To add to my comments last night, I could also note that pseudo-scholar's interpretation of the "seventy years", not coincidentally shared by the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society, construes this period as a chronological datum critical to an accurate chronology of the Neo-Babylonian period. This is one of the most fundamental features of his chronology, and he regularly criticizes others for treating it as "symbolic" or non-literal to avoid "the exegetical difficulty", or the differing attempts to apply this period to a historical period other than 607 to 537 BC. Jonsson himself presents several optional ways of construing the period as applying to a literal 70 years while at the same time acknowledging that it may also have been figurative. If Applegate "vindicates" pseudo-scholar and "destroys" Jonsson with respect to the "seventy years", one would think that Applegate would at least support this rather basic assumption of pseudo-scholar. Yet in addition to supporting a "higher critical" view of subsequent interpretation of the "seventy years" in 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Daniel, etc. (and later redaction of the prophecies within the Jeremianic text itself), Applegate also clearly indicates that the "seventy years" is in Jeremiah a non-chronological period:
"Although it is not gone uncriticised, the current consensus on Jeremiah's use appears to be that, by convention, ancient near eastern peoples anticipated seventy years of divine displeasure for a city or land that fell foul of its god, and that an actual period of seventy years may also be in view. As to which period of seventy years is in view, this varies from writer to writer... There is little concensus on this matter and it may be that Jer uses the term only loosely or to symbolize the fullness of time or simply to mean 'a long time' (cf. Jer 28; 29.3-10) -- perhaps the duration of one or more generations (cf. Ps 90.10; Job 42.16; Jer 27.7). As R. P. Carroll remarks,It cannot be determined whether a literal, metaphorical or conventional meaning should be understood as the meaning of the phrase 'seventy years'. All are possible categories for it and its use in a number of traditions outside Jeremiah ... is indicative of its flexibility of meaning and reference.Similar comments might be made of the 'forty years' of Israel's wilderness experience and in Ez 4.6 and 29.13. In the end, it is the variety of responses to Jeremiah's 'seventy years' that will form one of the foci of this study" (pp. 92-93).
On the same page, he also discusses the fact that "seventy years" is used "in the context of the letter to the first deportees", thus "the 'seventy years' in 29.10 would seem to date from 597 BC," i.e. before the destruction of Jerusalem but when the "first deportees" were taken captive. Pseudo-scholar of course does not view the "seventy years" as already in progress when Jeremiah wrote the "letter to the exiles", so it is hard to see again how Applegate "vindicates" him. In discussing Jeremiah 29:10 in more detail, Applegate suggests that "the seventy years are to be understood symbolically as the time anticipated for a god's punishment of his people. If we are to give credence to this view then we must assume that the exiles were aware of it and that it would be appropriate for Jeremiah to address this expectation" (p. 97). Again, the period is described as "symbolic" and already in progress before the destruction of Jerusalem; it is the period of their god's displeasure with the nation. Notice that Applegate does not define the seventy years in the idiosyncratic way that pseudo-scholar does by requiring that it applies to a period of (1) desolation PLUS (2) exile PLUS (3) servitude. By requiring all three in every mention of the "seventy years" in the OT, pseudo-scholar can only reckon the start of the "seventy years" after the destruction of Jerusalem. Applegate gives no support to this view and he clearly views that each mention of the seventy years should be taken on their own terms and not be harmonized with all other mentions as referring to the same exact thing. Thus he claims that Zechariah has a "precise chronological meaning of the seventy" (p. 109), while others attest to "the flexibility of interpretation of Jeremiah's seventy years" as well.
How funny that pseudo-scholar accused me of concocting "wild theories" when I expressed my suspicions of what Applegate would likely say. If he had read the article as he claimed he did, he knew full well that Applegate regarded 2 Chronicles, Daniel, etc. as reinterpreting Jeremiah exactly as I had suspected. Rather than answer my question in the affirmative ("You're right, that is Applegate's perspective, but..."), he shot back that I was expressing "wild concoted theories", implying I was way off base in my suspicions. And rather than try to fairly represent us what Applegate actually wrote ("Here is his thesis in a nutshell..."), he hid these facts from us being content to baldly claim that Applegate "vindicates" pseudo-scholar and "destroys" Jonsson without showing how this is the case.
BTW, here is the actual abstract from the article itself. I requested such an abstract which pseudo-scholar refused to give. Judge for yourself whether it "vindicates" pseudo-scholar:
"The paper examines references to Jeremiah and the 'seventy years' in the Hebrew Bible, offering readings of Jer 25.11-12; 29.10; 2Chr 35.25; 36.11-23; Ezra 1.1-11; Zech 1.1-17 and Dan 9. The study concludes that the Jeremianic prophecies have been influential in a variety of ways, partly due to their flexibility of interpretation arising from the absence of any indication about which term of seventy years is intended" (p. 109).
Does that sound like what pseudo-scholar has been saying? No. Pseudo-scholar has a very rigid interpretation that he applies to ALL texts in Jeremiah, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Daniel, without any "flexibility of interpretation", they begin at 607 and end at 537 BC for him, regardless of the differences between the texts themselves. To be sure, this is imho a flaw in Jonsson's approach as well who like pseudo-scholar views the OT as inerrant, or at least assumes that later writers shared the same understanding of the "seventy years" as Jeremiah did (while Applegate construes these later writers as "creatively midrashic", p. 109), and accepts Daniel as an authentic writing from the sixth century BC (while Applegate regards it as "dated much later" "presumably during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes," with historical inaccuracies, pp. 106-108), so indeed Applegate does contradict Jonsson in many respects, but overall if Applegate "destroys" Jonsson, then he also "destroys" pseudo-scholar on the same grounds. And yet nothing he says in contradiction to Jonsson has any bearing on Neo-Babylonian chronology. For if Applegate is right and later texts freely reinterpret the "seventy years" of Jeremiah, then they cannot be used as a basis for understanding what Jeremiah meant in his prophecies. And if Applegate is right that the texts in Jeremiah are ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways and are figurative, then the "seventy years" cannot be used as a chronological datum, particularly one that upsets otherwise well-established chronology. While certain minor points may in small ways support one feature or another of pseudo-scholar's view (as he has cherry-picked certain things like Applegate's reference to "Jeremianic influence" in Zechariah while ignoring everything else as stuff he just doesn't "agree with", hence my critique of his use of Applegate as unscholarly "proof-texting"), the overall analysis refutes pseudo-scholar even more than Jonsson. For if the "seventy years" is to be regarded as a variable, figurative, flexible, as "symbolic of the time anticipated for a god's punishment", as "simply 'a long time' ", etc., then the basis for the 607 BC date melts away and Jonsson's chronology of the Neo-Babylonian period (= standard Neo-Babylonian chronology) goes on just fine without treating the "seventy years" as a literal period.