Doug Mason
Hi Doug! Hope you are well.
You raise the matter of Gedaliah and the length of his rulership. You will be pleased to know that I finally printed out Rainer Albertz's Israel In Exile some 450 pages of excellent information. This was the first reference quoted in the Oct 15 Wt 2011 on Chronology a refernce that as always correctly used. His chronology does not agree with JW's but his Theology certainly does and that is more important. Regarding Gedaliah he states on page 94, "Unfortunately,we do not know precisely how long Gedaliah's regime lasted...then Gedaliah had only two monthsfor his social experiment...If we accept this date, then Gedaliah had some four or five years to carry out his social reform.' This confusion seems to represent the state of current scholarship for one side accepys a couple of months whereas others give a number of years.
Albertz' history of the Exile uses different chronologies for the exile but begins the Exile only with the Fall of Jerusalem and not some earlier date proposed by Jonsson and others. Further, he treats the matter of the seventy years from 587-517 BCE rather differently as well.
scholar JW