Kepler, I have a theory that maybe some of if not most of the prophecy about the desruction of Jerusalem and the 70 year desolation was in fact about Babylon. Babylon was destroyed by Senacharib the people deported and a curse put on it for 70 years. Im thinking these writings were then used to then describe Jerusalem's fate. To many similarities.
On the Fundamentalist Notion of Babylon Destroyed - Forgot to Tell Ancient World
by kepler 11 Replies latest watchtower bible
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kepler
Crazyguy,
I think we have both gone over some of this before. But to clarify for others, there was in fact a curse placed on Babylon by Sennacherib: desolation for 70 years. Sennacherib ended his days via assassination, a presumed conspiracy of his sons, of whom Esarhaddon was chosen to succeed him. In the "community" there was a lot of concern about the severity of measures against Babylon - so Esarhaddon had it reversed. A stone stela records how the curse of desolation was re-invoked, but read upside down - inverting the cuneiform to 11 years from the previous 70.
Seventy years elsewhere in the Bible is counted as a human lifetime. And one can imagine that the notion was borrowed or shared with Assyrians. So given all that, it would not surprise me that there would be a widespread acceptance among middle easterners of Assyrian notions of retribution or law. It might have even been a Babylonian notion as well. I've heard I remarked elsewhere that a lot of the notions about Covenants ( e.g., in Deuteronomy) seem to resemble Assyrian treaties with states intimidated into alliances.
StephaneLalIberte,
Thank you both for your recall and your source material. Because we all now can see the enforced disconnect among elements of recruiting, daily belief and "apologetics". I suspect that the last is a mental Potemkin village, a display of rationality and scholarship while concocting the new New World Testaments to back theological positions already made.
Reflecting on the times I felt that I was confronted with saying "two plus two equals five" or else, I understand the how, but I do not fully understand the why. Then there were simply the consequences of whatever I chose. And it affected my life irrevocably. As it has others.
Shortly after I had to made choices for "four" when signals all around me were for "five", I encountered another people in my neighborhood connected with Lyndon Larouche's political movement. Larouche provided his young adherents with quick set elements of a classical education. They sang patriotic and operatic choruses together; they studied the physical sciences, economics ( of course), the history of the Enlightenment - and then somehow molded it into political thought of their Leader. Oddly enough there was a pantheon of Enlightenment scientists, but Isaac Newton was the Judas among Copernicus, Kepler ( actually no relation), Galileo and Leibnitz. Larouche had a fondness for Germany - much like Rutherford initially. Anyway, of the five or six of Larouche's followers that seemed to settle at one of the local coffee houses, all of them were ready to explain at length Newton's infidelity.
... Otherwise they would have been thrown out of the movement.
So somehow in the case of Babylon being utterly destroyed ( with the assist of Darius the Mede), I see a force at work.