The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Sham Scholarship 473
Judah, therefore, not less than the neighbouring countries, will be laid waste by the
Chaldaeans, and be subject to them for seventy years. (See verses 11 and 12 below):
11 And this whole land shall be a waste, and an appalment: and these nations
shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. 12 And it shall come to pass,
when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon,
and that nation, saith Yahweh, for their iniquity, and the land of the
Chaldaeans; and I will make it desolate for ever.
Let us just take a good look at another very authoritative translation, made by a
grammarian and lexicographer of very high standing in continental Europe,
similar to the one enjoyed by Dr. Driver in the English-speaking world, namely
Professor Frants Buhl of Copenhagen and Leipzig, who edited Wilhelm
Gesenius’ large Hebrew-German Handwörterbuch for a number of years. He also
translated the Old Testament into Danish (Det gamle Testamente, Copenhagen
1910) and here follows his rendering of Jeremiah 25:11, 12 in Danish:
11 og hele dette land skal blive til en Ørk, og disse Folkeslag skal trælle for
Babels Konge i halvfjerdsinstyve Aar. 12 Men naar der er forløbet
halvfjerdsinstyve Aar, straffer jeg Babels Konge og dette Folk, og gør det til
evige Ørkener. (Cf. the English rendering below):
11 and all this land shall become a desert, and these nations must slave for
the king of Babylon for seventy years. 12 But when seventy years have run
their course, I will punish the king of Babel and this people, and make it
into everlasting deserts.
Now, these two eminent Hebraists are most certainly not the only ones who
have rendered Jeremiah’s words in this way; facts are, I haven’t been able to
find a single translation or commentary opting for the solution suggested by
RF, i.e., to regard the ‘et prefixed to melekh (babhel ) in verse 11 as the
preposition meaning ‘with’, and I take it for granted that RF has failed in this
regard too, or else he would no doubt have told us about it. Consequently, we
shall disregard RF’s very unorthodox idea as a mere figment of his imagination
and stick to the natural and straightforward sense of the Hebrew text of
Jeremiah, exactly as the real experts in Biblical Hebrew have rendered it.
What about the LXX and the Old Ethiopic?
As for the LXX, preferred by RF, we agree with the view expressed in the
Watchtower publication Insight on the Scriptures, vol. II, page 32 (in the article
about the Book of Jeremiah):
The majority of scholars agree that the Greek translation of this
book is defective, but that does not lessen the reliability of the
Hebrew text.
As it is, the LXX lacks about one seventh of the Hebrew text and the
translators have taken many liberties with it, omitting words and phrases here
and there, adding others not found in the Hebrew, and it is generally unreliable.
After all, it is a second-hand text, a translation into an Indo-European language,
made by people who may not have been too well acquainted with Classical