607BCE or 587/586BCE explained

by truth about the last days 62 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • truth about the last days
    truth about the last days

    HI, all! Let us say that, for arguements sake.that 607BCE is to be the correct date. If we do possess a Revelation-its grand climate at Hand book, it carefully explains that it was first origanially explained that the 2520yrs was from 1914 back to 606BCE. And it states there that because the early christians did not know that there was no zero year, they adjusted it to 1914CE to 607BCE. It states that "it was necessary to adjust B.C.606 to 607B.C." So, h0w is everyones maths? Lets count the years between 10BC to 10AD- with and without the zero year.


    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10=21 years 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10=20 years
    So, in order to take away the "0" year, we have to TAKE AWAY one year from our original sum of 606 to 1914. What we should have come up was 606BC to 1913CE or 605BC to 1914 this takes away one year. What was done was, instead of TAKING AWAY one year, they ADDED one year to the sum of 606BC to 1914BC. We also know that the date of 606BC was due to the calulations of the "seven times" that was recorded in the book of Danial. There was no evidence in the late 1800s to state as to when the Temple was taken and destroyed. So, by using this calcuation, they assumed that the temple was destroyed in 606BCE. In 1933, the excavation of thousands of Cuineform Tablets that were dug up gave the date of the destruction of the Temple. I happened to get a book of facts from a antique show that was published (first edition1933) at that time. It states 586BC as to when the Temple was destroyed. All other reference books from that time does have the 587/586 date in them, due to historic evidence.
  • undercover
    undercover

    607 or 586? Doesn't matter.

    Line of kings? Doesn't matter.

    Let's keep it even more simple for even more stupid people:

    The WTS claims that the end of the Gentile TImes ended in 1914. What's a time and how long is a time?

    According to the WTS a "time" is 360 days and that seven times of 360 day "times" is 2520. So the Gentile Times equals 2,520 "times" or years. So then they add 2520 to 607 and come up with 1914.

    The problem is that they are using 365 day years. Since it's already established that a "time" is 360 days, shouldn't the 2520 "times" be 360 days each instead of 365 days?

    2520 x 360 = 907200

    2520 x 365 = 919800

    Leaving a difference of 12600 days or 34.5 years(365 day years, that is).

    The Gentile "Times" doesn't end in 1914 using the formula devised by the WTS. So what's the point in arguing about what year Jerusalem was destroyed or how many kings ruled Bablyon and for how long?

  • truth about the last days
    truth about the last days

    It is intresting to know about the chart of the Great Pyramid that was shown earlier. Any one who does not believe that the date 1914 came from this Egyptian structure, In the "Jehovahs Witnesses-proclaimers of Gods Kingdom", pages 162,201 and the picture with the brothers in India(1915) does actually have this chart shown. It also states that they used the Great Pryamid calcuations for 35years. Then the brothers abanded the idea of using a pagan structure to get details of future events.

  • truth about the last days
    truth about the last days

    P.S. Sorry, all. The picture of the brothers in India is on page 239.

  • truth about the last days
    truth about the last days

    And as to the 2520 years. Seeing that reading the whole of Danial chapter 4 and verses 20+21 of chapter 5, we read there that the "seven times" only applied to Nebuchadnezzar, himself- and no-one else. And I seriously doubt that he lived 2520 years!!1 He! He! Even Nebuchadnezzar did not know that the kingdom was allready taken away from him. (verse 31 ch4) So even he did not know how long the "seven times" was, but it did occur between when the "kingdom" was taken away from him to when the "kingdom" was returned back to him. (verse 36 ch4)

  • IP_SEC
    IP_SEC
    seven times" only applied to Nebuchadnezzar, himself- and no-one else.

    exactly

  • Leolaia
    Leolaia

    Well, there's an even more basic problem to the use of Daniel 4 to interpret the synoptic reference to the "times of the Gentiles". The schema that the Society has inherited from 19th-century Protestant/Adventist eisegesis posits a larger application of the "7 times" of Nebuchadnezzer's madness to a period of Gentile hegemony amounting 2,520 years, and this is reckoned from the destruction of Jerusalem in the 18th year of Nebuchadnezzer (the banding of the stump with iron). But this would posit Nebuchadnezzer, the very Gentile who destroyed Jerusalem in that year, as the symbol for God's kingdom that is overrun by Gentiles (i.e. including Nebuchadnezzer himself). This amounts to a very confused attempt at eisegesis.

    As for undercover's observation that the Society uses a year of 360 years to compute a 2,520-year period of 365-day years, this actually oddly enough has a biblical basis. The Society plugs in their values for the "7 times" with help from Revelation 11:2-3, which refers to the Gentiles trampling the holy city for 1,260 days, specified as a period of 42 months. This is based on the "3 1/2 times" of Daniel 7:25, and is influenced by the 1,290 and 1,335 days of Daniel 12:11-12. Now, the 3 1/2 times of 7:25 corresponds to the "half week" of Daniel 9:26-27, i.e. 3 1/2 times equals 3 1/2 years. Now all of this is based on the old Zadokite solar calendar, not the lunar calendar that is still used by Jews today, and this calendar had a symmetrical system in which the year was 360 days in length (with four seasons containing 3 months of 30 days each), interspersed with 4 equinoxes and solstices which did not count as days of the month but served to usher in the seasons. So in a month-by-month reckoning, the solstices and equinoxes are omitted. So the year has a total of 364 actual days, but only 360 monthly days. This system was especially useful for sacerdotal functions because 364 is evenly divisible by 7, so the year would have 52 weeks and every year the sabbath and the festivals would start on the same day of the week. Of course, 364 days is one day shy of our usual 365-day calendar, and to adjust for this, there was likely an intercalary "leap week" every 7 years (this is likely the origin of the sabbatical year in the OT). So within this system, 3 1/2 years is reckoned to have 42 months (each month containing 30 days), amounting to 1,260 monthly days, or 1,260 "official" days of the year. There was actually a big debate within Judaism in the second and first centuries BC on whether the 4 solstices and equinoxes counted as official days of the year or served only as markers of the seasons (see the Qumran calendrical texts, Jubilees, and 1 Enoch for some of this discussion). But Revelation has it right, in that 42 months contained 1,260 days. The actual length of the period of 42 months however was 1,274 days when the solstices and equinoxes are added in, and if a "leap week" had occurred within that 3 1/2 year period, the length would be 1,281 days. Note also the 1,290 days and 1,335 days of Daniel 12:11-12, which make perfect sense in the solar calendar. The first figure is 3 1/2 solar years + an extra 30-day month, while the 1,335 days is 3 1/2 solar years + 1 1/2 extra 30-day months (i.e. 45 days). These figures, like the imitation in Revelation, ignore the solstices and equinoxes which lay outside the monthly reckoning. The 1,150 days of ch. 8, however, give a strictly day-by-by reckoning of the first part of the same period starting from the fall equinox to the cleansing of the Temple on Hannukah, and count by the number of times the sacrifices were not given in the Temple, and thus count the solstices and equinoxes. The 1,290 and 1,335 days surpass the cleaning of the Temple and refer to events expected to happen months later (or 3 1/2 years later, depending on how 12:12 is interpreted), i.e. the death of Antiochus and the resurrection of the dead.

    Anyway, the basic point is that the 2,520 years that the Society computes is based on a solar calendar that is used in both Daniel and Revelation, but this monthly reckoning of days (used by the Jerusalem priests) intentionally omits the solstices and equinoxes as well as the sabbatical year intercalaries (7 days every 7 years, to amount to an average 365-day year), because these were not days contained within the months and seasons. Thus, the 34.5 extra day-years are accounted for, these are the solstices and equinoxes and sabbaticals that must be plugged into the monthly reckoning to get the actual day-by-day total. Of course, the Society has no knowledge at all of the ancient solar calendar (as they do not read and follow the critical literature on the subject), their fidelity to the ancient method of reckoning is purely an artifact of their use of Revelation to interpret Daniel.

  • TallTexan
    TallTexan
    I DID NOT COPY AND PASTE THAT INFORMATION FROM ANYTHING THE WATCHTOWER HAVE PUBLISHED.WERE DID YOU GET THAT FROM?

    Well, we KNEW you copied and pasted it from SOMEWHERE, because it had correct grammar, correct spelling, correct punctuation and sentence structure. Therefore we KNEW you did not write it.....

  • Jeffro
    Jeffro

    'truth about the last days':

    So, in order to take away the "0" year, we have to TAKE AWAY one year from our original sum of 606 to 1914. What we should have come up was 606BC to 1913CE or 605BC to 1914 this takes away one year. What was done was, instead of TAKING AWAY one year, they ADDED one year to the sum of 606BC to 1914BC.

    Unfortunately, your logic here has 2 fundamental flaws. You have not considered the fact that you are minusing a negative number. Because the year zero is removed from consideration (because it never existed), there is one fewer number being counted. To use your -10 to 10 analogy: if the required number was 21 (rather than 2520), with a zero year would count from -10 to 10, but if the zero is omitted, 1 must be taken away from -10, which is -11, not -9. Additionally it is cardinal, not ordinal, numbers being dealt with for years, so the Society's 2520 years in numerical terms ranges from -606.25 to 1913.75 (i.e. 606 years plus about a quarter of a year, plus 1913 years plus about three quarters of a year).

    The numerics of the matter is probably the only thing the Society did get right (eventually), when they finally realised there was no zero year (duh), though unfortunately nothing significant actually happened either in October of 607, or in October of 1914, and there are many, many other things wrong with their interpretation.

  • geevee
    geevee

    So Russell and Barbour were convinced that Jerusalem fell in 606BCE. They must have also felt that they had some kind of "Historical" evidence to support their belief?
    Yet how is it that for convenience their supported year of 606BCE can be changed to 607BCE? Did someone then alter what happened in the time line? The 606 didnt fit so then simply change the year to 607, darn all the "historical evidence". Rechisel those stone plates and cuniform to say 607 instead of 606.....c'mon said Rutherford, no one will even notice......

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