Where did Barbour get the 606B.C. date?
This is from TruthHistory.blogspot.com, (cite as: B. W. Schulz: Nelson Barbour: The Millennium's Forgotten Prophet, copyright 2007) the best research on Barbour out there:
Attempts to delineate "Gentile Times" were not new. In 1795, E. W. Whitaker, Anglican rector of All Saints, Canterbury, published A General and Connected View of the Prophecies Relating to the Times of the Gentiles, ending them in 1856. There is a very large and complex body of 18th and 19th Century prophetic literature centered on the Times of the Gentiles.
An endless number of suggestions were made on various basis for the end of Gentile Times. One speculation originated in England and is of interest because the author prolongs the fulfillment of the Times of the Gentiles beyond the end of the first 6000 thousand years of the millennial week. L. A. Du Puget suggested that the end of 6000 years, "when the Seventh Millennium and Day of the Lord may be daily expected," was due in 1862. He dates the end of the Times of the Gentiles to three years afterward.
Barbour and his associates did not immediately reconsider Gentile Times. The issues of an invisible parousia and other chronological speculations came first. We also do not know who among them initiated the discussion. In the absence of other claims, it is probably safe to suppose that Barbour was responsible for concluding Gentile Times ended not in the 1870s, but in 1914. The first mention of the 1914 date as the end of The Times of the Gentiles is in the September 1875 issue of The Herald of the Morning. In passing Barbour remarked, "‘The time of the Gentiles,’ viz. Their seven prophetic times of 2520 years ... which began when God gave all into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, in 606 B. C.; do not end until 1914."
Barbour is indebted to John Aquila Brown for the 2520 year computation. Brown in turn owes the calculation of the "seven times" of Daniel’s prophecy as 2520 years and the association of it to The Times of the Gentiles to Joshua Spalding. Spaulding wrote Divine Theory; A System of Divinity in 1798, though it seems not to have been published until 1808. Spalding, writing of the seven-times of Daniel’s Great Tree Vision, said: "Seven times, or one full week of years, upon the great prophetic scale, is 2520 years. This supposition is much strengthened by the consideration, that the continuance of mystical Babylon is said expressly to be for a time, times, and a half; and as the times allotted for this division of the empire, is the half of a week, three times and a half, it is natural to conclude, that the whole of the times, called the times of the Gentiles, is a whole week, or seven times."
Though Spalding was an American clergyman, his books circulated in Britain as the British Library Catalogue testifies. It is possible that J. A. Brown was familiar with Spalding. Yet, it seems certain that in actual influence on Barbour, Brown played a part that Spalding did not.That Gentile Times were 2520 years became a standard view among expositors, though they were calculated from various start dates. The popularization of the 2520 year calculation was probably due to George Stanley Faber. He used the calculation in The Sacred Calendar of Prophecy, published in 1828. When The Christian Guardian and Church of England Magazine reviewed Faber’s book in 1830, it accepted without question the 2520 day calculation, though it suggested Faber had no basis for his start date. Edward Bickersteth adopted the calculation in the mid-1830s. His reputation as a pious Bible scholar sealed it into Advent thinking.
If the 2520 year calculation isn’t original to Barbour, nothing else in his "Gentile Times" calculation belongs to him either. Faber mentioned the 606 B.C. date in his 1811 work A Dissertation on the Prophecy Contained in Daniel ix, 24-27. In the 1820s several authors pointed to 606 B. C. as the date at which the seventy-years exile began. In 1834 Matthew Habershon mentioned the 606 B. C. date, but calculated the "seven times" from three years later, ending them in 1918. William Miller adopted the 2520 year calculation but ended it in 1843. John Dowling, a Baptist pastor, criticized William Miller’s method for calculating the "seven times," suggesting that "it would have answered the purpose ... much better had this subtraction happened to have brought out the number 606 B. C., the date of the commencement of the 70 years captivity of the Israelites in Babylon."
It seems certain that the ultimate source for Barbour’s 1914 calculation is E. B. Elliott’s Horae Apocalypticae, where the 606 B.C. to 1914 calculation is found. The next mention of the 1914 date in connection to Gentile Times I can find is by an anonymous author writing in The Original Session Magazine in 1850. The magazine was published in Scotland but saw circulation in the United States. This author suggested that the "seven times" would end in 1897, yet his calculation took him to 1914. He arrives at his other dates, including the 1897 date by a complicated series of additions and subtractions from the basic "2520 - 606 = 1914" calculation. If one removes all the puzzling additions and subtractions, one has Barbour’s usage. There is no way to know if Barbour was familiar with Session magazine, but he almost certainly was familiar with John Dowling and Habershon, and he tells us he read Elliott’s Horae Apocalypticae.
It is worth noting that Samuel Davies Baldwin taught that the actual date was 607 B.C. He dated the seventy years from 607- 537 B.C., a view later adopted by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Note: "Bruce" isn't the moderator of either of the amzingforums presentations. He is the author of the Barbour biography at Truthhistory.blogspot.com. He is very forthcoming on sources, and can be reached through his blog. It's refereshing to find a JW who isn't afraid of really looking at the Watchtower's past. Most Witnesses seem afraid of it.