"Scholar"
You have made a number of statements, so let me address them one at a time.
It is incorrect to say that there is overwhelming evidence for 587. Other scholars prefer 586, so how can such dates be factual.
It is true that 586 or 587 has been sited by experts. But, a difference of one year does not invalidate the research. The society once claimed 606 instead of 607. See "the time is at hand".
The bottom line is that any chronology in respect to dating the fall of Jerusalem is based on interpretation and methodology.
You still have not explained the interpretation and methodology of the WTBTS. So allow me to present it now:
What chronological evidence did Charles Taze Russell use? His chronological argument was borrowed completely from the second-adventist Nelson Barbour. They had a long list of dates, one of which was 1914.
Barbour said Jerusalem was destroyed in 606BC.
Counting 2520 years from 606BC gives us 1914, right?
Wrong.
Barbour was, like Russell, very ignorant about chronology and history. When the calendar we use (Julian, later improved to the Gregorian) was created, there was no zero year, so 1 BC was followed by 1 AD. 2520 years from 606BC would give us 1915, which Russell actually used instead of 1914 for a few years. But then World War I started in 1914. Russell had predicted something for 1914, something did indeed happen, so Russell thought he had been right. Russell then 'forgot' about the zero-year, and changed the chronology to 1914 again.
But sooner or later this had to be corrected. How? By moving the destruction of Jerusalem by one year, from 606 to 607BC.
The Watchtower book Revelation - Its Great Climax is at Hand! (1988) quotes the old Barbour booklet on page 105:
"'It was in B.C. 606, that God's kingdom ended, the diadem was removed, and all the earth given up to the Gentiles. 2520 years from B.C. 606, will end in A.D. 1914.' - The Three Worlds, published in 1877, page 83."
A footnote informs us:
"Providentially, those Bible Students had not realized that there is no zero year between "B.C." and "A.D." Later, when research made it necessary to adjust B.C. 606 to 607 BC, the zero year was also eliminated, so that the prediction held good at "A.D. 1914." - See "The Truth Shall Make You Free," published by the Watch Tower Society in 1943, page 239."
What new "research" changed this date? None, of course. If you examine the WTS' books, you will find no evidence whatsoever for this new date.
As we have seen, the WTS claims they follow the Bible and defend it against criticism. Is this true? Sometimes, but not in this case.
We noticed that Daniel 1:1 said that Nebuchadnezzar took prisoners from Jerusalem in the 3rd year of Jehoiakim (accession-year system).
According to Watchtower chronology, this is not possible.
The WTS Bible encyclopedia, Insight on the Scriptures (hereafter: it), Volume 1, page 1269, states:
"Evidently it is to this third year of Jehoiakim as a vassal king under Babylon that Daniel refers at Daniel 1:1. It could not be Jehoiakim's third year of his 11-year reign over Judah, for at that time Jehoiakim was a vassal, not to Babylon, but to Egypt's Pharaoh Necho."
"Evidently," they say. A person not versed in the Bible may find it possible that Daniel refers to "the third year" since a specific event of a king's reign. But when we know that this was the way time was counted in those days, we understand how extremely unlikely this is. To use an example: Is it likely that any person living in our days will date the start of World War II to 1869, simply because he meant the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans was a more interesting event to initiate the start of our calendar? If Daniel had made such a strange statement, he would have known he would almost certainly be misunderstood. Also, Daniel like many other Bible writers use this dating frequently (Daniel 7:1; 8:1; 9:1; 10:1; 11:1).
Daniel 2:1 has the prophet interpret the dreams of Nebuchandezzar in his 2nd year. Again, the WTS must appeal to acrobatics, when the text itself says "in the second year of the kingship of Nebuchadnezzar" which is extremely unambiguous.
This refusal to put Scripture ahead of dogma becomes especially embarrassing in Your Kingdom Come (hereafter:kc), which in an appendix tries to refute criticism against WTS chronology. On page 188 they try to refute the value of the Babylonian chronicles by Berossus:
"Though Berossus claims that Nebuchadnezzar took Jewish captives in his accession year, there are no cuneiform documents supporting this."
The society in its wisdom have presented a simple, historical and scriptural methodolgy for dating the fall of Jerusalem as nicely explained in the literature.
Please provide this "simple" explation. In the meantime, let me show you an early explanation of the year 606 from Pastor Russell:
The Time is at Hand
Written in 1889 by Pastor Russell
"According to the words of the prophet (Ezek. 21:25-27),
the crown was taken from Zedekiah; and Jerusalem was besieged
by Nebuchadnezzar's army and laid in ruins, and so
remained for seventy years--until the restoration in the first
year of Cyrus. (2 Chron. 36:21-23) Though Jerusalem was
then rebuilt, and the captives returned, Israel has never had
another king from that to the present day. Though restored
to their land and to personal liberty by Cyrus, they,
as a nation, were subject successively to the Persians, Grecians
and Romans. Under the yoke of the latter they were
living when our Lord's first advent occurred, Pilate and
Herod being deputies of Caesar.
With these facts before us, we readily find the date for the
beginning of the Gentile Times of dominion; for the first
year of the reign of Cyrus is a very clearly fixed date--both
secular and religious histories with marked unanimity
agreeing with Ptolemy's Canon, which places it B.C. 536.
And if B.C. 536 was the year in which the seventy years of
Jerusalem's desolation ended and the restoration of the
Jews began, it follows that their kingdom was overthrown
just seventy years before B.C. 536, i.e., 536 plus 70, or B.C.
606. This gives us the date of the beginning of the Times of
the Gentiles--B.C. 606."
As for secular evidence of 587:
One of the most extensive and overwhelming pieces of evidence is the enormous amounts of business and administrative documents unearthed from the Neo-Babylonian era. These are contemporary documents, not later copies, and there can be around 50,000 (!) of these documents, many of them stored at British Museum in London. Some thousand of these documents are documented. The WTS admits:
"Business tablets: Thousands of contemporary Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablets have been found that record simple business transactions, stating the year of the Babylonian king when the transaction occurred. Tablets of this sort have been found for all the years of reign for the known Neo-Babylonian kings in the accepted chronology of the period." (kc, p 187)
So for every known year in this era, there are such contemporary documents. However, the WTS claims twenty years are missing. Where is the business documents covering this period? They do not exist. If some king reigned for more than the years assigned to them in the established regnal lists, or if some unknown king reigned for twenty years (or a combination), there must have been hundreds if not thousands of business documents dated in this period. There are indeed none. The documents contains details of hundreds of thousands of trivial and not-so-trivial business transactions -- buying and selling -- and the idea that this did not happen during this period is absurd. Moreover, we can track business transactions from delivery of goods to payment of the same goods. We can establish who is head of the company in the given year. It is patently obvious that to believe that the WTS chronology can be defended against this evidence, makes the infamous "illuminaty conspiracy" seem likely by comparision. It would involve not only hundreds of scribes, chroniclers, officials and astrologers from the Neo Babylonain period onwards through the centuries, it would also require a conspiratory silence from thousands of business man in a whole empire!
It is more than obvious that there are no records for the "missing twenty years" because they never existed. Not a single piece of cuneiform text has ever hinted that they existed."
SHOW ME THE SIMPLE WATCHTOWER EXPLANATION ! The only way to accept the Society's date of 607 is to isolate yourself from the real world and blindly accept whatever crap they feed you.
thinker
Edited by - thinker on 15 January 2001 16:50:16
Edited by - Thinker on 15 January 2001 16:58:47
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