The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Furuli’s First Book 447
remaining from the sword captive to Babylon” (v. 20) occurred about two
decades after the servitude of “all the nations” had begun. The desolated state
of the land, therefore, did not last 70 years but somewhat less than 50 years.
Strictly speaking, the desolation of the land did not cease until the exiles had
returned to Judah in the late summer or early autumn (Ezra 3:1) of (most likely)
538 BCE (GTR 4 , Ch. 3, note 2). So we must conclude that either the exiles in
some way continued to serve the king of Babylon until 538 or that the sabbath
rest of the land ended in 539 BCE.
The first option seems impossible to defend. How could the exiles have
continued to serve the king of Babylon for another year after the fall of the
empire and the dethronement of the king in 539 BCE? Is it possible, then, that
the sabbath rest of the land ended in 539 BCE?
It is quite possible that the Chronicler did not regard the year of the return
(538 BCE) as the last year of the sabbath rest of the land. It is important to
observe that, according to the directions at Leviticus 25:4, 5, the land should
have complete rest during a sabbatical year:
“You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not
reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your
untrimmed vines.”
The sabbatical years were reckoned on a Tishri-to-Tishri basis. (Leviticus
25:9) The Jewish remnant that returned in 538 BCE arrived late in the summer
or early in the autumn, well before the month of Tishri (as is clearly indicated at
Ezra 3:1), which began on September 16/17 that year (PD, p. 29). Because they
needed food for the winter, it seems likely that they immediately started making
preparations to obtain food. They could harvest olives and fruits such as grapes
from untrimmed vines. Grapes were valuable food because they were dried as
raisins and used as winter food. Thus, if it is correct that they harvested food
upon their return (which seems likely), the last year of sabbath (complete) rest
for the land cannot have been 538 but must have been the year that had ended
immediately before Tishri 1 of 539 BCE. This could explain why the Chronicler
ends the sabbath rest of the land and the servitude of the exiles at the same
time (i.e., when the Persian kingdom came to power in the autumn of 539
BCE).
2 Chronicles 36:20, 21: The Hebrew preposition ad—while or until?
Furuli, of course, disagrees with the discussion above. His thesis is that the
period of the desolation and sabbath rest of the land were identical to the 70-
year period of Jeremiah. In his analysis, he is trying to force the Chronicler’s
statements to conform to this theory.
This seems to be the reason why he argues that the Hebrew preposition ad
in the clause, “until (ad) the land had paid off its sabbaths” ... “is better
rendered while than as until.” (p. 79) This allows him to reconstruct the verse as
two parallels that say:
“in order to fill the words spoken by Jeremiah, while the land kept sabbath.
in order to fill seventy years, it kept sabbath while it was desolate.”