Citing Middle Eastern Prophecy Being Fulfilled

Becasue he needs the Biblical prophesy to be true to support his theology.If any given prophesy in the Bible is rock-solid proven to be a false prophesy, it proves that the Bible is not infallible.So any unfulfilled prophesy in the Bible, regardless of how much textual evidence shows that the passage is speaking about contemporary events and not far-off future ones, must simply be unfulfilled yet.Revelations seems pretty strongly to be talking about the Roman empire, and was supposed to have happened soon after it was written? Well, the world hasn't ended yet, Jesus hasn't come again, so it must have simply not happened yet.Jesus says he's coming "soon" almost 2000 years ago? Well by golly, 2000 years is like a blink of an eye to an immortal deity!Buz needs this and every other prophesy in the Bible that wasn't fulfilled within its own pages to still potentially happen in the future. It doesn't matter how far wrong the prophesy becomes in a modern context, or that the people and nations discussed in the passage no longer exist as such (and have sometimes even been absorbed into those who are supposed to fight against them!). Buz needs the prophesy to potentially happen in the future, or all of Biblical literalism falls apart.

And yet that's not the way Buz is interpreting this prophesy. Biblical literalism insists that the Bible is literally true, every word. That means that when a passage says "x is going to happen," it means "x is going to happen," not "x will happen unless you change your ways." I imagine the author of the passage was simply expressing his own personal anger by saying "my god is going to kick your ass for this!" But that doesn't match up with Biblical literalism. If the Bible is literally true, it has to mean exactly what it says - which means prophesies are supposed to be fulfilled, inevitably. For that to be the case, the literalist position has to be that any unfulfilled prophesies in the Bible will still be fulfilled at some point in the future. Personally, I would think they are more expressions of the author's frustrations. He laments that he personally can't do anything to change events, but fervently believes his deity will serve out the vengeance he desires.But then, I'm not a literalist, like Buz is.

Then all of your comments constitute a red herring, as I was specifically addressing Buz's requirements for prophesy to be literally true, and have not been talking about possible metaphorical interpretations at all. I thought that was made perfectly clear.

Take examples from other Biblical stories of mass destruction, like Soddom. Fire and brimstone from the sky? Look to Revelations as well. When a person sees something, they try to describe what they've seen, not translate it into contemporary terms.It's not hard for someone who has never seen modern weaponry to describe their first glimpse, and the descriptions are unlikely to simply be "swords and arrows." Think "flinging balls of fire" or "raining fire and destruction from the sky."If you took a completely sheltered person from say, a South American Indian tribe from the middle of the rain forest and showed him a battle scene from Iraq, I seriously doubt he'd call an RPG a "bow and arrow." I'm pretty sure he'd call it some sort of weapon of the gods, and describe it as some great weapon that shoots fireballs.