The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

190 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
Curiously then, the Babylonian astronomers must also have
regularly made similar “mistakes” when dating the observations
recorded in VAT 4956, LBAT 1420, SBTU IV 171, and also other
tablets from which later astronomers abstracted their Saros cycle
eclipse records — unless of course changes were purposely made
by copyists in the Seleucid era, as the Watch Tower Society posits.
Still more incredible is the idea that scribes and astronomers
could remove twenty years from the Neo-Babylonian era several
years prior to that era—as is shown by the oldest diary, BM. 32312,
the lunar eclipse tablets LBAT 1415+1416+1417 and ADTV, no.
5, the Saturn tablet B.M.76738+76813 , and the planetary tablet
ADT V, no.52—all the five of which inexorably block all attempts
at lengthening the Neo-Babylonian period.
But the most remarkable “coincidence” is this: Tens of thousands
of dated economic, administrative and legal documents have been
excavated from the Neo-Babylonian period, covering every year of
this period—except, as the Watch Tower Society would have it, for
a period of twenty years from which not one tablet has been found.
Again, most curiously, according to this logic, that period
happens to be exactly the same as that lost through a series of
other “mistakes” by scribes in Babylon and Egypt, and by later
copyists and historians.
Either there was an international agreement during several
centuries to erase this twenty-year period from the recorded history
of the world—or it never existed! If such an international “plot”
ever took place it was so successful that of all the tens of thousands
of documents unearthed from the Neo-Babylonian era there is not
one, not even a line in any of them, that indicates that such a twenty-year
period ever existed. We can safely conclude, then, that the Watch
Tower Society’s chronology is unquestionably in error.
But if this is the conclusion of our study, how are we to
harmonize this fact with the Biblical prophecy of the seventy years,
during which the land of Judah and Jerusalem would lay desolate
according to the Watch Tower Society? And how are we to view
the year 1914, the supposed terminal date for the times of the
Gentiles according to the prophetic time scale of the Watch Tower
Society? Do not world events clearly show that Bible prophecies
have been fulfilled since that year? These questions will be dealt
with in the following chapters.