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Case file

Prophetic perfect tense

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “verb tense that some claim is used by the prophets in the hebrew bible”. Today it says “certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened”.
Found by software in Wikipedia's own edit history. Not yet read by hand. The quoted words are Wikipedia's.
Compared with the live article on 2026-08-04.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2010 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2010

The prophetic perfect tense is a verb tense that some claim is used by the prophets in the Hebrew Bible . This literary technique refers to future events in the past tense , known as deictic center shift. Many liberal scholars contest the existence of this tense, claiming that all of the events ascribed to prophetic perfect can be understood to have indeed occurred in the past.1

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 341857344.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “verb tense that some claim is used by the prophets in the hebrew bible”. Today it says “certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened”. Read the current article and compare.
201020152020Oct '232025
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.

What Wikipedia says this is

Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2010, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

verb tense that some claim is used by the prophets in the hebrew bible

Now

certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened

Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.

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