The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

196 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
Three things are predicted in this prophecy:
(1) The land of Judah would become a “devastated place”.
(2) ”These nations” would “serve the king of Babylon
seventy years”.
(3) When the seventy years had been “fulfilled” God would
“call to account against the king of Babylon and against
that nation . . . their error, even against” the land of the
Chaldeans.
What does this passage really tell us about the “seventy years”?
A-1: Desolation or servitude—which?
Although it is predicted in the passage that the land of Judah would
be a devastated place, it should be noted that this “devastation” is
not equated with, or linked with, the period of the seventy years.
All that is clearly and unambiguously stated in the text is that
“these nations will have to serve the king of Babylon seventy years”
The phrase “these nations” is a reference back to verse 9, in which
it is predicted that Nebuchadnezzar would come against “this land
[that is, Judah] and its inhabitants, and also against all these nations
round about.”
The seventy years, then, should be understood to mean years of
servitude for these nations. This conclusion is so obvious that the
Watch Tower Society, at the head of page 826 of its large-print
Jehoiakim and was presented to the king a few months later (Jeremiah 36:1–32), did not
contain any references to Babylon and king Nebuchadnezzar, how then could
Jehoiakim, after having listened to and burned up the roll with the prophecy, ask
Jeremiah: “Why is it that you have written on it, saying: The king of Babylon will come
without fail and will certainly bring this land to ruin and cause man and beast to
cease from it?’ “ (Jeremiah 36:29, NW) As this same question is found both in Jer-MT
and Jer-LXX, the original prophecy must have explicitly mentioned the king of Babylon.
Professor Norman K. Gottwald cites this verse and says: “If the prophet had not
somewhere in his scroll openly identified Babylon as the invader, the sharp retort of the
king is difficult to explain.” (N. K. Gottwald, All the Kingdoms of the Earth. New York,
Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964, p. 251.) This strongly
indicates that Jer-MT might very well represent the original text here.
It should be kept in mind that LXX is a translation made hundreds of years after the
time of Jeremiah from a Hebrew text that is now lost, and, as the editors of Bagster’s
The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament point out in the “Introduction,” some of
the translators of the LXX were not competent to their task and often inserted their
own interpretations and traditions. Most scholars agree with this observation. The
Watch Tower Society, too, emphasizes that “the Greek translation of this book
[Jeremiah] is defective, but that does not lessen the reliability of the Hebrew text.”—
Insight an the Scriptures, Vol. 2, 1988, p. 32.
For a thorough defense of the superiority of the MT text of Jeremiah, see Dr. Sven
Soderlund, The Greek Text of Jeremiah (= Journal for the Study of the Old
Testament, Supplement Series 47), Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1985.