Short answers, pulled from the story.
The English noun "prophecy" appeared from about 1225, drawn from Old French profecie of the 12th century and from the Greek propheteia, meaning "gift of interpreting the will of God." The related meaning of "thing spoken or written by a prophet" dates from around 1300, and the verb "to prophesy" is recorded by 1377.
Maimonides defined prophecy as an emanation sent forth by the Divine Being through the Active Intellect, passing first to a person's rational faculty and then to their imaginative faculty. In his philosophical work The Guide for the Perplexed, he outlined twelve modes of prophecy ranging from inspired actions to audiovisual waking revelations, with the highest mode referring implicitly to Moses.
Ichadon prophesied to King Beopheung of Silla that a miracle would occur at his execution, convincing court officials to accept Buddhism as the state religion. When he was executed on the 15th day of the 9th month in 527, the Haedong Kosung-jon records that the earth shook, flowers rained from the sky, his severed head flew to the Geumgang Mountains, and milk instead of blood sprayed a hundred feet from his body. Buddhism became Silla's official state religion that same year.
The Azusa Street Revival occurred in Los Angeles, California, from 1904 to 1906 and is sometimes considered the birthplace of Pentecostalism. The revival was known for "speaking in tongues," and some participants are claimed to have prophesied. Pentecostals believe that prophecy and certain spiritual gifts are once again being given to Christians, a view also shared by the Charismatic Movement.
Vaticinium ex eventu is a Latin phrase meaning "prophecy written after the fact," describing a prediction composed after an event occurred and presented as foreknowledge. Skeptics cite this practice alongside deliberate vagueness as explanations for many apparently fulfilled prophecies. The Jewish Torah addresses the related problem of the false prophet directly in Deuteronomy 13 and 18.
Julian Jaynes proposed that prophecy involves a temporary accessing of the bicameral mind, a separation of mental functions in which one part of the mind speaks to another as if an external voice. He argued that what ancient people heard as the voices of gods were organizations of the central nervous system, and that what was once experienced as God speaking to man has become, in more recent times, God speaking through man.