Pterist and others,
Do you really think that the issue of 607 BCE is the only broken link in this chain?
I am speaking as someone who initially had paid little attention to all this - until my ex insisted on returning and a couple of people armed with a pamphlet started trying to convince me that Jehovah had destroyed Babylon via Cyrus, citing arguments out of Isaiah. I repeat, I hardly knew anything of this other than a passing knowledge that Babylon was NOT destroyed from abundant historical evidence of secular writers sitting on my shelfs who were witness to later events there, or access to historians that gave a passing account of Mesopotamian history.
ut even as these parties of Elders and understudies spoke, their text and their claims appeared to be the ravings of utter loons.
The more I investigated, the worse it got.
They convinced me that they were not only crazy but LIARS and their publications were hoaxes with lies on every page.
If you want to see a genuine instance of BABYLON GETTING DESTROYED, I refer you to devastation wrought by the Assyrian King Sennacherib in 689 BC. If you read Isaiah chapter 14:22-23, it refers to the destruction turning Babylon into a SWAMP, a place where hedgehogs would range, paraphrasing Sennacherib's own accounts written in stone.
And that is what actually happened in Isaiah's timel, near the end of his life in King Manesseh's reign. Sennacherib pulverized Babylon, destroyed its temples and carried off its inhabitants into slavery, presumably construction work on Nineveh. He flooded it for good measure.
Cuneiform tablets also record that Sennacherib had the priests of Marduk condemn Babylon to 70 years of desolation.
It was Esarhaddon, his son ( and perhaps co-conspirator in Sennacherib's murder) that rescinded the decree by having the 70 year sentence read upside down. In Akkadian, the 70 years turns to 11. See the Blackstone of Esarhaddon. The Assyrians considered Sennacherib's act sacrilege and Esarhaddon repaired the damage.
Cyrus did nothing like this - as my post above explained. Some Chaldean successions were more bloody - and some later rebellions to Persian rule had more strife on the city streets. The stories of 689 and 539 are conflated. Babylon destroyed in 689 could not be punishment for events that occurred 100 years later in Jerusalem - unless reasoning about this is more circular about inerrancy than I've discovered to be already.
Since Ezra contradicts Jeremiah and Isaiah has been distorted into a prediction of an event which had happened 150 years earlier - and Daniel reads like he never read Isaiah by inventing a whole new sequence of events, I would say that many other "incontrovertible" deterministic narratives can be layed out, depending on which inerrant account you want to ignore this week or this Elder visit.
In fact, that's what American off-shoots of Calvinism have done for the last four hundred years, mostly in attempts to erase the boards and make every human endeavor illegitimate since shortly after Christ's death and until they arrive gloriously on the scene.
But the outfit we're discussing, it has led people into a remarkably cruel cul-de-sac.
You have to decide for yourself which is worse: facing some truly disturbing inconsistencies in Biblical stories or weaving ever more elaborate alibis for beliefs that are more evil than staring in awe at the emperor's new clothes.
