Prophecies About Nations and Cities

"Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon made his army labor hard against Tyre.  Every head was rubbed bald and every shoulder rubbed bare;  yet he and his army received no wages from Tyre for the work he carried out against it." — Ezekiel 29:18, NET¹

"He did not suppress them, but let them stand in their contradiction to events." — Moshe Greenberg, on Ezekiel's failed oracles, 1997²

Summary

The Hebrew prophets spoke oracles against the cities and nations around Israel:  Tyre, Babylon, Egypt, Edom and Nineveh.  Isaiah also names Cyrus, the Persian king who let the exiles go home.  Popular apologetics, from Alexander Keith in the 1820s to Peter Stoner in the 1950s and Josh McDowell in the 1970s, presents these oracles as fulfilled in every detail and prices the odds against chance in the millions.  This article tests each case by the eight tests of How to Test a Fulfilled Prophecy, and counts every clause of each oracle, not just the clauses that came true (Test 6).

The cases do not stand or fall together.

1. Nineveh does best. Nahum names Nineveh, mentions the fall of Egyptian Thebes in 663 BC as past, and predicts the total and permanent ruin of the capital of the strongest empire on earth. A Babylonian chronicle records that Nineveh was taken in the month Abu of 612 BC after a siege of about three months and turned into "ruin-hills." Two centuries later the Greek soldier Xenophon marched past its walls and did not know its name. The weakness is Test 1: no manuscript is older than 612 BC, and if Nahum wrote in the 620s or 610s, when Assyria was already collapsing, the prediction was far less bold. Some scholars also think the book reached its final form after the fall.
2. Egypt does worst. Ezekiel promised that Nebuchadnezzar would make Egypt an uninhabited ruin for forty years and scatter its people. A Babylonian tablet records a campaign against Pharaoh Amasis in 568 or 567 BC, and nothing more. Amasis reigned for over four decades in peace and wealth. No clause of the forty-year desolation happened. Conservative scholars agree.
3. Tyre is a failed prediction that the book kept on the record. Ezekiel 26 names Nebuchadnezzar. He besieged Tyre for thirteen years and never took the island city. Ezekiel himself says so in an oracle dated 571 BC (29:17–20). Alexander the Great did build a causeway of rubble into the sea in 332 BC, which matches one clause. But within eighteen years Tyre was again a fortress that held out against a fifteen-month siege, and it stands today on the same ground. "You will never be built again" failed. The usual rescues, that the oracle meant the mainland suburb, or that "many nations" means attackers spread over 1,600 years, save a clause only by changing it, and none can save "never be built again." A separate article weighs them in detail. Ezekiel 29:18 is still strong evidence on another question: the book was not edited to fit events.
4. Babylon is half right. Isaiah and Jeremiah say the Medes, with Elam and a coalition from the north, would take Babylon. They did, in 539 BC. But the same oracles describe slaughter, fire, broken walls and a city emptied at once. Babylon's own chronicle says Cyrus's army "entered Babylon without battle." The city stayed inhabited for about six more centuries and emptied slowly, as the other great cities of southern Mesopotamia did. The evangelical commentator John Oswalt reads Isaiah 13 as figurative, "without intending any specific prediction."
5. Edom is a hit on the main point and a miss on the details. Edom lost its independence within a few decades of the oracles, probably to the Babylonian king Nabonidus, and Malachi already treats its ruin as past. But its capital, Bozrah, stayed inhabited for two or three more centuries. The Edomites survived as the Idumeans of southern Judea until they were absorbed into the Jewish people, and one of them, Herod the Great, ruled Jerusalem. Edom's land held the Nabataean city of Petra, whose caravans Strabo compared to an army. The popular claim that Petra fulfils these oracles confuses Edom with the people who replaced it.
6. Cyrus by name is the strongest prediction if Isaiah wrote it, and nothing in the manuscripts can show that he did. The case rests entirely on the date of Isaiah 40–48, which belongs to its own debate.

Two patterns run through all six.  First, the oracles that came true are the ones that went with the odds:  the royal cities of Assyria and Babylonia were all eventually abandoned, while the old Phoenician ports, Tyre among them, are still inhabited.  The one prediction that bet against the odds, Tyre's permanent end, is the one that failed.  Second, the books themselves preserve their misses.  Ezekiel kept the Tyre oracle beside its correction.  Jeremiah's violent destruction of Babylon was never revised to match Cyrus's peaceful entry.  A writer composing after the events would not have left either.  So the same evidence that weakens these oracles as proof of foresight strengthens the case that they were written when they claim to have been.

The verdict:  these oracles cannot carry a probability argument of the Stoner kind.  Taken one clause at a time they show real prophets making checkable predictions, some fulfilled, some not, in books that did not hide the difference.

Part 1: How the cases are scored

The method article sets out eight tests, numbered so that this article can cite them.³  Four matter most here.

Test 1, written before.  For oracles about nations, the manuscripts help less than one might hope.  The Hebrew texts from the Dead Sea caves were copied, in Emanuel Tov's summary, "between 250 BCE and 68 CE."⁴  Ben Sira, writing about 180 BC, already praises Isaiah, "Iezekiel who saw a vision of glory," and "the twelve prophets."⁵  Every event in this article except the last stages of Babylon's and Edom's decline happened before 250 BC.  So no copy can show that an oracle was written before the event it describes.  Test 1 must rest on internal evidence that does not argue from accuracy:  a book's own dates, the turning point where an accurate text goes wrong, and what the book kept that a later editor would have dropped.

Test 2, committed in advance.  Each clause is scored for whether a reader at the time could have said what would count as failure.  A clause with a named agent, a place and a time scores high.  A clause with no time limit, or one that is true of almost every city, scores low however well it fits.

Test 6, all the misses counted.  The corpus for each case is fixed before scoring:  every clause about the city's fate in the oracles the popular case cites, plus every other oracle against the same city in the same book.  Each clause gets one of five verdicts.  Fulfilled means it happened as worded, by the agent and in the time the text gives.  Fulfilled late or by another agent means it happened, but not by the one the text names or not in its horizon.  Failed means it did not happen.  Unfalsifiable means no outcome could have counted against it.  Unknown means the record is silent.  The method article's symmetry rule applies:  an oracle excused as conditional when it fails cannot also be scored as fulfilled.

Test 8, the same rules for everyone.  Each rescue reading offered for a failed clause is asked one question.  Would a Christian accept the same move from a defender of the Delphic oracle or of a Babylonian prophecy?

The popular case is stated first in each part, in its own words.  The main sources are Alexander Keith's Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion of the 1820s, Peter Stoner's Science Speaks of 1958, and Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict of 1972.  Stoner and McDowell are the ones most often repeated today.  Their critics, such as Farrell Till, made most of the same points that conservative scholars now make in print.  Till on Tyre:  "In fact, Tyre still exists today, as anyone able to read a map can verify."⁶  This article quotes the scholars, because a reader can check a commentary more easily than an online debate.

Part 2: Tyre

Tyre now has its own article, Did Ezekiel's Prophecy Against Tyre Come True?, which weighs the Hebrew, the records and every rescue reading in detail.  Its verdict, in short:

Ezekiel 26, dated to 587 or 586 BC, names Nebuchadnezzar and foretells that he will enter Tyre, kill its people and plunder it, and that Tyre will become "a bare rock" and "never be built again."¹  Nebuchadnezzar besieged the island city for thirteen years.  It submitted, lost its king and took kings sent from Babylon, but it was never taken.  Greenberg:  the siege "had ended with the city subjected but intact—contrary to Ezekiel's predictions."²  Ezekiel himself wrote in 571 BC that Nebuchadnezzar's army "received no wages from Tyre."¹  In 332 BC Alexander built a causeway of Old Tyre's stone into the sea, a real match with 26:12, whose Hebrew plural "they" lets later nations be the agent.  But Tyre was a fortress again by 315 BC, a Roman city in Paul's day, a Crusader port, and today Lebanon's fourth-largest coastal city.⁷  The rescue readings, that "never rebuilt" means the mainland, or lost status, or war rhetoric, or a cancelled plan, each save a clause by changing it, and none can be combined with the claim of detailed fulfilment.  Of fifteen clauses, two came true as worded or nearly so, four by other agents and centuries late, six failed, and three are unfalsifiable or unknown.  The book's preservation of its own failure is good evidence that it was not edited after the event.

Part 3: Babylon

What Isaiah and Jeremiah said

Two books carry long oracles against Babylon.  Isaiah 13 is headed "an oracle about Babylon that Isaiah son of Amoz saw," which places it in the late eighth century BC, when Babylon was a restless Assyrian province.  Its key lines:  "Look, I am stirring up the Medes to attack them," and Babylon "will be destroyed by God just as Sodom and Gomorrah were.  No one will live there again;  no one will ever reside there again.  No bedouin will camp there, no shepherds will rest their flocks there."  It ends:  "Her time is almost up, her days will not be prolonged."¹  Isaiah 21 adds:  "Go up, Elam!  Lay siege, Media!" and "Babylon has fallen, fallen!"¹

Jeremiah 50–51 is a scroll that the book dates to the fourth year of King Zedekiah, 594 or 593 BC.¹  It says much more, and much of it is concrete:

• A "nation from the north," "a host of mighty nations," will capture Babylon. God will "arouse a spirit of hostility in the kings of Media."¹
• "She will throw up her hands in surrender; her towers will fall. Her walls will be torn down."¹
• "The soldiers of Babylonia will stop fighting. They will remain in their fortified cities." Runners will tell the king "that his whole city has been captured," that "the fords have been captured, the reed marshes have been burned." "The houses in her cities will be set on fire. The gates of her cities will be broken down."¹
• God will "set out a banquet for them" and make them drunk "so that they will pass out, they will fall asleep forever."¹
• "Babylon’s thick wall will be completely demolished. Her high gates will be set on fire."¹
• "No one will use any of your stones as a cornerstone; no one will use any of them in the foundation of his house. For you will lie desolate forever."¹
• "No people will ever live there again; no one will dwell there for all time to come," as with Sodom and Gomorrah.¹

What the popular case says

Stoner draws seven predictions from Isaiah 13 and Jeremiah 51:  Babylon destroyed, never reinhabited, no Arab tents, no sheepfolds, wild beasts in the ruins, "The stones shall not be taken away for other buildings," and "Men shall not pass by the ruins."  He estimates the chance at 1 in 5 × 10^9.[stoner-2005:babylon]  His evidence is his own report:  "Though the Arabs will pitch their tents at nearly any spot, they are superstitious about Babylon;  and though you hire one as a guide, he will not stay there at night."  On the stones he concedes the main fact and narrows the clause:  "Bricks and building materials of many kinds have been salvaged from the ruins for cities round about, but the rocks, which were imported to Babylon at such great cost, have never been moved."  And on visitors:  "Though nearly all ancient cities are on prominent tourist routes, Babylon is not, and has very few visitors."⁸

What happened in 539 BC

The Medes were real and so was the coalition.  Cyrus of Persia had made himself master of Media in the 550s, and the Babylonian Nabonidus Chronicle records that the Median king's own army "revolted against him and in fetters they delivered him to Cyrus," who then took the Median capital.⁹  So the army that came against Babylon in 539 BC was a Persian-led empire of Persians, Medes and Elamites, from the north and east.  Jeremiah's "kings of Media" and Isaiah's "Elam" and "Media" both fit.

How the city fell does not fit.  The Nabonidus Chronicle, a Babylonian record kept year by year, says that after a battle at Opis, "The 14th day, Sippar was seized without battle.  Nabonidus fled.  The 16th day, Gobryas (Ugbaru), the governor of Gutium and the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without battle."  The temple rites went on uninterrupted.  On the third day of the next month "Cyrus entered Babylon, green twigs were spread in front of him—the state of “Peace” (lulmu) was imposed upon the city."⁹  Cyrus's own cylinder, a piece of royal propaganda written after the event, says Marduk "made him enter his city Babylon without fighting or battle;  he saved Babylon from hardship."¹⁰  Herodotus, writing about a century later, says the Persians entered along the river bed and that the people in the middle of the vast city went on "dancing and rejoicing" at a festival, not knowing the outskirts had fallen.¹¹  Herodotus also says plainly that when Darius later retook a rebellious Babylon he "took away the wall from round their city and pulled down all the gates;  for when Cyrus took Babylon before him, he did neither of these things."¹¹

So in 539 BC there was a surrender without a fight inside the city, which Jeremiah 50:15 and 51:30 describe well.  There was no slaughter of children and no rape (Isaiah 13:15–16), no fire, no broken gates, no demolished wall (Jeremiah 51:30, 58), and Babylon was not emptied.  Robert Chisholm says it directly:  Jeremiah's prophecy "was essentially realized because the neo-Babylonian empire came to an end, even though the city was not destroyed."¹²  John Oswalt, defending the unity of Isaiah, says the same of Isaiah 13:  "neither in 689, when Sennacherib put down the Babylonian rebellion with a violence much like that described in the previous verses (vv. 14—18), nor in Cyrus’s much more peaceful takeover in 539 B.C. was Babylon abandoned."¹³

Two other details are often counted as hits.  Jeremiah's drunken banquet matches Herodotus's festival and the feast of Daniel 5.  But in Jeremiah the image belongs to a larger figure, the cup of God's wrath that every nation must drink (Jeremiah 25:15–27), so it was not a forecast of a party on a particular night.  And Jeremiah's dried-up waters (50:38;  51:36) match Herodotus's story of the diverted river.  That story is Herodotus's alone.  The Babylonian chronicle does not mention it, so it cannot count as independent confirmation (Test 5).

"No one will live there again"

Babylon was not abandoned in 539 BC, or for centuries after.  When Alexander the Great entered it in 331 BC, its people came out to meet him, and he ordered them to rebuild the temples that Xerxes had destroyed.¹⁴  Its decline began when Seleucus, one of Alexander's successors, founded a new capital on the Tigris.  Strabo, writing under Augustus, says that after Seleucus "had fortified Seleuceia on the Tigris near Babylon, at a distance of about three hundred stadia therefrom," that is about 55 kilometres, "Seleuceia at the present time has become larger than Babylon," and "the greater part of Babylon is so deserted" that one could apply a comic poet's line:  "The Great City is a great desert."¹⁵  Pliny, about AD 77, says Babylon "has been reduced to a desert, having been drained of its population in consequence of its vicinity to Seleucia," though "The temple there of Jupiter Belus is still in existence."¹⁶  Pausanias, in the second century AD:  "of the Babylon that was the greatest city of its time under the sun nothing remains but the wall."¹⁷  So the emptying took four to six centuries after Cyrus, and it was caused by a Greek king moving the capital, not by the Medes.  Oswalt again:  "It is certainly true that Babylon, the jewel of the nations, was eventually abandoned and is today.  In this way, Isaiah’s prophecy has been fulfilled with a vengeance, but the fulfillment is more that of a principle than in a specific event.  For these truths apply to Nineveh and Asshur equally as much as to Babylon."¹³

That last sentence is the key to Test 2.  The royal cities of southern Mesopotamia shared Babylon's fate:  Ur, Uruk, Nippur, Kish, Sippar and Borsippa are all ruin mounds today, and so are Assyria's capitals, Assur, Nimrud and Nineveh.  Shifting rivers, salt in the irrigated soil and the founding of new capitals emptied them all.  A prediction that Babylon would one day be empty, with no date attached, bet on what happened to every city of its kind.  Isaiah's own clause that "her time is almost up" gives a date, and on Isaiah's traditional eighth-century date it missed by many centuries.  On the critical date of the 540s, it fits the fall to Cyrus and still misses the emptying.

Oswalt himself does not read Isaiah 13 as a forecast.  On the Medes:  "it is quite possible that Isaiah of Jerusalem, writing in the late 700s, knew something of the Medes’ fearsome reputation and used them as a figure of the pitiless destruction characterizing the Day of the Lord, without intending any specific prediction."  On the bedouin:  "The point would not be disproven if from time to time bedouin tents were set up within the confines of what was once Babylon."¹³  The leading evangelical commentary on Isaiah thus declines the clause-by-clause reading that Stoner priced.

The stones clause failed outright.  Babylon was built of baked brick, and its bricks have been dug out and reused for two thousand years.  Robert Koldewey, who excavated Babylon from 1899 to 1917, wrote that its buildings, "with their excellent kiln bricks, served even in antiquity, perhaps in Roman times, certainly in Parthian days, as a quarry for common use," and that in his own day a dam on the Euphrates was built year after year "with bricks from Babylon."¹⁸  He also lived on the site.  His expedition house was "The most northerly house of Kweiresh," one of several villages among the ruins.¹⁸  Stoner admits the brick-robbing and saves the clause by limiting "stones" to the imported rocks.  But Jeremiah's "stones" are the city's building material, and in Babylon that was brick.  Stoner's last clause, that men would not pass by, has also gone the other way since he wrote.  UNESCO listed Babylon as a World Heritage Site in 2019.  Its listing describes a property that "includes villages and agricultural areas surrounding the ancient city," and regrets "the reconstructions and structural alterations of the ‘Revival of Babylon Project’ and other constructions in the 1980s."¹⁹

Test 1, and the turning point

The manuscripts do not settle when these oracles were written.  The Great Isaiah Scroll was copied in the second century BC, long after Cyrus.  The internal evidence points to a date before 539 BC, and it does so by the turning-point test of the method article.  Both Isaiah 13 and Jeremiah 50–51 expect Babylon to be stormed, burned and emptied.  A writer working after 539 would have known that it surrendered and carried on.  Oswalt adds a detail on the conservative side:  "it was the Persians, who had defeated the Medes, who peacefully took over Babylon in 539.  It is difficult to imagine a contemporary of those events not referring to the Persians instead of the Medes."¹³

So the oracles were probably written before the fall, and their misses are evidence of that.  But "before 539" is not the same as "before anyone could guess."  After the Medes and Babylonians destroyed Nineveh together in 612 BC, the Medes were the obvious great power to the north.  Jeremiah, writing in 594, named the most likely enemy of Babylon.  For Isaiah 13, the eighth-century date rests on its heading, and the critical case puts it in the 540s.  On either date the Medes were a known people, and Oswalt himself counts them as a figure rather than a forecast.

Babylon: the clauses

Babylon scores three clear hits on who would take it and how it would surrender, all in 539 BC.  It scores at least four clear misses on what the conquerors would do.  Its permanent desolation came true only on a timescale that made it close to certain.

Part 4: Egypt

What Ezekiel said

Ezekiel's oracles against Egypt run from chapter 29 to chapter 32.  The first is dated to the tenth year, tenth month, twelfth day of the exile, January 587 BC, while Jerusalem was under siege and Judah still hoped for Egyptian help.¹  It is specific:

• "I will turn the land of Egypt into an utter desolate ruin from Migdol to Syene, as far as the border with Ethiopia. No human foot will pass through it, and no animal’s foot will pass through it; it will be uninhabited for 40 years."
• "I will scatter Egypt among the nations and disperse them among foreign countries. … At the end of 40 years I will gather Egypt from the peoples where they were scattered."
• "It will be the most insignificant of the kingdoms; it will never again exalt itself over the nations. I will make them so small that they will not rule over the nations."¹

Chapter 30 names the agent and the time.  "The day is near," and God "will put an end to the hordes of Egypt, by the hand of King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon."  It adds:  "There will no longer be a prince from the land of Egypt."¹  Then in 571 BC, in the oracle that admits the failure at Tyre, God promises Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar as his army's "wages":  "He will carry off her wealth, capture her loot, and seize her plunder."¹  Jeremiah, in Egypt with the Judean refugees, predicted the same:  Nebuchadnezzar would set his throne at Tahpanhes, "attack Egypt," and "set fire to the temples of the gods of Egypt."¹

On Test 2 this is as committed as prophecy gets:  a named conqueror, a named country with its borders, a number of years, and a scattering and return.

What happened

Pharaoh Hophra, called Apries by the Greeks, lost his throne to his general Amasis in 570 BC.²  A broken Babylonian tablet records that in the thirty-seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar, 568 or 567 BC, "Nebuchadnezzar, king of Bab[ylon] mar[ched against] Egypt (Mi-sir) to deliver a battle.  [Ama]sis … of Egypt, [called up his a]rm[y]."  The outcome is lost.⁹  Greenberg reports that the Egyptologist Elmar Edel matched this tablet with an Egyptian text of the same year in which Amasis defeated an invading force of Asiatics, presumably the Babylonians.²  Nebuchadnezzar died in 562 BC.  Egypt was conquered at last in 525 BC, by the Persian Cambyses, thirty-seven years after Nebuchadnezzar's death.

Amasis reigned for about forty-four years.  Herodotus, who visited Egypt within a century of his death, heard that "In the reign of Amasis it is said that Egypt became more prosperous than at any other time before," and "that at this time the inhabited towns in it numbered in all twenty thousand."¹¹  Far from being unable to "rule over the nations," Amasis, Herodotus adds, "was the first of men who conquered Cyprus and subdued it so that it paid him tribute."¹¹

Josephus says that Nebuchadnezzar invaded Egypt in his twenty-third year, "slew the king that then reigned and set up another," and carried Jews off to Babylon.²⁰  No Babylonian or Egyptian record supports this.  Greenberg notes that Donald Wiseman, the British Museum Assyriologist, "cannot find evidence for Nebuchadnezzar’s interventions in Egypt alleged by Josephus, Antiquities 10.9.7, or in the prophecy of Jer 43:8-13;  Jeremiah’s expectations were no more realized than Ezekiel’s."²

Scholars across the range agree on the result.  Greenberg:  "The prediction made in the amendment that Nebuchadnezzar would (soon) conquer and plunder Egypt also failed to materialize."²  Chisholm:  "Nebuchadnezzar apparently invaded Egypt in 568–567 bc, but not with the success promised by Ezekiel.  As far as we can surmise, Amasis, who became king of Egypt in 570 bc, enjoyed a relatively peaceful and prosperous reign of over four decades."¹²  Udd:  "If Nebuchadnezzar ever sacked Egypt, evidence of the event has completely eluded both archaeologists and historians."²¹  There is no record from any period of Egypt lying empty for forty years, or of its people being scattered among the nations and gathered back.

The rescue readings

"The most insignificant of kingdoms."  Thomas Renz argues that "the main point of Ezekiel's pronouncements against Egypt was fulfilled in that Egypt became a 'lowly kingdom' that could no longer threaten Yahweh's position as a source of trust for Israel."²²  It is true that Egypt never again ruled an empire under native kings after the Persian conquest.  But it is not true within the oracle's own horizon, since Amasis took Cyprus.  And it is not true of the land of Egypt afterwards.  The Ptolemaic kingdom ruled Judea for a century from Alexandria, and later the Fatimid and Mamluk sultans ruled Syria and western Arabia from Cairo.  To save the clause, "Egypt" must mean native Egyptian rulers only, which the text does not say.

"No longer a prince from the land of Egypt."  McDowell lists this as "There will not any more be a native prince from Egypt (Ezekiel 30:13)," and quotes Urquhart:  "The prophecy concerning the absence of a native prince from Egypt has been completely fulfilled. … The Persians took Egypt in 525 B.C. and she remained a rebellious province for all of 170 years.  In 350 B.C., Ochus finally crushed Egypt and from then on, foreigners have controlled the government."²³  Urquhart skips sixty years.  Egypt threw off Persian rule at the end of the fifth century BC, and three native dynasties ruled it until the Persians returned in the 340s.  Nor did the clause hold within its own horizon:  the oracle gives Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar, yet Amasis, a native Egyptian, outlived him by thirty-six years.  Read as a forecast for the far future, the clause did hold for a long time, from the 340s BC until the Egyptian officers' revolution of 1952.  But a clause that can begin whenever it first becomes true, and need not end, is the elastic endpoint that Test 2 warns about.

Contingency.  Chisholm suggests "that circumstances unknown to us prompted God to be lenient toward Egypt."¹²  That may be the right theology.  It means the oracle was not fulfilled.

The popular case leaves out the forty years altogether.  McDowell's Egypt section lists four predictions about Memphis, Thebes and the native prince, and none about the forty-year desolation or the scattering and return.²³  That is the selection Test 6 forbids.

Egypt: the clauses

Egypt is the worst of the six cases.  The oracle named its agent and its timescale, and neither the desolation, the forty years, the scattering nor the return happened.

Part 5: Edom and Petra

What the prophets said

Edom, the kingdom of the hill country south and east of the Dead Sea, gets more oracles than any other neighbour of Judah.  Obadiah:  "you who reside in the safety of the rocky cliffs, whose home is high in the mountains ...  I can bring you down even from there!"  "You will be destroyed forever."  "There will not be a single survivor of the descendants of Esau!"  "The people of the Negev will take possession of Esau’s mountain."¹  Jeremiah:  "Bozrah will become a pile of ruins. ...  All the towns around it will lie in ruins forever," and "No one will live there.  No human being will settle in it."¹  Ezekiel:  "I will exact my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel," and "I will turn you into a perpetual desolation, and your cities will not be inhabited," and "I will cut off from it the one who passes through or returns."¹  Isaiah 34, a poem in which "the sky will roll up like a scroll," says of Edom that "no one will ever pass through it again."¹

Obadiah describes Edom's conduct "when they cast lots over Jerusalem," which most readers take to be the fall of the city in 586 BC.  The oracles in Jeremiah and Ezekiel belong to the same years.  Malachi, a century or more later, already speaks of Edom's ruin as past:  "I turned Esau’s mountains into a deserted wasteland," and Edom says, "Though we are devastated, we will once again build the ruined places."¹  So on Test 1 the oracles were written before Edom's decline.  The question is what they committed to, and what happened.

What the popular case says

Stoner draws three predictions from Jeremiah 49:  "Edom shall be conquered.  ...  Edom shall be desolate.  ...  Edom shall not be reinhabited."  He prices them at 1 in 10^4, and he identifies Edom with Petra:  "Its capital city, Petros, was hewn out of solid rock ...  It remained a prosperous city until long after Christ.  It was taken by the Muhammadans in A.D. 636.  From that day to this it has lain desolate."⁸  McDowell goes further on his own account:  "Three-hundred million to one would be conservative, yet that is roughly what happened in real life to Edom."²³  He quotes David Higgins on Isaiah 34:10:  "Isaiah said that ‘none shall pass through it forever and ever,’ ...  That the commerce of Edom should cease was unthinkable, for the land was the crossroads of the trade routes.  But the prophecy has been literally fulfilled."²³

What happened

The kingdom ended, slowly.  The Babylonian king Nabonidus campaigned through Edom on his way to Arabia in the 550s BC and left a rock relief at Sela.  Bradley Crowell dates the attack to 551 BC and calls it "the beginning of the end for the Iron Age polity in Edom."²⁴  But the end was not a single blow.  Piotr Bienkowski, who published the excavations of Busayra, the Edomite capital that the Bible calls Bozrah, found that new evidence "now proves beyond doubt that settlement at the site continued into the Persian period."²⁵  The final report puts the end of the Iron Age and Persian town at "c. 300/200 BC," and Bienkowski suggests that "Edom continued to be represented by the supra-tribal authority at Busayra under the Babylonians and Persians."²⁶  So Bozrah lasted two and a half to three and a half centuries after Jeremiah's oracle.  Busayra is a village today, and its ancient settlement extends "under the modern village."²⁶

The people moved west and survived.  Crowell notes that after Nabonidus "some of the remaining Edomite elite went to the west, to the cities of the Negev."²⁴  They became the Idumeans of southern Judea.  About 125 BC the Jewish ruler John Hyrcanus conquered them and, Josephus says, let them stay "if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews," so "that they were hereafter no other than Jews."²⁰  A century later an Idumean, Herod the Great, ruled Judea itself.  His rival Antigonus objected that Herod was "no more than a private man, and an Idumean, i.e. a half Jew."²⁰

The land was not empty.  The Nabataeans, Arabs first recorded in 312 BC, took over the old Edomite highlands.²⁵  Their capital was Petra.  Strabo, under Augustus, calls Petra the Nabataean "metropolis," "exceedingly well-governed," and describes camel caravans between Petra and the Red Sea "in such numbers of men and camels that they differ in no respect from an army."¹⁵  McDowell's own source concedes this:  "Even after the Edomites had been pushed out, the Nabateans developed a flourishing civilization that lasted for centuries."²³  Petra was still a city in the sixth century AD.  Carbonized papyri found in its Byzantine church in 1992 are dated "ca. 537 to 594," and show that "the people in Petra at this time were speaking an early form of Arabic."²⁷  In 2025, Jordan's Ministry of Tourism counted 582,550 visits to Petra.²⁸

Assessment

Some of the Edom oracles came true.  Edom was brought down from its heights.  It ceased to exist as a state, probably under Nabonidus.  Its people lost their name, absorbed into the Jews, which fits Ezekiel's "by the hand of my people Israel" in a way no one in 586 BC would have guessed.

Others did not.  Bozrah was not a perpetual ruin:  it was rebuilt and occupied for centuries after Jeremiah, and a village stands on it now.  Edom's land was not uninhabited:  it held the Nabataean kingdom and, later, the Roman province of Arabia.  "No one will ever pass through it again" failed outright for Petra, whose whole wealth came from people passing through.  Keith himself, in a footnote of his 1844 edition, conceded that the clause "can be viewed only as referring to strangers, and not to the natives of the desert," and that "even in this limited sense the interpretation, we conceive, is very unsafe, and not quite tenable consistently with events which have already taken place."²⁹  The Edomites did not die out without "a single survivor":  they became Jews, and one of them ruled Jerusalem.  Obadiah's "people of the Negev will take possession of Esau’s mountain" did not happen either.  The Hasmoneans took Idumea in the south of Judea, not the mountains of Seir, which stayed Nabataean.

The Petra argument rests on a confusion.  Stoner's "Petros," Edom's "capital," was a Nabataean city, founded on Edom's old land after the Edomites had left it, and it flourished for six centuries after the oracles.  It cannot show that Edom became desolate.  It shows the opposite.

Two points on Test 2 and Test 6.  First, the prior was high.  Every small kingdom of the region lost its independence to the empires of the sixth century BC.  Bienkowski notes that "Ammon and Moab appear to have been annexed by Nebuchadnezzar in 582 BCE."²⁵  Second, the same book of Jeremiah that gives Edom no future promises one to Moab, Ammon and Elam:  "Yet in future days I will reverse Moab’s ill fortune."¹  Moab and Ammon vanished as completely as Edom.  If Edom's disappearance is scored as a fulfilment, Moab's and Ammon's must be scored as misses, unless all three are read as pointing to a future not yet come.

Edom: the clauses

Part 6: Nineveh

What Nahum and Zephaniah said

The book of Nahum is a single long oracle "about Nineveh," the capital of Assyria.¹  It predicts that God "with an overwhelming flood ... will make a complete end of Nineveh," that "Your dynasty will come to an end," and that "The sluice gates are opened;  the royal palace is deluged and dissolves."  The conquerors will cry "Plunder the silver!  Plunder the gold!"  There will be "piles of the dead," and "fire will consume the bars of your gates."  "There the fire will consume you."¹  It also promises Judah:  "never again will the wicked Assyrians invade you."¹  Zephaniah, dated to the reign of King Josiah (640–609 BC), adds:  "He will make Nineveh a heap of ruins;  it will be as barren as the desert.  Flocks and herds will lie down in the middle of it."¹

Test 1: when was Nahum written?

Nahum dates itself from both ends.  It recalls the fall of Egyptian Thebes as past:  "You are no more secure than Thebes ...  Yet she went into captivity as an exile."¹  The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal sacked Thebes in 663 BC.  And it treats Nineveh's fall as future.  McDowell's source puts it plainly:  "The earliest date is fixed in 3:8 where the prophet looks at the conquest of Noamon (Thebes) as a past event."²³  So if the book is a prediction, it was written between 663 and 612 BC.

That window is wide, and where Nahum falls in it matters.  In the 660s and 650s, under Ashurbanipal, Assyria ruled from Egypt to Iran, and predicting the destruction of its capital was a bold call.  From 626 BC, when Nabopolassar made Babylon independent, Assyria was fighting for its life, and in 614 BC the Medes took Assur, the old capital.  A prophet writing in 615 BC was forecasting what many could already see coming.  No manuscript can narrow the window.  Commentators read the internal clues differently, and none argues from the oracle's accuracy.  J. J. M. Roberts reasons that "the need to reassure Judah that Yahweh would destroy Assyria would be more intense earlier in this time frame, when the Assyrian power was still at full strength," and concludes:  "I would prefer a date between 640 and 630 B.C."³⁰  Duane Christensen, in the Anchor Yale commentary, links the prophet's message to a Judean revolt around 652 BC, but holds, on his theory that the Twelve Prophets were composed by word counts, that "The book of Nahum was ultimately written as a numerical composition in the context of the Babylonian Exile or shortly thereafter."  He reports that Paul Humbert "placed the book immediately after the fall of Nineveh."³¹  So the prophet is usually placed between 663 and 612, but some scholars think the book reached its present form after 612.  If they are right, its detailed picture of the fall could have been sharpened by editors who knew the outcome, which weakens Test 1 for the details more than for the central prediction.

What happened in 612 BC

The Babylonian chronicle for the fourteenth year of Nabopolassar records the end.  The Babylonian king and Cyaxares, "the king of the Manda-hordes," that is, the Medes, marched up the Tigris and camped against Nineveh.  "From the month Simanu till the month Abu, three ba[ttles were fought, then] they made a great attack against the city.  In the month Abu, [the ...th day, the city was seized ...]."  Then:  "many prisoners of the city, beyond counting, they carried away.  The city [they turned] into ruin-hills and hea[ps (of debris)]."⁹  The words in brackets are restorations of a broken tablet.  Wiseman's edition reads the same line:  "The great spoil of the city and temple they carried off and [turned] the city into a ruin-mound and heaps of debri[s]."³²  The Assyrian king set up a last court at Harran, which fell in 610 BC.

So Nahum's central predictions were fulfilled:  the city was besieged by a coalition, taken, plundered, and turned into ruin mounds, and the Assyrian dynasty ended within three years.  And the ruin lasted.  About 401 BC the Greek soldier Xenophon marched past "a great deserted fortress," which he called Mespila and said the Medes had once lived in.³³  His Loeb editor notes that "The ruins which Xenophon saw here were those of Nineveh, the famous capital of the Assyrian Empire."³⁴  Two centuries after the fall, a passing army did not know its name.  Strabo:  "the city Ninus was wiped out immediately after the overthrow of the Syrians."¹⁵  Lucian, in the second century AD, has Hermes tell Charon that Nineveh "is already gone" and that "you couldn't even say where it was."³⁵

Unlike Babylon, Nineveh did not fade over centuries.  It ended as a great city in a single summer.  The prediction had a named target, a clear outcome, and it held.

The flood, and other details

The popular case goes further and claims the details.  Gleason Archer, quoted by McDowell:  "Nahum 2:6 contains a remarkably exact prediction, for subsequent history records that a vital part of the city walls of Nineveh was carried away by a great flood."²³  The "history" is Diodorus, writing in the first century BC from the Greek physician Ctesias of about 400 BC:  "in the third year, after there had been heavy and continuous rains, it came to pass that the Euphrates, running very full, both inundated a portion of the city and broke down the walls for a distance of twenty stades."³⁶  Ctesias puts Nineveh on the wrong river and the siege at three years, where the chronicle has about three months.  The chronicle itself says nothing of a flood.  Wiseman thought the silence "might support the classical tradition that the final breach in the walls resulted from an abnormally high flood," but that is his conjecture, not evidence.³²  Walter Maier, also quoted by McDowell, argued that the month of the fall suits a flood, because "the rivers attain their greatest height in the months of April and May, the period roughly parallel to Ab."²³  But Abu, the Hebrew month Ab, falls in July and August, the low-water season, not in the spring floods.

So the flood detail rests on a Greek story two centuries late and wrong in its geography.  It is not independent confirmation (Test 5).  Roberts thinks the Greek tradition may itself have grown from a figure of speech:  "in view of the traditional Mesopotamian use of flood imagery to describe the attack of an enemy army, it is possible that the Greek tradition arose from a misunderstanding of the metaphorical language of a lost Babylonian source."³⁰  Ashurbanipal's own account of the sack of Thebes uses exactly that figure:  his troops "conquered this city completely, smashed (it as if by) a floodstorm."⁹

The excavations tell of battle, not water.  At the Halzi Gate on the east wall, a University of California team found that "a blocking of mud-brick ... narrowed the central corridor of the gate" before the end, and that "The disposition of the 12 excavated skeletons, all tightly concentrated in the central narrowed passageway, makes it clear that they died in the same event under dramatic circumstances."  Arrowheads and an iron spearhead lay among them, and a horse outside.³⁷  No published report on the gate describes flood damage.

Two clauses count against Nahum.  First, "never again will the wicked Assyrians invade you."  The NET supplies "Assyrians";  the Hebrew says "the wicked one."  Read of Assyria, it held.  Read as a promise that Judah would see no more invaders, it failed within twenty years, when Babylonian armies invaded Judah and in 586 BC destroyed Jerusalem.  Second, "a complete end of Nineveh" was not quite complete.  Tacitus records that in AD 49 a Parthian army "captured the city of Ninos, the most ancient capital of Assyria."³⁸  The archaeologist St John Simpson adds that "Nineveh almost certainly held a Roman garrison," that until the Arab conquest of 637/38 or 641/42 "it flourished as a Sasanian town, bridgehead and fortress on the east bank of the Tigris," and that it had a Christian bishop until the ninth century, "when the bishopric was merged with that of Mosul."³⁹  The mound of Nebi Yunus still carries a village around the shrine of Jonah, and the city of Mosul has spread across the river.³¹  Neither point touches the main prediction, that the imperial capital would fall and never rise again as one.  But "a complete end" was true of the empire and the capital, not of every house on the site.

Nineveh: the clauses

Part 7: Cyrus by name

What Isaiah says

Isaiah 44–45 names the Persian king twice.  God is the one "who commissions Cyrus, the one I appointed as shepherd to carry out all my wishes and to decree concerning Jerusalem, ‘She will be rebuilt,’ and concerning the temple, ‘It will be reconstructed.’"  Then:  "This is what the Lord says to his chosen one, to Cyrus, whose right hand I hold in order to subdue nations before him and disarm kings, to open doors before him so gates remain unclosed."  God calls him by name "even though you do not submit to me."¹  And:  "He will rebuild my city;  he will send my exiled people home, but not for a price or a bribe."¹

On Test 2 a personal name is the strongest commitment a prediction can make.  Every clause here also came true.  Cyrus subdued Media, Lydia and Babylon.  Babylon opened to him "without battle."⁹  His own cylinder says he returned displaced gods and peoples to their homes:  "I (also) gathered all their (former) inhabitants and returned (to them) their habitations."⁹  Ezra 1 gives his decree for the temple in Jerusalem.¹  And the cylinder credits Marduk, not the God of Israel, which fits Isaiah's "you do not submit to me."  The cylinder never names the Jews, as the article on Exile, Babylon, and Persia shows, so it supports the policy Ezra describes, not the decree itself.

Test 4 and Test 1

Two problems keep this from being a clear proof.

The first is Test 4.  Josephus says Cyrus released the Jews because he had read Isaiah:  "This was known to Cyrus by his reading the book which Isaiah left behind him of his prophecies," and "when Cyrus read this, and admired the Divine power, an earnest desire and ambition seized upon him to fulfill what was so written."²⁰  If that is true, the decree was a fulfilment arranged by a reader of the prophecy.  The method article draws the consequence:  the decree fails Test 4, and only the naming of Cyrus could count.

The second is Test 1, and it decides everything.  The oldest copy of Isaiah 44–45 is in the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, which radiocarbon and handwriting analysis date to "between 180–100 BCE," about four centuries after Cyrus.⁴⁰  Ben Sira, writing about 180 BC, already credits Isaiah with the comfort chapters:  "By his great spirit he showed what would be, forever, and he comforted those who mourned in Sion."⁵  That shows that Isaiah 40–66 was read as Isaiah's book by the second century BC.  It does not show that it was written before 539.

The internal arguments run both ways, and the method article sets them out.  S. R. Driver, the leading English critic of 1910, argued from the prophet's standpoint:  "the prophet does not claim foreknowledge of Cyrus, but only of what he will accomplish :  he is already "stirred up," and "come"."⁴¹  The texts support him.  The Cyrus of Isaiah 41 is one God has already "stirred up," who "advances" and "steps on rulers as if they were clay."¹  John Oswalt replies that the book makes the Cyrus prediction its own proof of God's power, so a late date makes the book a deception:  "If this is an after-the-fact realization, what purpose is served by attempting to make it appear a prediction?"¹³  Isaiah 48 does claim that God "announced them to you beforehand;  before they happened, I predicted them for you."  But the same chapter also says of the "new events" now announced that "before today you did not hear about them."¹

This article does not try to settle the authorship of Isaiah 40–66, which Who Wrote Isaiah 40-66? weighs.  The verdict here is narrower.  If the Cyrus oracle was written in the eighth century, it is the most remarkable fulfilled prediction in this article.  If it was written in the 540s, while Cyrus was already conquering, it is a confident and accurate forecast, but not evidence of foreknowledge beyond what a well-informed observer could have had.  No manuscript can choose between the two, and the internal evidence has not persuaded either side.

Cyrus: the clauses

Part 8: The cases side by side

The clause count

The counts depend on how the clauses are divided, and a different reader would divide some of them differently.  The pattern does not depend on it.  Nineveh's main clauses came true as worded, at the time, and stayed true.  Tyre and Egypt failed on the terms the texts set, and the book that contains them says so.  Babylon and Edom came true on who and what in broad terms, and failed on how, when and how completely.

What the hits had in common

Peter Stoner supplied the base rate himself.  He priced Tyre's "never be rebuilt" at one in twenty because "Nearly all old cities which had great natural advantages were at some time rebuilt."⁸  That is true of some regions and false of others, and the regions matter.

Tertius Chandler's tables of the largest cities in history, put online by Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma and Karen Seto in 2016, allow a rough check.  For 650 BC Chandler lists seven large cities between the Aegean and Iran:  Nineveh, Babylon, Miletus, Sais, Jerusalem, Nimrud and Susa.  For 430 BC he lists sixteen, including Babylon, Memphis, Sidon, Tyre, Jerusalem and Damascus.⁴²  The three Mesopotamian cities and the two Egyptian ones are ruin fields today.  The four Levantine cities are all living cities.  Southern Mesopotamia emptied for reasons that had nothing to do with prophecy:  rivers that changed course, irrigated soil that turned salty, and new capitals founded a few miles away.

Read against that background, the six cases sort themselves.  The oracles that predicted the permanent ruin of Nineveh and Babylon bet on what happened to every royal city of Mesopotamia, given enough time.  Nineveh's oracle stands out because the ruin came at once.  The oracle that predicted the permanent ruin of Tyre bet against the odds for a Phoenician port, and it lost.  The oracles that gave a short timescale and a named agent, Egypt in forty years by Nebuchadnezzar and Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar, failed.

The best case and the worst

Best:  Nineveh.  Nahum named the capital of the strongest power on earth, said it would fall, be plundered and end for good, and it did, within at most fifty-one years of the earliest possible date of writing.  The chronicle confirms the fall and the ruin, and Xenophon and Strabo confirm that it stayed ruined.  Its weakness is that no one can show it was written while Assyria was strong rather than when it was already falling.

Worst:  Egypt.  Ezekiel named the conqueror, the borders and the number of years.  Nothing in the forty-year desolation, the scattering or the return took place, and the pharaoh of the day ruled four decades in prosperity and took Cyprus.

The most oversold:  Tyre.  It is the case popular books lead with, and it is a prophecy that failed as worded, as its own book records.  It should be retired as evidence of foreknowledge, as the method article already concluded.⁴³

Objections and responses

1. Objections about Tyre alone, the "waves of nations," the mainland city and "modern Sur is not ancient Tyre," are answered in the Tyre article.
2. "Prophecies of judgment are conditional, as Jeremiah 18 says, so Tyre and Egypt were spared." That may be true, and Chisholm argues it. But then these oracles were not fulfilled, and they cannot be counted as hits in a probability argument. By the symmetry rule, a conditional reading of Tyre's failure also removes Alexander's causeway from the list of fulfilments.
3. "The prophets used hyperbole; the details were never meant literally." If so, the details cannot be scored as fulfilled either. Archer's flood at Nineveh, Stoner's Arab tents and the nets of Tyre all go out with the failed details.
4. "Babylon is desolate today, exactly as Isaiah said." It emptied over four to six centuries, after Seleucus moved the capital, as every comparable city in the region did. Villages stood among its ruins in Koldewey's day, its bricks were carried off for two thousand years, and it is now a World Heritage Site with a reconstructed palace. Oswalt, the leading evangelical commentator on Isaiah, calls it "the fulfillment ... of a principle" rather than of a specific event.
5. "Isaiah 13 is about Sennacherib's destruction of Babylon in 689 BC, in Isaiah's own lifetime." The suggestion is Seth Erlandsson's and Charles Boutflower's, as Oswalt reports, and it fits the violence and the "near" time limit.¹³ Sennacherib boasted that he "destroyed," "devastated," and "burned with fire" the city, dumped its temples into a canal and "made it like a meadow."⁴⁴ But his son Esarhaddon began rebuilding Babylon at once. His inscription says Marduk had written seventy years of desolation and then "turned (the Book of Fate) upside down and ordered its (the city's) restoration in the eleventh year."⁴⁴ On this reading "No one will live there again" fails within a decade, and the Medes have no part in 689. Oswalt sets it aside for the figurative reading.
6. "Isaiah 13 looks past historical Babylon to a final judgment, as the cosmic language shows." The stars and sun darkened in 13:10 support that reading. But a prophecy of the end of the world cannot be scored as fulfilled in Mesopotamia. It belongs to the open future, not to the evidence.
7. "Critics date these books late only because they rule out prediction." Not here. The case for dating the Tyre, Egypt and Babylon oracles before the events rests on what they got wrong, and the case for Nahum rests on Thebes. This article accepts the books' own dates for all of them except Isaiah 40–48, where the dispute is real.
8. "A few failed details should not hide the remarkable hits." The hits are real, and this article counts them. But Test 7 asks what the hits were worth. The fall of Nineveh and the eventual emptying of Babylon had high odds, and the clauses with low odds, the forty years, the bare rock, the never-rebuilt, failed. The balance does not support a probability argument.
9. "Ezekiel 29:18 proves Ezekiel was a false prophet by Deuteronomy 18:22." The method article treats this objection.⁴⁵ For the question here, foreknowledge, it is enough that the Tyre oracle failed as worded. Whether that makes Ezekiel a false prophet is a theological question about conditional prophecy, on which Chisholm and Block take the conditional side.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Nahum's date. The book falls between 663 and 612 BC. Whether it belongs to the 650s or the 610s decides how much weight it carries, and the internal evidence has not settled it.
2. Ezekiel 26:12. The Hebrew has "they," the Greek "he." Zimmerli and Allen judge the Hebrew original, which lets "they" mean the "many nations" of 26:3. The Tyre article weighs what that does and does not rescue.
3. The Egyptian campaign of 568/7 BC. The Babylonian tablet is broken where the outcome should be, and Edel's Egyptian text, which Greenberg reports as a defeat of the invaders, was not read for this article.
4. The end of Bozrah. The final report dates it to about 300 or 200 BC on a few imported sherds, and Bienkowski himself urges caution. Malachi's report of a devastated Edom, a century or more before that, has not been reconciled with continued occupation at Busayra.
5. Fire and flood at Nineveh. The chronicle mentions neither. The main excavation reports by David Stronach and Diana Pickworth were not obtained, only a 2010 radiocarbon paper on the Halzi Gate skeletons. Those skeletons give radiocarbon ages about two centuries too old for 612 BC, a puzzle their authors do not solve.
6. The last years of Babylon. The latest datable cuneiform tablet, from about AD 79/80, comes from Uruk, not Babylon. When the last community left Babylon itself is not fixed here.
7. Isaiah 40–66. The Cyrus case depends on the date of these chapters, which Who Wrote Isaiah 40-66? weighs.
8. Isaiah 23 and Zechariah 9. Isaiah 23 predicts Tyre's revival after seventy years, and Zechariah 9 predicts its fall again. Neither was scored here, because neither is in the popular case. Renz judges that in Isaiah 23 "The promise thus seems to exceed the fulfilment."²²

Verdict

When the Hebrew prophets foretold what would happen to the cities and nations around them, some of it happened as written and some did not, and the books keep both.  Nahum's oracle on Nineveh is a clear, early, specific prediction that came true at once and stayed true, and it is the strongest case of the six.  The fall of Babylon to the Medes and Persians, the end of Edom as a nation, and its people's absorption by Israel are real hits of moderate weight.  The details that would make these cases remarkable, the violent sack of Babylon, the emptying of Edom's land, the bare rock and permanent end of Tyre, the forty-year desolation of Egypt, did not happen as written.  The Cyrus oracle would outweigh them all if Isaiah wrote it in the eighth century, and nothing in the manuscripts can show that he did.

The words were not written after the events.  For Tyre, Egypt, Babylon and Edom, the misses themselves show that the oracles came first, because no one writing later would have written them that way.  That is good evidence for the honesty of the books and poor evidence for foreknowledge of detail.  The popular case built by Keith, Stoner and McDowell counts the hits and drops the misses.  Done the other way, the count supports a smaller claim:  the prophets named real enemies and real outcomes, some of which came true and some of which did not.

Sources