The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

The Seventy Years for Babylon 199
against attempting to throw off the Babylonian yoke and
admonished them: “Serve the king of Babylon and keep on living.
Why should this city become a devastated place?” —Jeremiah
27:17, NW.
Thus, the nations that accepted the Babylonian yoke would serve
the king of Babylon seventy years. But the nations that refused to
serve the Babylonian king would become devastated. This fate at last
befell Judah after about eighteen years of servitude, interrupted by
repeated rebellions. The seventy years of servitude foretold by
Jeremiah, therefore, did not apply to Judah as a nation, but only to
the nations who submitted to the king of Babylon. As Judah
refused to submit, it had to get the punishment for this―desolation
and exile―exactly as had been predicted at Jeremiah 25:11. Of
course, the exiled Jews also had to perform various kinds of
“service” in Babylonia. This was not the service of a vassal state,
however, but the service of captured and deported slaves! 13
A-2: When would the seventy years end?
The prediction that “these nations will have to serve the king of
Babylon seventy years” (Jeremiah 25:11) implies that there would
be a change in Babylon’s position of supremacy at the end of the
seventy-year period. This change is described in verse 12 of
Jeremiah 25:
”And it must occur that when seventy years have been fulfilled I shall
call to account against the king of Babylon and against that nation,”
is the utterance of Jehovah, “their error, even against the land of
the Chaldeans, and I will make it desolate wastes to time
indefinite.” (NW)
All historians, and also the Watch Tower Society, agree that the
Neo-Babylonian empire ended in 539 B.C.E. On October 12
(Julian calendar) that year the city of Babylon was captured by the
13 Other nations, too, who refused to accept the Babylonian yoke, were desolated, and
captives were brought to Babylon. For example, one of the Philistine city-states,
probably Ashkelon (the name is only partly legible), was “plundered and sacked”
and “turned . . . into a ruin heap,” according to the Babylonian Chronicle (B. M.
21946). This destruction, predicted by Jeremiah at Jeremiah 47:5–7, took place in
the month Kislimu (9th month) of the first year of Nebuchadnezzar according to
the chronicle, that is, in November, or December, 604 B.C.E. (A. K. Grayson,
Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, Locust Valley, N.Y.: J.J. Augustin Publisher,
1975, p. 100.) That Ashkelon was mined is now confirmed by excavations. In 1992,
Lawrence E. Stager uncovered at Ashkelon the archaeological evidence for this
Babylonian destruction.— See L. E. Stager, “The Fury of Babylon: Ashkelon and
the Archaeology of Destruction,” Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 22:1 (1996), pp.
56–69, 76–77.