There are many intriguing prophecies in the Bible, which have created heated arguments. Take Isaiah 44:28, for example. If it was written in 700 B.C. as many think, it would truly be a miraculous prophecy  since Cyrus the Persian didn’t exist until the early 500s B.C. Needless to say, there is a raging debate over the dating of Isaiah.

Another puzzling prophecy is from Daniel 9:25, which seems to lay out a timeline from a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Messiah comes. It appears to be a reference to the decree of Artaxerxes in 444 B.C. (see Nehemiah 2:1-8). If these weeks referred to in Daniel are taken as groupings of seven years, this timeline takes us up to 33 A.D., the time of Jesus. Nobody claims Daniel was alive in the time of Jesus, so the controversy has to do with the way the weeks are interpreted.

Then there is Ezekiel 26, which is a judgment on the city of Tyre. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to the city. People moved from the city to a nearby island in 585 B.C.  Later, Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. tore Tyre down and use its broken structures to build a raised walkway out to the island to attack the people. Again, the controversy is on the dating of Ezekiel, because if it was written as many believe around 600 B.C., it involves miraculous prophecy.

Christians see many prophetic comments in the Old Testament as referring to Jesus. For example, Micah 5:2  suggests it will be Bethlehem from which a future ruler will be born; the indication is that he is an eternal being. Then there are the famous chapters in Isaiah (49, 50, 52, 53) that  Christians apply to Jesus – his life, sufferings, and purpose for his existence. One other interesting set of verses comes from Psalm 22, where it seems to speak clearly of someone’s death by crucifixion, a type of punishment, unknown in the psalmist’s  time.