribes within the opposing alliance to fight each other until they were all dead.
What is there to say except that it’s a fanciful story? Just like #11, this is a self-contained story with a prophecy. The dating problem is also similar: King Jehoshaphat reigned in the 9th century BCE, while the books of Chronicles document events up to Cyrus the Great allowing the Jews to return after his conquest of Babylon 539 BCE. They were probably written later still, in the 4th century BCE.
Half a millennium passes from event to documentation, and Ross wants us to credulously accept the story as true?
13. King Jeroboam of Israel (922–901 BCE) encouraged worship of deities other than Yahweh. A prophet told him that a future King Josiah of Judah (641–609 BCE) would burn the bones of Jeroboam’s wayward priests on their own altar. And that’s indeed what happened.
The prophecy is in 1 Kings 13:2, and the fulfillment is in 2 Kings 23:15–18. Here Ross is making the same mistake yet again: the two books of Kings were originally one book. It documents events up to the year 560 BCE, and it received its final editing at about that time. There is no prophecy if the prophecy and the fulfillment were edited at the same time.
Hugh Ross’s conclusion
Since the probabilities were stated without justification, I haven’t been critiquing them, but Ross has attached one to each prophecy, from one chance in 10⁵ to one in 10²⁰. They’re outlandish figures, both since they have no justification and because the natural explanation is so obvious, but that doesn’t stop Ross from computing the final probability.

Since these thirteen prophecies cover mostly separate and independent events, the probability of chance occurrence for all thirteen is about 1 in 10¹³⁸.

Then he talks about how unlikely “the second law of thermodynamics will be reversed in a given situation” and concludes,

Stating it simply, based on these thirteen prophecies alone, the Bible record may be said to be vastly more reliable than the second law of thermodynamics.

(This tangent about thermodynamics is intriguing but irrelevant.) The Christian who wants to accept this as true without considering an alternative view now has a compelling sound bite.

Each reader should feel free to make his own reasonable estimates of probability for the chance fulfillment of the prophecies cited here.

There is no “chance fulfillment of the prophecies” when the natural explanation works fine, but I accept your challenge. 1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1×1 = 1 (rather than 1 in 10¹³⁸).
Ross wraps up by saying that, given that the Bible is so fabulously correct, the Bible’s 500 upcoming prophecies “will be fulfilled to the last letter.” Who can risk ignoring these upcoming events, missing out on the blessings of Jesus, and blah blah blah?
As I’ve researched each of Ross’s claims, I’ve been amazed at how elementary these mistakes are, and this is from a guy with a doctorate in physics. But perhaps I should be more accustomed to this. We see many scholars skilled in one field who ineptly jump into apologetics. William Lane Craig has two doctorates, and John Lennox and John Warwick Montgomery have three.
You say the Bible has a prophecy from God? First make sure that it avoids the childish mistakes that Ross makes here. Next, makes sure that the prophecy meets the straightforward criteria I explore here—criteria that you’d instinctively demand from any foreign religion or supernatural claim.
Thirteen certainly hasn’t been Hugh Ross’s lucky number. That he had to cite this many rather than offering just one compelling prophecy is a clue that even he thinks they won’t be convincing.
These 13 claimed prophecies have been a useful exercise in seeing what prophecies from a perfect holy book would not look like.

I won’t insult your intelligence
by suggesting you believe what you just said.
— William F. Buckley

Image credit: Wikimedia

Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe (an old-earth Creationist ministry) claims that the Bible has thousands of fulfilled prophecies, and he gives us his top 13. Let’s continue our critique (part 1 here).
9. “Jeremiah predicted that despite its fertility and despite the accessibility of its water supply, the land of Edom (today a part of Jordan) would become a barren, uninhabited wasteland.”
Reading the cited passage in Jeremiah (49:15–20), I feel like I’ve been called in to settle a playground dispute. Israel and Edom are arguing and calling each other names. “You think you’re so strong?” Israel says. “My big brother will take care of you!”
Here are a few selections of the bravado. These are coming from God’s mouth:

I will make you small among the nations, despised by mankind.
Edom will become an object of horror; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds.
The young of the flock will be dragged away; their pasture will be appalled at their fate.

Ross says that Edom will be made “a barren, uninhabited wasteland.” If you look at a satellite map of where it was—a rough circle from the Dead Sea south to the Gulf of Aqaba—it does look pretty dry.
There’s a lot of trash talking here and in the other passage mentioned (Ezekiel 25:12–14) but no mention of their fertility or water. Did God take away their water? Apparently not, since ancient Edom has always had almost no arable land. In the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, its economy was based on the caravan trade.
Ross’s story of fertile farmland suddenly turned into a desert is just a fairy tale.
10. “Joshua prophesied that Jericho would be rebuilt by one man. He also said that the man’s eldest son would die when the reconstruction began and that his youngest son would die when the work reached completion. About five centuries later this prophecy found its fulfillment.”
Ross cites Joshua 6:26. After Joshua’s army had plundered and destroyed Jericho, Joshua is either speaking a curse or making a prophecy against anyone who would rebuild the city:

At the cost of his firstborn son he will lay its foundations;
at the cost of his youngest he will set up its gates.

The fulfilment is in 1 Kings 16:33–4:

In King Ahab’s time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, in accordance with the word of the Lord spoken by Joshua.

We can date the prophecy by noting that Joshua came from the 13th century BCE, and we can date the fulfilment by noting that King Ahab came from the 9th century BCE. That sounds good for Ross’s claim except that there is good evidence (the “Deuteronomistic history”) that Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings were edited together by one person, creating a unified story from Moses to the destruction of Judah by Babylon (see also Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? p. 103).
No historical hypothesis can be proven, but the plausible natural explanation that the “fulfilment” was deliberately written to satisfy the “prophecy” destroys Ross’s claim.
11. “The day of Elijah’s supernatural departure from Earth was predicted unanimously—and accurately, according to the eye-witness account—by a group of fifty prophets.”
Ross’s source is 2 Kings 2:3–11. Elisha is tagging along as Elijah makes several visits, and at each stop, local prophets tell Elisha ominous news: “Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?”
In fact, Elisha did know, though we’re not told why. Did Elijah tell him? Did he know because he was also a prophet?
Anyway, the prophecies do come true: “A chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind.”
We’ve not seen this kind of claim so far. Instead of a prophecy in one part of the Bible confirmed in a later book (not that we’ve seen this yet, but that has been Ross’s claim), all we have here is a story contained in one chapter.
Elijah lived during the reign of King Ahab (9th century BCE), while 2 Kings was written in the 6th century BCE. A story is kept alive orally for three centuries, and when it’s written down it has magical events. Why accept that as history?
To be concluded in part 5.

Every image that has ever been projected of God
is a mirror reflecting the age and person or group which produced it.
— Jesuit scholar Ignatius Jesudasan

Image credit: Wikimedia

Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe (an old-earth Creationist ministry) claims that the Bible has thousands of fulfilled prophecies, and he gives us his top 13. I find claims of prophecy particularly interesting as arguments for the truth of the Bible. Bold prophecy claims are often made, but they’re rarely backed up with an argument. And the argument here isn’t from an incoherent sign-carrying wacko but from the founder of a ministry that takes in $4 million per year.
Let’s continue our critique (part 1 here).
7. “The exact location and construction sequence of Jerusalem’s nine suburbs was predicted by Jeremiah about 2600 years ago.” After Israel became a modern state in 1948, “the construction of the nine suburbs has gone forward precisely in the locations and in the sequence predicted.”
Ross points to Jeremiah 31:38–40 for this precise layout of future Jerusalem (helpful interpretations of this unclear passage here and here). One immediate problem is that there is no agreement among modern scholars on the location of most of the landmarks referred to in this passage—the Tower of Hananel, the Hill of Gareb, Goah, and so on. There goes Ross’s claim from his introduction that “there is no room for error.”
A second problem is that when you map out this expanded Jerusalem, it extends the ancient, walled city to the west and south, and maybe a bit to the southeast. But five of Jerusalem’s new suburbs are north of the ancient city. No, there is no connection between what Jeremiah imagined God predicting for Jerusalem and how it actually expanded.
8. Both the Old Testament and the New predict conquest and enslavement. “The prophet Moses foretold (with some additions by Jeremiah and Jesus) that the ancient Jewish nation would be conquered twice and that the people would be carried off as slaves each time, first by the Babylonians (for a period of 70 years), and then by a fourth world kingdom (which we know as Rome). The second conqueror, Moses said, would take the Jews captive to Egypt in ships, selling them or giving them away as slaves to all parts of the world. Both of these predictions were fulfilled to the letter, the first in 607 BC and the second in AD 70. God’s spokesmen said, further, that the Jews would remain scattered throughout the entire world for many generations, but without becoming assimilated by the peoples or of other nations, and that the Jews would one day return to the land of Palestine to re-establish for a second time their nation.”
Ross cites five passages. First, Deuteronomy 29 has Moses cautioning the Israelites to not tolerate anyone within their ranks who worships the gods of other nations. “The Lord will single them out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster” (29:21). As with prophecy #6, this disaster is of the Sodom and Gomorrah type: “The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it” (29:22–3). Both the singling out of just the backsliders and the fire-and-brimstone punishment conflict with Ross’s view that this describes a conquest by either Babylonians or Romans.
Not only does this not fit Ross’s conquest hypothesis, but the dates don’t work out, either. The Babylonian conquest happened in 605 BCE, with enslavement happening in stages from 597–581. Moses supposedly lived long before that, but Deuteronomy was “discovered” (or planted) by King Josiah in 622 (Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? p. 116–17), and then it was edited over the next century. Chapter 29 (and more) was added after the end of the exile in 539 BCE. There’s not much of a prophecy when a document written after 539 BCE is accurate about something that happened in 605 BCE.
Second: Isaiah 11 says that a descendant of King David will usher in a time of peace in which “the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.” It won’t be so peaceful for the countries that Israel conquers, however.
Ross cites 11:11–13, which says that, as part of reuniting Israel, God gathers in scattered people from the twelve tribes. Where’s the fulfillment? Modern Israel exists, but neither this supernatural peace nor Israel conquering Edom, Moab, and Ammon (roughly modern Jordan) has happened. Many Jews have indeed returned to Israel, but less than half of Jews worldwide live there.
Third: Jeremiah 25:11 says, “This whole country will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years.” Let’s check some dates: Jeremiah was written 627–586 BCE. The first captives were sent to Babylon in 597, and Cyrus freed them in 539 BCE, which is a captivity of 58 years. If we round it up to the pleasing 70 (seven is the number of completion) by saying that people returned to Judah in stages, have we finally found a prophecy that is sort of correct? Not really, since Jeremiah may have been edited after the exile.
Fourth: Hosea 3:4–5 talks about Israel enduring a long period “without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without [sacred garments] or household gods.” After this, they will return, trembling, to God.
But the exile that this anticipates is that due to the Assyrians, which completed their conquest of Israel in 722 BCE.
(The positive reference to “household gods” may be startling, especially since the Deuteronomy passage cautioned against worshipping the gods of other nations. It’s possible that at this early stage of Judaism, not only were other gods acknowledged, but some gods of limited power could be worshipped along with all-powerful Yahweh. More about Hebrew polytheism here.)
And finally, Luke 21:23–4 talks about the destruction of Jerusalem, but where’s the prophecy? The First Jewish-Roman War ended in 73 CE, and Luke is thought to have been written in 80 CE or later.
Ross really needs to avoid bold claims like “fulfilled to the letter.” Go back and reread all that Ross says is clearly prophesied by these passages to see how badly wrong he got it.
Continued in part 4.

I prayed for freedom for twenty years,
but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
— Frederick Douglass

Image credit: Wikimedia