Dear Peter,Thank you, Rolf. I agree with you here.
My personal viewpoints regarding prophecies are linguistically irrelevant. However, my observations are that some persons believe that real prophecies can be uttered before the events come, and others believe that accurate predictions before the events materialize are impossible. This last view was the original reason for the hypothesis that the book of Isaiah has several authors.
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The point is that when a prophet spoke words which is his mind referred to the future, the reference of the verbs he used would be future. ...
... When a prophet who had seen some events wanted to write about these for an audience, and he would place his words in a prophetic setting, either to deceive his audience, or because he believed this was legitimate, he would still use verbs with future reference (there are examples of this in the Ethiopic Enoch). In other words, the prophet would choose his verbs as if he lived before the event. In this prophetic context only verbs with future reference would be "relevant, informative and true".This is interesting, and suggests that we don't have a full understanding of what is happening here. It would seem to me that in this kind of prophetic poetry the normal semantic distinctions between verb forms are cancelled, as a literary device perhaps intended to avoid specifying the real time reference.
In my dissertation work I did an extensive linguistic research on verbs used in prophetic settings, and the interesting picture that emerged was that if the four-component model is followed strictly by the translators of prophecies, the result is often a zig-zag text as far as time is concerned, where past tense, present, present completed, and future tense are used, and the readers are completely confused as to the real time reference. Jeremiah 50 and 51 are examples of this.
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