The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

The Seventy Years for Babylon 211
The context of Jeremiah 29:10, therefore, further supports the
earlier conclusion that the seventy years should be reckoned from a
point several years before the destruction of Jerusalem.
However, apart from the context, the text itself makes it clear
that the seventy years can be applied neither to the period of the
desolation of Jerusalem nor to the period of the Jewish exile.
B-1: Seventy years—”at” Babylon or ‘for” Babylon?
The New World Translation’s rendering of Jeremiah 29:10 seems to
depict the seventy years as a period of captivity: “seventy years at
Babylon.” Although it is true that the Hebrew preposition l e , here
translated “at”, in certain expressions may have a local sense (”at,
in”), its general meaning is “for, to, in regard to, with reference to,”
and is so rendered at Jeremiah 29:10 by most modern
translations. 26
The following examples are taken from some of the better
known translations in English:
Revised Version (1885): “After seventy years be accomplished for
Babylon.”
26 The view that the basic meaning of l e (l) is local and directional is rejected by
Professor Ernst Jenni, who is probably the leading authority on the Hebrew
prepositions today.—Ernst Jenni, Die Hebräischen Präpositionen, Band 3: Die
Präposition Lamed (Stuttgart, etc.: Verlag Kohlhammer, 2000), pp. 134, 135. This
work devotes 350 pages to the examination of the preposition l e alone.
(Interestingly, the Danish NWT of 1985 has “for Babylon”, and the new revised
Swedish NWT of 2003, too, has now changed its earlier “in” to “for Babylon”!)