1975 on the back burner

by Fisherman 53 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • KalebOutWest
    KalebOutWest

    I have a moment to add before I close and I don't want to add much further.

    I was born a Jew, left in the hands of my JW aunt for 10 years, and returned to Judaism as an adult.

    "Chumash" is a codex as opposed to a scroll which is a "sofer."

    Etymologically speaking, chumash came into Yiddish/Askenazi usasge from Hebrew since the Hebrew word for five is also "chumash" and in a codex, the Torah is divided into "fifths," namely Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

    And Jews do not, repeat, not see the Torah and the Talmud as the same.

  • Fisherman
    Fisherman

    DJW

    I’ve made it clear on this forum that I am a JW.

  • Rattigan350
    Rattigan350

    "strongly indicate that each of the creative days (Genesis, chapter 1) is 7,000 years long. Based on this reasoning, the entire creative week would be 49,000 years long."

    I think that the creative days or episodes in our modern vernacular are 24 or 12 hours long with each of these creative episodes covering millions of years.

  • Disillusioned JW
    Disillusioned JW

    It definitely took hundreds of millions of years of evolution (I no longer believe in old Earth creationism) on Earth for all of types of Earthly life (and the extinct Earthly life) to come into existences, and billions of years for Earth to form, and cosmological evolution has been taking place for billions of years. But when I spoke of according to a certain type of reasoning "... the entire creative week would be 49,000 years long" I was meaning according the WT's line of reasoning which they had prior to some time in the 1980s. After that time they stopped specifying precisely how long they think each of the biblical 6 creative periods/"days" (and one period/"day" of rest for Jehovah) were.

  • KalebOutWest
    KalebOutWest

    I think one of the reasons they may have stopped is because they ran into some problem calculating what a "day" actually stood for.

    In Genesis each "day" is basically "evening" until "morning" as in Genesis 1.5 which states "and there was evening and there was morning, a first day."

    It doesn't even say if this was a 12-hour day. 12-hour days only occur at certain times of the year from certain places on the surface of the globe. According to Jewish tradition, this was Rosh Hashanah: autumn, and there are no 12-hour days in the autumn from evening to morning.

    To add to this paradox the Hebrews did not believe that the earth was a sphere in Genesis chapter one but a flat platter over which a half bowl was tossed over, the firmament, upon which the sun, moon, and stars were affixed. This firmament kept out the heavenly or cosmos of waters from falling upon the earth (the dividing of the waters above from the waters below was established by the firmament which was named "sky", remember?)...

    So there was no globe or hemisphere over which to pinpoint a spot for seasons for 12 or 24-hour days to calculate and divide the years to start the march of prophetic years the Millerites had divised and that Franz had pulled out of the old hat to come up with 1975.

    Like the Mormons have done with many of their old teachings and some of the failed prophecies, the Watchtower stops talking about things and hopes that people forget. The less people talk about stuff, the less people remember. The less they remember, the less it becomes considers official teaching.

    That's the way it works in Mormonland. And that's the way 1975 has been working in Watchtowerland too.

    If you try to dig it up, people shrug. And it doesn't work when you compare it to both critical academic theology and tradition teachings. Watchtower likes it that way. They learned this little trick from the Mormon leadership.

    So you won't hear anymore speculations about Biblical creative days anytime soon...or probably ever again.

  • KalebOutWest
    KalebOutWest

    A footnote:

    This is why C.T. Russell made his announcement that the Gentile Times ended in October of 1914 and the Annual Meeting takes place in the Autumn.

    Russell believed that the Gentile Times ended on Rosh Hashanah, according to his calculations, in 1914 of that year.

    And the Annual Meeting was set to occur on the same date too. This was based on the calculations made by the SDA church that holds their celebrations of Jewish festivals for their Christian congregations. Sometimes they do these things according to the Jewish calendar, but sometimes they, like Russell, believe the Jews have it wrong. (Nisan 14 is one of those other calculations that Russell believed the SDA church over the Jews.)

    But the Creation, according to Jewish tradition (and JW theology) is in the autumn of the year--and that is also noted in the "Sons of God" book where 1975 first appears--and now you know why.

  • Balaamsass2
    Balaamsass2

    Obviously, the great Watchtower scholar CT Russel stole from earlier writers and mixed in some Egyptology, Occult, Pyramid measurements, and Masonic beliefs to come up with the initial timelines. Later "Scholar" Fredy Franz (who attended one year of College) built on those and was every bit as wrong. He also stole much of his work from earlier religious Bible "math whizzes" from the 1800s and 1600s.

    Basing your life and others' expectations on ancient verbal histories and expecting them to be accurate is foolish.

    Was there a "flood" that covered the ENTIRE earth in modern history? NO. Was there a global sea level rise at the end of the last ice age that drowned many coastal civilizations around the earth- especially in the Black Sea area? Yes. And of course, people's grandparents described this as a "global flood". https://animations.geol.ucsb.edu/2_infopgs/IP2IceAge/fBlackSeaFlood.html

    Did man (Adam & Eve) appear only 7,000 years ago? Of course not. There are CITIES older than that. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gobekli-tepe-the-worlds-first-temple-83613665/

    We all were forced to sit through boring book studies in the 60s and 70s reciting baloney from "Dr. Strange love".. Fred Franz who perfected his theories with his adoring boy fans in the Bethel Sauna. His bright Red "Life Everlasting" book was studied every week. Watchtower can not escape the fact that so many copies are still floating around.


  • blondie
    blondie

    The last time the 7,000 creative day was mentioned in WTS publications was 1987. 36 years ago...I realized then that the underpinning of the 1975 date was gone, the foundation was gone. But few jws then noticed. Some even missed the fact that the WTS had substituted "thousands and thousands of years" instead. jws that came in after that knew little or nothing about that explanation. Insight book current says "Ascribing not just 24 hours but a longer period of time, thousands of years, to each of the creative days better harmonizes with the evidence found in the earth itself." or 2014 Evidently, these “days” of creation lasted many thousands of years.​—Psalm 90:4. or 2021 So each of the six creative “days” during which God prepared the earth for life and created life on it could represent extremely long periods of time. (This blows out the teaching of 1975 based on the teaching of 7,000 year creative days)

  • ThomasMore
    ThomasMore

    TD - JW's do still insist that 1975 marked 6000 years of man's existence since the creation of Adam.

  • stan livedeath
    stan livedeath

    this 7000 year day thing was a major stumbling block to me--back in the '60s. I could never accept it. But within a few years i also came to realise i had no belief in the concept of god--a new world or the resurrection. I was out.

    fast forward to about 2010--and i discovered this internet world of ex jw's---and quickly found out that this 7000 year concept had been quietly dropped.

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