The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

206 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
eleventh and last regnal year (which partly overlapped the seventh year of
Nebuchadnezzar, or his eighth year in the nonaccession-year
system).
But this explanation directly contradicts Daniel 2:1, which shows
Daniel at the court of Nebuchadnezzar and interpreting his dream
of the image already in the “second year” of this king. If Daniel
was brought to Babylon in Nebuchadnezzar’s seventh year, how
could he be there interpreting his dreams in his second year? So, to
save their interpretation, this text, too, had to be changed and made
to say something else besides what it clearly says. Two different
explanations have been offered through the years, the last one
being that in this verse Daniel reckons Nebuchadnezzar’s years
from the destruction of Jerusalem in his eighteenth year.
Nebuchadnezzar’s second year, then, should be understood as his
nineteenth year (the twentieth year in the nonaccession-year system)!
Thus, once again we find that the application of the seventy
years held to by the Watch Tower Society contradicts the Bible,
this time Daniel 1:1–2 and 2:1. In order to uphold its theory, it is
forced to reject the easiest and most direct reading of these texts? 21
That some Jewish captives had already been brought to Babylon
in the year of Nebuchadnezzar’s accession is also confirmed by
Berossus in his Babylonian history written in the third century
B.C.E. His account of the events of this year reads as follows:
Nabopalassaros, his father, heard that the satrap who had been
posted to Egypt, Coele Syria, and Phoenicia, had become a rebel.
No longer himself equal to the task, he entrusted a portion of his
army to his son Nabouchodonosoros, who was still in the prime of
life, and sent him against the rebel. Nabouchodonosoros drew up
his force in battle order and engaged the rebel. He defeated him
and subjected the country to the rule of the Babylonians again. At
this very time Nabopalassaros , his father fell ill and died in the city
of the Babylonians after having been king for twenty-one years.
Nabouchodonosoros learned of his father’s death shortly
thereafter. After he arranged affairs in Egypt and the remaining
territory, he ordered some of his friends to bring the Jewish,
Phoenician, Syrian, and Egyptian prisoners together with the bulk of the army
and the rest of the booty to Babylonia. He himself set out with a few
companions and reached Babylon by crossing the desert. 22
21 For additional comments on Daniel 1:1, 2 and 2:1, see the Appendix for Chapter 5.
22 Stanley Mayer Burstein, The Babyloniaca of Berossus (Malibu: Undena
Publications, 1978), pp. 26, 27.