Vaticinium ex eventu

This article is about historiography and theology. For paranormal criticism, see Postdiction. For the scientific technique, see Retrodiction.

Vaticinium ex eventu ("Prophecy from the event") is a technical theological or historiographical term referring to a prophecy written after the author already had information about the events he was "foretelling". The text is written so as to appear that the prophecy had taken place before the event, when in fact it was written after the events supposedly predicted. Vaticinium ex eventu is a form of hindsight bias. The concept is similar but distinct from postdiction, where prophecies that were genuinely written or spoken before the event are reinterpreted after the event to fit the facts as they occurred.

Examples

In religious writings

The Bablyonian "Marduk Prophecy", a text describing the travels of the Marduk idol from Babylon, "prophecies" of the statue’s seizure during the sack of the city by Mursilis I in 1531 BC, Assyria, when Tukulti-Ninurta I overthrew Kashtiliash IV in 1225 BC and took the idol to Assur, and Elam, when Kudur-nahhunte ransacked the city and pilfered the statue around 1160 BC. A copy was found in the House of the Exorcist at Assur, whose contents date from 713-612 BC and is closely related thematically to another vaticinium ex eventu text called the Shulgi prophecy, which probably followed it in a sequence of tablets. Both compositions present a favorable view of Assyria.

The Book of Daniel utilizes vaticinium ex eventu, by its seeming foreknowledge of events up to Alexander's conquest but nothing from the second century BCE. Modern scholarship considers the stories of the first half legendary in origin, and the visions of the second the product of anonymous authors in the Maccabean period (2nd century BCE). Its inclusion in Ketuvim (Writings) rather than Nevi'im (Prophets) was likely because it appeared after the canon for those books had closed, and the dominant view among Jews and scholars is that Daniel is not in any case a prophetic book but an apocalypse. However, in the Christian canon Daniel is listed under the Major Prophets.

Scholars regard statements attributed to Jesus in the Gospels that foretell the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple as examples of vaticinia ex eventu, considering the Gospels were all written after the siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. in which the temple was destroyed.

The Sibylline oracles are held to be vaticinia ex eventu written in imitation of the Roman Sibylline Books, from the later Hellenistic era to Late Antiquity, first by Jews of Alexandria and later by Christians throughout the Roman world.

In Hinduism, the prophet Madhva made a vaticinium ex eventu in the thirteenth century when he applied a Vedic prophecy to himself, declaring himself to be an avatar.

The Book of Mormon contains many vaticinia ex eventu, such as the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus or the foretelling of the founder, Joseph Smith Jr..

Secular

• The Ancient world saw the technique of vaticinium ex eventu used by a wide variety of figures, from Pindar and Herodotus to Horace and Vergil.

• References in the late correspondence of Virginia Woolf to “how I love this savage medieval water...and myself so eliminated” are sometimes taken as presaging her suicide by drowning a few months later: the danger of vaticinium ex eventu has however also been observed.

See also

3

References

• Vaticiniium ex event (or post eventum) Dictionary of the Bible