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191 And at sunrise, lo and behold, they were all dead corpses. So Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, departed and journeyed back to his abode in Nineveh 2 KINGS 19: 35-36 To make sure the reader realizes that the whole prophecy came true, the biblical narrative then continues: “And Sen- nacherib went away, and journeyed back to Nineveh; and it was when he was bowing down in his temple to his god. . . that Adramelekh and Sharezzer struck him down with a sword, and they fled to the land of Ararat. His son Esarhaddon be- came king in his stead.” The biblical postscript is an amazingly informed record: Sennacherib was indeed murdered, by his own sons, in 681 B.C.E. For the second time, Assyrian kings who attacked Is- rael or Judea were dead as soon as they went back. While prophecy—the foretelling of what is yet to happen—is inherently what is expected of a prophet, the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible were more than that. From the very beginning, as was made clear in Leviticus, a prophet was not to be “a ma- gician, a wizard, an enchanter, a charmer or seer of spirits, a fortune-teller, or one who conjures the dead’”—a pretty com- prehensive list of the varied fortune-tellers of the surrounding nations. Their mission as Nabih—Spokesmen’’—was to con- vey to kings and peoples Yahweh’s own words. And as Heze- kiah’s prayer made clear, while the Children of Israel were His Chosen People, He was “sole God upon all the nations.” The Bible speaks of prophets from Moses on, but only fifteen of them have their own books in the Bible. They in- clude the three “majors”—lIsaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel— and twelve “minors.” Their prophetic period began with Amos in Judea (circa 760 B.c.E.) and Hoseah in Israel (750 B.C.E.) and ended with Malachi (circa 450 B.c.E.). As expec- tations of the Return took shape, geopolitics, religion, and actual happenings combined to serve as the foundation of biblical Prophecy. The biblical Prophets served as Keepers of the Faith and The Day of the Lord