Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction xi
1. Our Timeless Connection with Prophets and Prophecies 1
2. What Is a Prophet? 33
3. Where Prophecies Come From 75
PART I. THE EARTH
4. The Ecology 101
5. Weather and Topography 111
6. Space Travel: Ours and Theirs 119
PART II. SOCIETY’S LANDSCAPE
7. Politics and the Economy 133
8. Religion 145
9. Education 157
10. Technology 167
11. Crime Fighting and Forensics 177
PART III. OUR PHYSICAL, EMOTIONAL, MENTAL AND SPIRITUAL HEALTH
12. Health and Medicine 195
13. Diet, Fitness and the Way We Look 219
14. Mental Health 231
15. Relationships 251
16. Spirituality: The Benediction 261
Read an Excerpt
IntroductionI was eighteen years old. I’d been psychic for eighteen years, but I still hadn’t made peace with it. I was starting to do readings for people, successfully, and I was even building a clientele, to my amazement. The problem was, while I never doubted my God-given ability to see into people’s futures (I didn’t especially appreciate it, but I never doubted it), I kept hoping that somehow none of these new clients would notice that, accurate or not, I didn’t especially know what I was doing or how I was doing it. Except for my much adored and brilliantly psychic Grandma Ada, I had no one to talk to about it, no one to ask advice from or express my insecurities to or, probably most of all, tremble to about the responsibility of people turning to me for insights and warnings about what their lives held in store.
And so, I began reading everything I could get my hands on about other people who’d seemed to be “like me,” communicating with spirits, seeing clients, peering into the future, using their gifts for other people’s benefit and trying to serve God in the process. Somewhere between a biography of Madame Helena Blavatsky and one of Edgar Cayce’s many books I became intrigued with the idea of expanding my visions of the future from one client at a time to the world at large, just like Cayce and Madame Blavatsky and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and so many others I was reading about had done, with often remarkable accuracy.
I wasn’t very ceremonious about it. I just sat down one day, surrounded myself with the White Light of the Holy Spirit to keep God’s presence and protection around me, told Him what I was about to do (as if He didn’t know) and prayed for His wisdom and insights as I looked into the future of life on earth, took a deep meditative breath and nearly fainted. The rush of images and sounds and flashes and special effects and explosions and music and words and cars and doctors and rocket ships—it was like seeing and hearing every movie you’ve ever sat through, all at the same time, superimposed over one another.
Needless to say, I put a stop to that very quickly, and realized that if I was ever going to be able to expand my gift to anything beyond one-on-one prophecies, I was going to have to find a way to organize those prophecies into some kind of sequence my mind could sort out and make sense of. After a bit of trial and error early on, I finally learned that breaking prophecies down into one subject at a time—focusing on that one subject and then stepping aside for whatever information comes in—was what worked best for me.
Which explains the structure you’ll find in the pages of this book. As some of you may know, I have “standing dates” on several television and radio shows to do annual New Year’s predictions for the coming year. Those are great fun, and I enjoy them and am thrilled to be accurate enough that they keep inviting me back. But this book, subject by subject rather than year by year, is written at my real “comfort level” and my ultimate pleasure when it comes to prophecies.
I hesitate to call them “my” prophecies, because again, ultimately, everything comes from God. That doesn’t mean you should read these prophecies as a series of divine messages directly from Him. As you’ll read in Chapter 3, prophecies have a variety of sources, all of which trace back to our Creator, but by the time we fallible humans have finished translating them and communicating them, we’re bound to get it wrong some of the time.
I simply meant to acknowledge that never do I write a book, do a reading, give a lecture, make a media appearance, appear at a book signing or, for that matter, even take a breath, without God and His love at its core.
I thank Him for being with me through every page of writing Prophecy, and with you through every page of reading it.
—Sylvia C. Browne
PROPHECY
Chapter One
Our Timeless Connection
With Prophets and
Prophecies
It is our nature to want to know what the future holds. From the moment we first began to inhabit this earth in human form, we’ve believed that forewarned is forearmed, and we’ve sought out those who seem to have a clearer view of the road ahead than we do. On a small scale, we don’t want to get caught in the rain without an umbrella, but we also wouldn’t mind knowing whether or not we should save that rainwater for an upcoming drought or man-made crisis. On a much larger scale, we want to know that we personally, we as a community, we as a faith, as a society, as a nation or as a surprisingly fragile planet are going to be okay and, more to the point, what “okay” is going to look like. We look to prophets and prophecies not just for warnings but also for hope and for comfort, no matter how far in the distance they might be. And because we’ve been fooled before, and/or not paying attention, and/or too naive or greedy or in too much of a hurry to always rely on our own judgment, we explore prophecies in search of a blueprint for discerning the real from the counterfeit, the truth from the lies, the heroes from the villains, meaningful road signs from time- and soul-wasting detours and, probably most essential of all, the genuinely God-centered from the countless clever pretenders.
The Cultural Bond of Prophecy One of the countless aspects of prophets and prophecies that has always fascinated me is that they’ve always been traditional and fundamental to civilizations throughout the world, even the most ancient, isolated cultures who had no interest in or means of communicating with each other. It’s not as if the Aborigines of Australia heard that predicting the long-range future had become very popular among American Indians and decided to give it a try, or the Mayans only started coming up with prophecies so they wouldn’t be outdone by those Egyptian prophets they kept hearing about. Cultures tend to express the most deep-rooted essences of their people, and each of these cultures, so vastly different in so many ways, has demonstrated, separately and together, that we’re eternally united as human beings around the world in our insistence that the future is knowable.
Of course, the future is knowable, and I’ll explain in Chapter 3 exactly why that is. That fact alone, and our universal agreement that it’s true, should bring us more peace than it does. Who’s “good at” and “bad at” foreseeing the future, and which information is accurate and which isn’t, is almost beside the point when it comes to simply appreciating how dearly held our global yearning to look ahead really is. It would be impossible to explore the prophecies of every culture that ever existed, or that exists today, but I want to highlight just a few, hoping that as you read them you’ll focus on the respectful purity of spirit at their core, no matter what corner of the world they came from.
The American Indians
A friend of mine was involved in a recent documentary about native American Indians. The film crew shot for a couple of weeks, capturing great footage of several generations of the tribes they were focused on, their rituals, their daily lives, their traditions and ceremonies, their relationships within families and within the tribe, and the extent to which “civilization” had irreversibly seeped into their lives.
As wonderful as the footage and the camera work were, though, and as mesmerizing as that collage of brown, beautiful faces from ages one year old to a hundred were to watch, the producers and the director realized that their film was still missing something, some special element that would set it apart from every other documentary ever done about the American Indian. As a solution, someone came up with the idea of giving a camera to the Indians themselves and letting them shoot some footage, so the makers of the documentary could really get a look at life through the eyes of the subjects of their film. And that’s exactly what they did. A week later the producers and director found themselves gaping, with chagrin at first, at the results of their bright idea: a coyote’s pawprints in a muddy riverbank, a wisp of white fur caught in a broken branch, a hawk circling, an aura around a full moon, an approaching thunderstorm, a bear catching fish in a waterfall, a wolf loping across a hill—hour after hour of footage, and not for one second was there so much as a glimpse of a human being.
What they finally edited together was a gorgeous documentary and eloquent, simple proof of what’s been written about American Indians for thousands of years: ask them to tell you their story and they’ll tell you about Nature.
Of course, the many tribes of the native American nations each have their own distinct language, customs and cherished legacy of prophecies. But even their prophecies reflect their reverence for this earth and our essential spiritual connection to it, without which humankind can’t and won’t survive. One of the most beautiful examples is an excerpt from a Lakota prophecy. It refers to the Star People, whom many tribes believe to be their ancient extraterrestrial ancestors, and to the Sacred Mother, who is the earth:
In the next decade, the Star People that you call meteorites will come to this earth in answer to the Mother’s call for help. You see, we are all relations. So the Star People are beings, and they are the planets, and the other bodies in the heavens as well.
The Sacred Mother is screaming for life and the meteorites will hear her cries and answer her call for help. They will hit the earth from the heavens with such force that many internal things will happen as well as external. The earth will move as a result of the impact. This will cause the sacred fire that is the source of all life to the Mother to move through her body.
The rains will change their fall and the winds will alter their course and what has existed for three hundred years will no longer exist. And where there is summer, there will be fall. And where there is fall, there will be winter. And where there is winter, there will be spring.
The animals and plants will become confused. There will be great plagues that you do not understand. Many of these plagues are born from your scientists whose intentions have gone awry. Your scientists have let these monsters loose upon the land. These plagues will spread through your waters and through your blood and through your food because you have disrupted the natural chain through which your Mother cleanses herself.
Only those who have learned to live on the land will find sanctuary. Go to where the eagles fly, to where the wolf roams, to where the bear lives. Here you will find life because they will always go to where the water is pure and the air can be breathed. Live where the trees, the lungs of this earth, purify the air. There is a time coming, beyond the weather. The veil between the physical and the spiritual world is thinning.
And this came from Brave Buffalo of the Brule Sioux Nation:
It is time for the Great Purification. We are at a point of no return. The two-legged are about to bring destruction to life on earth. It’s happened before, and it’s about to happen again. The Sacred Hoop shows how all things go in a circle. The old becomes new; the new becomes old. Everything repeats. White people have no culture. Culture is having roots in the earth. People without culture don’t exist very long because Nature is God. Without a connection to Nature, the people drift, grow negative, destroy themselves. In the beginning we had one mind, and it was positive, a thing of beauty, seeing beauty everywhere.
The Aborigines
Half a world away from the American Indians, and very probably unaware of their existence, the Australian Aborigines are thought to have been on this earth for more than eighteen thousand generations. From their ancient beginnings they’ve been nomadic hunters and gatherers, traveling and living in clans, orally passing their culture and traditions along from one generation to the next to the next to the next. They revere Nature and their elders, they’re intensely connected to both the practical and the spiritual sides of their lives, and they embrace a gorgeous mythology called the “Dreamtime” that lies at the heart of their belief system.
The Dreamtime, which is woven through Aboriginal lives in a variety of daily applications, is at its core their treasured account of that time when their spirit ancestors moved through the bare, unsanctified land and gave it its physical form and its sacred laws. There was the Rainbow Serpent who slithered across the world creating rivers and valleys with its massive body. Bila was the sun woman whose fire lit the world. She was destroyed by two lizardlike creatures called Kudna and Muda, who, frightened by the darkness they’d brought about by killing Bila, began hurling boomerangs into the sky in all directions, trying to bring back the light. Kudna’s boomerang flew into the eastern sky and a brilliant ball of fire appeared, which slowly crossed the sky and vanished again beyond the western horizon, and day and night were born. The countless spirits and stories are the exquisite foundation on which the Aborigines build their reverent awe of all of Nature and their belief that it is humankind’s privilege to live among and serve such hallowed creations.
Dreamtime is a tangible reality of the Aboriginal past, present and future. It isn’t something that happened a very long time ago and was completed, it’s an ongoing consciousness and responsibility with tragic consequences if it’s ignored. A prophecy from an Australian Aboriginal Tribal Elder named Guboo Ted Thomas, orally preserved until it was committed to writing, reflects their profoundly simple faith:
I was in Dreamtime.
I see this great wave going.
I tell people about this wave.
It wasn’t a tidal wave.
This was a spiritual wave.
So, to me, I believe that the Dreamtime is going to be that.
I believe the revival is going to start in Australia when we’re Dreaming.
It’s the hummingbee that I’m talking about.
And love.
We’ve got to learn to love one another.
You see, that’s really what’s going to happen to the earth.
We’re going to have tidal waves.
We’re going to have earthquakes.
That’s coming because we don’t consider this land as our Mother.
We’ve taken away the balance, and we’re not putting back.
I look at the bush, and those trees are alive.
They’re not dead, they’re alive.
And they want you to cuddle them.
The Incas
Thousands of miles from the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines, the ancient Inca civilization evolved on the South American continent. The origins of the Incas are a mystery, primarily recorded through the oral legacy of a people whose world was destroyed and whose vast wealth was pirated by Spanish conquistadors in 1532.
At its most powerful, the Inca Empire was the largest nation on earth, stretching 2500 miles along the Andes Mountains. They were artisans, hunters, gatherers, farmers and incredibly gifted builders and engineers, constructing more than fourteen thousand miles of roads before such a thing as the wheel even existed, roads built for foot travel but so time- and weather-resistant that some of them are still virtually intact today. Also still intact today, and marveled over by visitors from around the world, are Inca pyramids, temples, observatories and some structures that were never finished, mute reminders of lives interrupted forever and a brilliant civilization thrown aside for power and greed.
Nature formed the heart of the Inca language and the Inca religion as well. The Incas believed that all creation in nature was the work of the Sun God, and they considered themselves to be descendants of the Sun. They held festivals at the end of every harvest season to thank the Sun God for their bountiful crops or to pray for better crops in the season ahead, and at the solstices when the earth and the Sun are at their farthest from each other, the Incas held ceremonies to ask the Sun God not to leave his children. They believed in reincarnation and even carried the mummies of revered ancestors to the holiest of rituals so their ancestors could share the events with them.
After the Inca civilization was destroyed in the 1500s, a small tribe of refugees called the Q’ero escaped to isolated villages in the high Andes. They’ve lived there ever since, with the Q’ero elders and shamans passing along the Inca language, history, traditions and prophecies to five hundred years of descendants.
The Western world’s first actual sighting of the Q’ero villages didn’t happen until 1955. Communication between the Westerners and the Q’ero evolved from there, and in 1996 a tribal leader, the head shaman and other Q’ero elders honored the United States with a historic visit in which, among other shared knowledge and rituals, they passed along the prophecies of their revered Inca ancestors. Those prophecies read, in part:
The new caretakers of the Earth will come from the West, and those that have made the greatest impact on Mother Earth now have the moral responsibility to remake their relationship with her, after remaking themselves.
The prophecy holds that North America will supply the physical strength, or body; Europe will supply the mental aspect, or head; and the heart will be supplied by South America.
The prophecies are optimistic.
They refer to the end of time as we know it—the death of a way of thinking and a way of being, the end of a way of relating to nature and to the earth.
In the coming years, the Incas expect us to emerge into a golden age, a golden millennium of peace.
The prophecies also speak of tumultuous changes happening in the earth, and in our psyche, redefining our relationships and spirituality.
The next pachacuti, or great change, has already begun, and it promises the emergence of a new human after this period of turmoil.
To which the Q’ero shamans added in closing:
Follow your own footsteps.
Learn from the rivers,
the trees and the rocks.
Honor the Christ,
the Buddha,
your brothers and sisters.
Honor your Earth Mother and the Great Spirit.
Honor yourself and all of creation.
Look with the eyes of your soul and engage the essential.
Three timeless civilizations, each a part of the earth’s earliest fabric but existing so far from one another, in such remote isolation, that they might as well have lived on different planets. And those ancient civilizations, like too many others to elaborate on here, obviously shared certain common needs that extended far beyond food, clothing and shelter:
-a need to believe in a Force greater than themselves
-a need to understand their relationship with the natural world around them
-a need to formulate prophecies, and then embrace them as such an essential part of their culture that they passed them like treasured heirlooms from one generation to the next
It may be even more fascinating, though, that those three very separate, isolated societies searched the land, the stars, the rivers, the sun, their own souls, wherever they thought their answers came from, and arrived at prophecies that all added up to the same identical conclusion: humankind’s sole hope for sustaining the privilege of life on this earth is through its constant, humble, reverent connection to its own spirituality.
Three remote civilizations, one prophetic conclusion.
It’s enough to make you believe those prophecies might all have been coming from the very same Source.
Prophecies and Religion
Without faith, without our beliefs, we’re lost. It doesn’t matter that God, by whatever name we call Him, never stops believing in us. If we don’t reciprocate and keep that connection alive on our end, we’re tragically squandering God’s belief in us, which is the one gift that makes everything possible. It’s like someone calling to announce that you’ve just won the richest lottery in history—that call is worthless if you don’t bother to pick up the phone.
Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, our beliefs are the driving force behind our behavior, our opinions, our actions and in-actions, our decisions and the choices we make. They’re essential to our identity, our individuality and, above all, our dialogue with our spirit minds, where our absolute knowledge of our genetic eternity is held for safekeeping. Our beliefs are all we have that can’t be taken from us, or threatened or harmed. No matter what specific words and images and allegories we choose to best express and expand those beliefs, they define us, they make each one of us utterly unique because they’re ours and ours alone, and yet they unite us all by the breadth and depth of their existence.
The great religions of the world through which we express and explore our beliefs have too much in common to be disrespectful of each other. We all worship a Supreme Being, a loving Creator who gave us the gift of eternal lives. And from the first moments that small groups of followers began to grow into the millions upon millions who practice these great religions today, prophets and prophecies were essential to the story of that growth in each and every case.
Christianity
The temptation is to say, “To see how prophets and prophecies played a part in the dawn of Christianity, read the Holy Bible, pages 1 to 981.”
I’m not a fan of hypothetical questions like “Would Christianity have become such a powerful force among world religions without prophets adding so much anticipation to Christ’s arrival?” His virgin birth, His unparalleled life, His crucifixion at the age of thirty-three and His resurrection that changed the world forever would certainly have found their way on their own into our hearts and our consciousness on this earth, I’m sure, because I’m certain beyond all doubt that our spirits would have searched until we found Him. But with prophets preparing us for His arrival hundreds of years before He was born, and giving us specifics about how we’d know Him, we were given the added advantage of a divine road map leading straight to Him. Of course I believe that Christ and Christianity were inevitable, according to God’s plan, which means I believe that the prophets and their prophecies were inevitable too, along with every other person, event and moment that contributed to Christianity’s inception and growth. God is hardly in a position to have to rely on accidents or luck to get His message across, after all.
The Old Testament of the Bible was written between about 1450 b.c. and 430 b.c. It is too rich with prophets—Joseph, Moses, Elisha, Samuel, Hosea, Isaiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Nathan, Ahijah, Micah, Jonah and Malachi, to name a few—to begin to do it, or its prophecies, even a pathetic attempt at justice, nor would I presume to try for the purposes of this particular discussion.
Instead, I’ll focus on only two of the Old Testament prophets whose prophecies were especially descriptive of the life and crucifixion of Christ, which were still hundreds of years in the future, and on Christ’s acceptance of His sacred destiny.
The prophet David, king of Israel from approximately 1010 b.c. to 970 b.c., is believed to have written several of the Old Testament’s magnificent psalms. Among them is Psalm 22, which contains some prophetic images of Christ’s crucifixion too precise to pass by lightly:
My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping
me, from the words of my
groaning?...
In thee our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and thou didst deliver
them.
To thee they cried, and were saved;
in thee they trusted, and were not
disappointed.
But I am a worm, and no man;
scorned by men, and despised by the
people.
All who see me mock at me,
they make mouths at me, they wag
their heads;
“He committed his cause to the Lord;
let him deliver him,
let him rescue him, for he delights in
him!” ...
Yea, dogs are round about me;
a company of evildoers encircle me;
they have pierced my hands and feet—
I can count all my bones—
they stare and gloat over me;
they divide my garments among them,
and for my raiment they cast lots ...
It was hundreds of years later, of course, that Jesus was crucified and the New Testament of the Bible written, probably from 45 a.d. to 95 a.d.. One account of the crucifixion, in the New Testament book of Matthew (7:27–50), reads, in part:
Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the praetorium, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe upon him, and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on his head, and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spat upon him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe, and put his own clothes on him, and led him away to crucify him . . .
And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots; then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus the King of the Jews.” ... And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” ... At about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah ... Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.” And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.
The prophet Isaiah, whose book of prophecies appears in the Old Testament, was born in Jerusalem seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. No other prophet was quoted more often than Isaiah by Jesus and His disciples, and it’s easy to understand why Isaiah’s prophecies about the coming Messiah would have resonated so deeply in the heart of Christ and those who followed Him.
Isaiah 7:14, in the Old Testament, reads, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel (which means ‘God with us’).” And in Matthew 1:18–21, in the New Testament, we find:
Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit; and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
From Isaiah 53:3
He was despised and rejected by
men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted
with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their
faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him
not.
And from the New Testament, Luke 23:13–23
Pilate then called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, and said to them, “You brought me this man [Jesus] as one who was perverting the people; and after examining him before you, behold, I did not find this man guilty of any of your charges against him; neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Behold, nothing deserving death has been done by him; I will therefore chastise him and release him.” . . .
But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed.
Jesus’ profound reverence for the prophecies and His divine place among them is woven throughout the New Testament.
In Matthew 5:17, He said, as part of His magnificent Sermon on the Mount, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
In Matthew 26:53–56, as Jesus was captured by a crowd of armed soldiers and high priests and elders in Gethsemane, He said:
“Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” At that hour Jesus said to the crowds, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But all this has taken place, that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.”
It’s as impossible to cite every prophecy from every prophet in the literature and legacy of Christianity as it is to try to separate the concepts of Christianity and prophecy themselves. They’re as intertwined in their historic resonance as they are in their shared sacred Origin.
Judaism
According to the Jewish faith, prophets were far more than simply those who could see the future. They were people chosen by God to speak for Him as His messengers and teachers, and they were admired for their scholarship and their closeness to God.
The greatest of all prophets in Judaism was Moses, who freed the Israelites from their slavery to the Pharaoh and delivered them to the Promised Land of Canaan. It was Moses whom God summoned to the top of the holy mountain of Sinai to present him with the sacred tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written. Jewish faith teaches that Moses saw the combined prophecies of all other prophets to come, so that any prophecies that followed would be nothing more than recitations of what Moses had already seen.
The written Torah, called the Torah Shebiksav, which is God’s teaching to the Jewish people, is divided into three parts:
-Torah—the five books presented to Moses by God on Mount Sinai
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
-Nevi’im, or Prophets—the messages received by the prophets from God
Joshua
Judges
the two books of Samuel
the two books of Kings
Jeremiah
Ezekiel
Isaiah
Trey Asar, or the Twelve, which combine the writings of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi
-Kesuvim, or Writings—written by the prophets with God’s guidance, but not devoted exclusively to prophecies
Psalms
Proverbs
Job
Song of Songs
Ruth
Lamentations
Ecclesiastes
Esther
Daniel
Nehemiah
the two books of Chronicles
The Talmud is, to put it very basically, the source book of Jewish law, describing how to apply the rules of the Torah to a variety of different circumstances. According to the Talmud, there were actually twice as many prophets as the number of people who fled Egypt. But only the prophets whose messages were intended to apply to future generations were recorded, and those numbered fifty-five—forty-eight males and seven females. The female prophets listed in the Talmud are Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah and Esther. Sarah was held in such high esteem as a prophet, in fact, that her ability was thought to be superior to that of her husband, the prophet Abraham.
As I’ve said in many of my books, I was raised in a Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Jewish home. I’m sure that unique upbringing planted the seeds of my lifelong passion for world religions, and I deeply appreciate each of them for the gorgeously singular ways in which they celebrate and glorify God. If I had to credit just one of those influences, though, with my earliest awareness and awe of prophets and their impact in this world, I would give that credit to Judaism.
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