Again the end result the same with false dates predicted and many people deceived. They also teach that those who were alive from the generation will be alive to witness the complete end and tribulation. This is very important to understand! What evidence is there to look into? I have went to great lengths to find solid information regarding this issue and encourage you to examine it for yourselves.
To: Peter J. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jewish nation a long time ago. I have found most information stating that took place in B.
Do you have any information that can help, websites, books, etc. The Anchor Bible Dictionary is a very good source and I would recommend you start there…As far as I know, the scholarly consensus is that the Exile began in B. Traditional Jewish sources date it to about B. This book provides both biblical chronology and the chronologies of other contemporary countries, some of the arguments, and a chart of the Near East. The following is information from some online archaeologists.
It was on the 9th of Av, B. It was on the 9th of Av in the year 70 C. The following is information from Online Encyclopedias and Reference Material:. It was destroyed and rebuilt under the rule of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome. King Solomon, his son, extended the city and built the great temple that stood until BC when it was destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon.
At the time of the second deportation an important group of Israelites fled to Egypt; thereafter, only the poorest peasants were allowed to remain in Palestine, and the political dissolution of independent Israel was an accomplished fact. The majority of the Jews living in Babylon did not return to Palestine at the end of the exile period, but became a part of the Diaspora, or body of Jews dispersed among nations outside Palestine.
For most nations, this would be the end of the story. But, obviously God had a plan. Judah was reorganized into a province of the Babylonian empire. After the puppet Babylonian king was killed by the neighboring king of Ammon your remember the Ammonites , many remaining Jews fled to Egypt taking Jeremiah with them against his will.
They joined some of the other refugees of Judea there. Meanwhile, the Babylonian deportees were conscripted into various public works, like draining the land, building dams, and other slave labor.
They kept their Hebrew names and preserved their religious and national identification. The dispersion of the Jews, know as the Diaspora began during this time. The Jews spread along the Mediterranean coastline and in nearby countries. The Edomites meanwhile taking advantage of the situation moved in to S.
This was about the time of Obadiah. They also dated these documents according to the regnal year and name of the current king. In other words, they kept an overwhelming abundance of business receipts and legal records, inadvertently recording a chronological trail for each reigning king during the Neo-Babylonian era. There are so many of these documents chronologically accounted for that the average frequency is one for every few days—not weeks, months or years.
So, for every week, experts have documents with the name of a Babylonian king inscribed on it, along with the numbered year of his reign. The complete Neo-Babylonian era has been accounted for by archeologists, and they consider this as primary evidence.
Therefore, the above statement made in The Watchtower article is false. Once your audience accepts this false premise, you can proceed to demolish it and appear the winner. This bias plays into their next statement which is false: Bible Chronology does not strongly indicate that the destruction occurred in B.
In fact, the Bible gives us no dates at all. It only points to the 19th year of Nebuchadnezzar reign and indicates that the period of servitude lasts 70 years. We must rely on secular research for our starting date, not the Bible. Do you not think that if God wanted us to make a calculation like Witnesses have made, he would have given us a start date in his own word and not required us to lean on secular sources?
Nevertheless, having laid their foundation, the publishers can now build their strawman. Secular historians do not mainly base their conclusions on the writings of classical historians, nor on the canon of Ptolemy, but on hard data acquired from thousands of unearthed clay tablets. Of course, there is still the fact of those clay tablets to deal with.
When the years that these kings ruled are totaled and a calculation is made back from the last Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus, the date reached for the destruction of Jerusalem is B. However, this method of dating works only if each king followed the other in the same year, without any breaks in between.
This is comparable to dismissing fingerprints of an accused found at the scene of a crime in favor of a written statement from his wife claiming he was at home with her the whole time. These thousands of cuneiform tablets are primary sources.
Despite occasional scribal or deciphering errors, irregularities or missing pieces, as a combined set, they overwhelmingly present a cohesive and coherent picture. Primary documents present impartial evidence, because they do not have an agenda of their own. They cannot be swayed or bribed. They merely exist as an unbiased witness who answers questions without uttering a word.
Were you aware that Watchtower publications have actually published the accepted regnal years of the Neo-Babylonian kings without any challenge to them? This ambiguity seems to have been done unwittingly. You should draw your own conclusions from the data listed here:. Nabonidus followed Labashi-Marduk who only reigned for 9 month from B. He was appointed by his father, Neriglissar who reigned for four years from to B.
Nebuchadnezzar ruled for 43 years from B. So, how does the Organization get around this? They do not. What this amounts to is saying that the 19 years must be there because they must be there. We need them to be there, so they must be there.
Now, we agree that the Bible cannot be wrong, which leaves us with two possibilities. And all this land must become a devastated place, an object of astonishment, and these nations will have to serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
And I will bring in upon that land all my words that I have spoken against it, even all that is written in this book that Jeremiah has prophesied against all the nations. For even they themselves, many nations and great kings, have exploited them as servants; and I will repay them according to their activity and according to the work of their hands.
You see the problem right off the bat? Jeremiah says that seventy years would end when Babylon is called to account. That was in B. Therefore, counting back 70 years gives us B. Now, take a hard look at verse Israel was conquered by Babylon some 20 years before Babylon returned to destroy the city and carry off its population. At first, it served Babylon as a vassal state, paying tribute. Babylon also carried away all the intellectuals and youth of the nation in that first conquest.
Daniel and his three companions were among that group. Therefore, the Organization can accept B. Yet they have adamantly refused to do this. Instead, they have chosen to willfully ignore the hard evidence and perpetrate a lie. If this were just the result of imperfect men making honest mistakes due to imperfection, then we might be able to overlook it. We might view this as a theory they have advanced, nothing more. But the reality is that even if it started as a well-meaning theory or interpretation, not really based on evidence, now they have access to the evidence.
We all do. Given this, on what basis do they continue to advance this theory as fact? If we, sitting in our homes without the benefit of formal education in archeology and the forensic sciences, can learn these things, how much more so the Organization with the significant resources at its disposal? Yet, they continue to perpetuate a false teaching and aggressively punish anyone who openly disagrees with them—which as we all know is the case. What does this say about their true motivation?
It is up to each one to think seriously on this. Are the Watchtower researchers ignorant of these facts? Are they only guilty of a mistake due to imperfection and sloppy research? There is is a Neo-Babylonian primary source whose significance in dating the length of the reign of these kings is something The Watchtower fails to tell us about.
This is a tombstone inscription that proves there were no gaps equal to twenty years between these Kings. This inscription was discovered on a commemorative stone slab in the year A second copy was found 50 years later in a different excavation site.
So now we have corroborative evidence of its accuracy. On it, the Queen Mother narrates her life, though part of it was completed posthumously by her son, King Nabonidus. She was an eyewitness who lived through the reigns of all the kings from the Neo-Babylonian period. The inscription gives her age at using the combined years of all the reigning kings and reveals there were clearly no gaps as the Organization contends.
We have reproduced its contents below for your examination. Additionally, there is a website called Worldcat. This amazing website will show which library close to you has a relevant book on their shelves. It is listed under the table of contents under Mother of Nabonidus.
Volume 2, page or Volume 3, page , Here is a link to a translation online. From the 20th year of Assurbanipal, king of Assyria, that I was born in until the 42nd year of Assurbanipal, the 3rd year of Asur-etillu-ili, his son, the 2 I St year of Nabopolassar, the 43rd year of Nebuchadrezzar, the 2nd year of Awel-Marduk, the 4th year of Neriglissar, in 95 years of the god Sin, king of the gods of heaven and earth, in which I sought after the shrines of his great godhead, for my good doings he looked upon me with a smile he heard my prayers, he granted my saying, the wrath of his heart calmed.
My descendants to four generations from me flourishing in themselves I have seen, I am fulfilled with offspring. So long as he is alive let him not offend against thee ; the genius of favour, genius of favour which to be with me thou hast appointed and they have caused me to attain offspring, with him too appoint them , and wickedness and offense against thy great godhead endure not, but let him worship thy great godhead.
I nourished their spirits , and incense offering rich, of sweet savour, I appointed for them continually and laid ever before them. He assembled [the people] of Babylon and Borsippa, [with the people] dwelling in far regions, [kings, princes, and] governors, from [the border] of Egypt on the Upper Sea even to the Lower Sea he [made to come up], mourning an weeping he performed, [dust? The explanation given is that the Bible is inspired and must therefore be taken above any secular source.
Click on the image for a 22 page PDF that shows the Watchtower depends on the same astronomical tablets to arrive at that it says are unreliable for arriving at With the level of evidence against B. Furthermore, the Watchtower depends of secular sources for the date of B. In other words, the Watchtower starts with a date taken from secular sources the B.
To claim the historical evidence as wrong is both baseless and counter productive, as the Watchtower relies on these very same historical records to arrive at B.
The archaeological evidence that shows the destruction of Jerusalem was in B. The Watchtower determines B. Archaeologists that prove when Babylon fell are the same people that have proven Jerusalem fell in B.
To undermine B. For example, to arrive at B. Since its 15th April edition, the Watchtower uses the interchangeable abbreviations B. The term Common Era traces back to , and the abbreviation C.
E are becoming more common since the late twentieth century out of sensitivity to non-Christians. It is because of the extreme reliability of the information regarding the secular king lists that the Watchtower is able to depend on B. Despite admitting dependance on these sources for determining their date calculations, the Watchtower contradictorily claims they are unreliable and cannot be used to calculate the fall of Jerusalem. A further issue the Watchtower needs to address is that the line of Babylon Kings shows a period of 50 years, and hence there is a gap of 20 years that must be filled.
Later it is shown they have attempted to do so by lengthening Nabonidus' reign. Alternatively, the Watchtower proposes that there may have been periods of time between these Babylonian kings when there was no king at all, despite no evidence for such a theory. This is an incredible admission, as it states there is available proof for B. It is as if the Watchtower is challenging it be proven that there were no gaps. This is almost a classic example of "Russell's teapot", where a person makes a claim that is unfalsifiable and hence demands it is true, except it is worse than that, since the close alignment of all the historical evidence shows there could be no gaps, particularly not to the span of 20 years.
It is revealing that after going to great lengths to use quotes of scholars to undermine B. The Watchtower has no proof to support B. Even then it must rely on historians to calculate back to that date. Nor are they able to logically counter the volumes of information that show Jerusalem fell in B.
So when it then is required to undermine these very historians it puts itself in a contradictory position that undermines any credibility in B. For a prophecy of such importance to the Watchtower, the onus of proof is upon them to provide legitimate support to this teaching. Yet because it is wrong, they necessarily put themselves in a position that makes it impossible to do so.
There is a large weight of evidence that can be used to prove this year wrong. Following is a simple calculation of when Jerusalem fell, taken solely from Watchtower literature. In viewing the calculation, remember that everything goes backwards when calculating years B.
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