Jeffro
Poor addled ‘scholar’. He imagines that preparation and travel has ‘only now been considered’. He makes the same kind of pathetic jibe every time it is ‘acknowledged’ that ‘there was an exile’ (as distinct from the nonexistent ‘70-year exile’) as if it’s new Informatio
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The said scholar has pushed and prodded you to concede the necessity of sufficient passage of time for not only the length of the Return journey but also the preparations required and now you whine and squeal because you are forced to make this concession in a vain attempt to support the nonsense date of 538 BCE
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Desperate to claim 538 BCE is ‘impossible’, he throws 537 BCE under the bus by pointing out that one person suggests 533BCE
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The fact is that Chronologist Steinmann recognizes what WT scholars have long said that there must be sufficient time of preparation as one of the many historical factors necessary for calculating the date of the Return in 537 BCE.
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In reality, there was no ‘decree’ just for the Jews, but a general policy on Cyrus’s part of allowing former exiled peopleto be repatriated to quell social unrest. The biblical story is greatly overstated and it is indeed true that many scholars recognise that the full number took a much longer time to return, with several separate groups returning at different times. As I already showed, the stories in Ezra and Nehemiah obviously conflate details, evidenced by the fact that they can’t decide whether it was Jeshua or Ezra who officiated. However, there is no problem at all for an initial contingent to have returned in 538 BCE
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What other rubbish. The Decree was for the Jews specifically and its nature and circumstances are well discussed by the scribe and historian Ezra thus there is no problem at all for an initial contingent to have returned in 537 BCE as fully explained in WT publications.
All of this has been thoroughly discussed on this forum but Jeffro has been misled by COJ's masterful deception and thus robbed of thinking ability.
scholar JW