The simple factor is:
The 70 years refers to the exile, and nothing more. The Bible says, when the “70 years” are over, God punishes the King of Babylon and then returns the Jews back to their home.
If this is so, then the 70 years would end in 539, when Cyrus attacks Babylon, and counting backward this leads to 609, not 607. Which doesn’t match the criteria for Watchtower’s assertions.
However. The Watchtower claims the 70 years is an exile, which was for the Jews “at Babylon” not “for Babylon”, and claim the Jews were still in exile, long after it’s attack by Cyrus, and defend themselves by claiming Babylon was not made “empty forever” until many centuries later, leading them to interpret its meaning to be; “at some random later time in the future after the 70 years (of Jewish exile), Babylon will be destroyed forever and never inhabited”.
- “This is what YWHW says: ““But when the seventy years are fulfilled, I will punish the king of Babylon and his nation, the land of the Babylonians, for their guilt,” declares YHWH, “and will make it desolate forever…. When seventy years are completed for/at(?) Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.“ - Jeremiah 25:12, Jeremiah 29:10
However, even should their statement be true, that the desolation happens “some time after” the 70 years completion, this alone does not prove the 70 years did not begin in 609.
It is for this reason they also claim the statements in Daniel say the 70 years of exile begin as Jerusalem’s “desolation”, which they say was during Jerusalem’s destruction by the king of Babylon. They claim this by the scriptures in Daniel:
- “Those who escaped the sword were carried by Nebuchadnezzar into exile in Babylon, and they became servants to him and his sons until the kingdom of Persia came to power. So the land enjoyed its Sabbath rest all the days of the desolation, until seventy years were completed, in fulfilment of the word of YHWH through Jeremiah”. - 2 Chronicles 36:20-21
- This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. - Jeremiah 25:11
- In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of YHWH to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years. - Daniel 9:2
- …to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years. - 2 Chronicles 36:21
This “desolation” they claim refers to its full destruction and the land being empty, and hence claim the 70 years began from then, and that the 70 years ended at the 2nd year of Darius. Asserting with that, that the secular date of Jerusalem’s fall is wrong, and that the Bible itself supports 607. Though no verse says this.
By this they try to assert an argument that it’s “the Bible vs the world”, when in actuality, no such conflict actually exists, as worldly scholars use the Bible itself to attain the date of 587 B.C for Jerusalem’s fall, based on its descriptions.
In addition, we are told that the start of the 70 years, doesn’t also just begin with a “desolation” of Jerusalem alone, but also with the rest of the surrounding nations serving Babylon, and the end of the 70 years would be when the land of the “Chaldeans” (Babylonians) would then be brought into account.
The Bible tells us this was the night the king of Babylon Belshazzar was killed, leading to the first year of Darius the Mede who took his place, which is said to be the “70th year” of Jerusalem’s desolations.
- "And all this land must become a devastated place, an object of astonishment, and these nations will have to serve the king of Babylon seventy years. 'And it must occur that when seventy years have been fulfilled I shall call to account against the king of Babylon and against that nation,' is the utterance of YHWH, 'their error, even against the land of the Chaldeans, and I will make it desolate wastes to time indefinite… For, they will force many nations, and their great kings to serve them. Then I’ll pay them back for the bad things they’ll do… According to the works of their hands'" - Jeremiah 25:11-12
- However, that very night, Belshazzar (the king of the Chaldeans) was killed and Darius the Mede took the kingdom as his own at the age of sixty-two. – Daniel 5:30-31
- Well, it wasduring the 1st year of Darius of Xerxes (a Mede who ruled the Chaldean kingdom), in the first year of his reign I, Daniel, discerned by the books the number of years mentioned in the word of YHWH to Jeremiah the prophet to fulfill the desolation of Jerusalem, namely, 70 years… So the words that were spoken against us… have now all come to pass…” - Daniel 9:1-2, 12
- “It was on the 24th day of the 11th month (the month of Shebat), in the 2nd year [of the reign] of Darius, that the Word of YHWH came to me (Zechariah the prophet, son of Barachiah and grandson of Iddo”)... this is the seventieth year of your rage. - Zechariah 1:7, 12
We see clearly this 70 year period according to Daniel ends with “Darius the Mede”.
Therefore, the “desolations” doesn’t have to refer to Jerusalem literally being empty or destroyed, if it did, then the other lands would not have served Babylon for 70 years, and the 70 years could not have said to have ended during the 1st-2nd year of Darius (possibly an accession transition year within the 70th desolation year) which was just after the king of Babylon died in 539 B.C.E.
Watchtower claims the 70 years had to have ended in 537, because of Zechariah’s statement of it being the “second year of Darius”, thus they count 539>538>537.
However, Daniel tells us clearly that the first year of Darius was in the same year Belshazzar was killed, and he also tells us this is when the 70th year came to pass. This lends to a conclusion that the 70th year Zechariah speaks of must be explained as an ascension year, just as it is with Daniel 1:1 and Jeremiah 25:1-3, where Jeremiah says “fourth year” and Daniel says “third year”, but they speak of the same time period.
If we use secular and strict Biblical references, we know Babylon was destroyed in 539 BCE and if the Bible does say this marked the end of the 70 years, then counting backwards 70 years from that we get to 609 B.C (the time the first exile happened), matching the reading that most Bible scholars and readers apply to Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel's statements.
- Ezekiel 40:1: “In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, in the start of the year, on the tenth [day] of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city had been struck down, on this very same day the hand of YHWH proved to be upon me, so that he brought me to that place. .
Thus the 70 years under Babylon began in 609 B.C, this would means the Jewish Babylonian exile began 22 years before Jerusalem completely fell to Babylon in what secular historians all attest to be 587 B.C.
it helps in a different way.