The prophetic perfect tense is a literary technique commonly used in religious texts, which describes future events that are so certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened. == History == The category of "prophetic perfect" was already suggested by medieval Hebrew grammarians, such as David Kimhi: "The matter is as clear as though it had already passed," or Isaac ben Yedaiah: "[The rabbis] of blessed memory followed, in these words of theirs, in the paths of the prophets who speak of something which will happen in the future in the language of the...