The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

The Seventy Years for Babylon 235
”Jeremiah’s seventy years for Babylon: a re-assessment,” Andrews University
Seminary Studies (AUSS),Vol.25:3 (1987), p. 296. Winkle’s discussion of the texts
dealing with the seventy years (in AUSS 25:2, pp. 201–213, and 25:3, pp. 289–299)
is remarkably similar to that published already in the first edition of the present
work in 1983. Winkle does not refer to it, however, and it is quite possible that it
was not known to him.
58 Several historians and biblical scholars have been amazed at the exactness with
which Jeremiah’s prediction was fulfilled. Some scholars have tried to explain this
by suggesting that the passages in Jer. 25:11 and 29:10 were added to the book of
Jeremiah after the Jewish exile. There is no evidence in support of this theory,
however. Professor John Bright, for example, commenting on Jer. 29:10, says:
“One cannot explain rationally why it was that Jeremiah was assured that
Babylon’s rule would be so relatively brief. But there is no reason to regard the
verse as a vaticinium ex eventu [a ‘prophecy’ made after the event]; we can only
record the fact that the prediction turned out to be approximately correct (which
may be why later writers made so much of it). From the fall of Nineveh (612) to the
fall of Babylon (539) was seventy-three years; from Nebuchadnezzar’s accession
(605) to the fall of Babylon was sixty-six years.” —John Bright, The Anchor Bible:
Jeremiah (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 2nd. ed. 1986),
pp. 208–09.
59 Interestingly, the Watch Tower writers, too, seem finally to have realized this.
Commenting on the 70 years that Tyre would be forgotten according to Isaiah
23:15–17—a period they equate with the 70 years for Babylon—their recent
commentary on Isaiah says: “True, the island-city of Tyre is not subject to Babylon
for a full 70 years, since the Babylonian Empire falls in 539 B.C.E. Evidently, the
70 years represent the period of Babylonia’s greatest domination . . . Different
nations come under that domination at different times. But at the end of 70 years,
that domination will crumble.” (Isaiah’s Prophecy. Light for All Mankind, Vol 1,
2000, p. 253) These remarkable statements are more or less a reversal of earlier
views.