The image of the prophet as fire—speech that sears, purifies, and exposes—has analogues in many traditions that see truth as something that burns away illusion rather than merely informing. Hindu traditions speak of tapas, an inner “heat” of ascetic discipline that transforms the person; in Buddhism, wisdom is sometimes compared to a fire that consumes ignorance. These parallels are imperfect, since the prophetic fire here is not chiefly self-cultivation but a word that comes from beyond the self and confronts a community, yet they rhyme in their sense that real truth costs, cleanses, and changes. The tension between divine power displayed in signs (famine, shut heavens, fire) and divine desire to heal and reconcile recalls a question that appears across religious philosophy: how judgment and mercy relate without collapsing one into the other. Jewish apocalyptic hope often holds both together: history is weighed, yet the goal is restoration. Some strands of Islam similarly speak of God’s justice and mercy as inseparable attributes, with warning serving repentance and return. Read this way, the “hard” interventions are not mere spectacle but a severe medicine ordered toward a mended covenantal life. The expectation of a returning figure who “restores all things” resembles wider human patterns of hoping for a renewer at the hinge of an age: Jewish hopes around Elijah, Islamic expectation of the Mahdi (with Jesus’ return in many interpretations), Zoroastrian notions of a final renovator (Saoshyant), and Hindu expectations of Kalki. The similarities can be overstated—each tradition frames the crisis and the remedy differently—but the shared motif suggests a deep intuition that history’s wounds require not only incremental improvement but a decisive act of reordering. The notion that the promised restorer can come “unrecognized,” and even be mistreated, touches a moral theme familiar to both religion and philosophy: the failure to perceive the truly righteous when they do not match our categories. Greek philosophy already worried about this—Plato’s accounts of the just person misunderstood by the city, or the fate of Socrates—as do Buddhist stories in which awakened compassion appears in humble forms, unnoticed by those seeking grandeur. The readings press the uncomfortable possibility that religious expertise can coexist with spiritual blindness. The command to keep the vision quiet for a time also resonates with traditions that treat sacred insight as something requiring ripeness and discretion. In Judaism there is a caution about esoteric teaching without proper formation; in Sufism and other mystical streams, there is often an ethic of guarding experiences that could be distorted by pride or by the hearer’s unreadiness. The point is not secrecy for its own sake but reverence for the slow education of desire. Finally, the linkage of restoration with suffering—both the herald’s and the one he heralds—echoes a pattern found beyond Christianity: the idea that renewal is purchased through costly witness rather than coercive triumph. One might think of the bodhisattva’s willingness to bear others’ burdens, or of the Jain and Buddhist valuation of nonviolence even when it entails vulnerability. The traditions differ on why suffering has this role and what it accomplishes, but they converge in resisting the fantasy that the world is healed without someone absorbing, refusing, and transfiguring its violence.