The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

468 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
verse 32; then, Jer. 14:1 ought to have been 14:1-7, and the next to last actually
spoke of, not just pestilence, but included sword and famine in the punishment
to be meted out. Finally, the sixth and last one is a real howler: RF’s ‘text’ says,
‘the holy place would be destroyed.’ Now, at this stage of Judean history this
could mean only one thing, the temple of Jerusalem; however, Leviticus 26:31,
32 does not say anything about that place (nor about the tabernacle, for that
matter), instead we find a prophecy against Israel’s false worship and the
punishment for it, which would hit their ‘high places’, their ‘incense altars’ and
their ‘lifeless idols’, also their ‘sanctuaries’, no doubt the kind spoken against in
Amos 4:4, 5; 5:5; 7:9 and 8:14! Worse still for RF, Jer. 22:5 does not refer to
‘the holy place’, but to ‘the king’s house’, the royal palace in Jerusalem! – Jer.
22:1-5.
Actually, any really diligent study of these matters could easily have produced
many more excellent verses to be used here, but once more RF has been too
sloppy in his research. Obviously, he is not interested in getting at the truth, the
whole truth and nothing but the truth, but only at connecting his erroneous
views with the idea of 70 years for the exile and the sabbath rest of the land, a
fact becoming even more obvious when his list of twelve quotations from
Jeremiah 4:7 to 44:22 presented on page 81 is checked: As it is, there is nothing
strange in these scriptures – after all, Jeremiah had been given the task of
prophesying about these events and that he did faithfully, which was his true
objective. This becomes even clearer when we realize that all but one of these
statements are parts of ‘messages from Jehovah’, and the one exception, the
very last one, is from Jeremiah’s speech to the Jewish remnant on the basis of
just such a message! Also, we know that he was not the first to speak in this
vein: Isaiah had in his time spoken just as candidly, Micah had spoken up in the
same manner, and so had others during the years of increasing idolatry. As it
was, however, Jeremiah was the man on the spot: he was in Jerusalem where
the action was, serving for an entire generation right to the end - and when the
Babylonians offered him to go with them in safety to Babylon, he stayed on in
the city and he even served with the remnant of the people in Egypt for some
time. – Jer. chapters 40-51.
A faulty list of quotations
Then, on page 81 we find some more peculiarities: first, according to RF
himself these quotations are taken from NWT, i.e., the Watchtower Bible, but
they are not, they are all straight from the NIV! The first three seem to be
defective in semantic content, as the writer does not include any reason for the
severe threats uttered, and the same can be said about 25:18, which starts in the
middle of a judicial statement, so that the reader will have to find out for
himself what the culprits mentioned have done to deserve the punishment with
which they are threatened. Also, in the last clause of 9:11, NIV has ‘so that noone’,
while RF merely has ‘so no one’. The same error occurs further down, in
the rendering of 34:22. Moreover, the fifth one is not from 9:22 but is a partial
repetition from 9:11! Then in 33:10 RF breaks off his quote in the midst of a
clause, so that we do not get to know ‘what will be heard once more’ – actually,
he should have included verse 11 to make this quotation a complete and natural
one. The next one, purportedly from 33:12, is not from that verse but is a short