A prophet in the Hebrew Bible is a spokesman. The office is one of confrontation far more than of foresight: the prophets denounce the king, the court and the cult, and where they speak of the future they do so to say what will follow from present conduct. Reading the prophetic books as an anthology of predictions is a later habit imposed on material that is mostly doing something else.
Christianity read them predictively, as pointing to Christ, and that reading is constitutive of the New Testament's use of the older scriptures. Judaism does not accept it, and the disagreement over particular texts, the young woman of Isaiah 7, the servant of Isaiah 53, is one of the oldest continuous arguments between the two.
Whether prophecy continues is answered differently in each tradition. Rabbinic Judaism holds that prophecy ceased with the last of the biblical prophets and that authority passed to the sages; the tradition of a lesser residue, a heavenly voice, is precisely what the famous ruling on the oven of Akhnai declines to obey. Christianity has never fully resolved the question: the New Testament lists prophecy among the gifts, the second-century Montanist movement claimed new prophecy and was rejected, and the modern cessationist and continuationist positions divide churches today. Islam is unambiguous, Muhammad is the seal of the prophets, and the finality of prophethood is a settled doctrine whose contested application to a nineteenth-century movement produced constitutional exclusion and criminal law in Pakistan.
Traditions outside the Abrahamic family often have no equivalent office. Oracles, mediums and diviners are widespread, but a figure who bears a moral message from a single God to a nation is specific, and the parallel is frequently asserted where it does not hold.