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Chronology and 607 BCE · Claim record

The Babylonian Chronicle BM 21946 records that in Nebuchadnezzar II's seventh year he besieged 'the city of Judah' and seized it on the second day of the month Adar, capturing its king. D. J. Wiseman, publishing the tablet for the British Museum in 1956, converted that date to 15 or 16 March 597 BCE.

Claim ID claim-chronology-bm21946-jerusalem-597Concerns 1956Explicit statement
Explicit statement · 1956 Verified

The Babylonian Chronicle BM 21946 records that in Nebuchadnezzar II's seventh year he besieged 'the city of Judah' and seized it on the second day of the month Adar, capturing its king. D. J. Wiseman, publishing the tablet for the British Museum in 1956, converted that date to 15 or 16 March 597 BCE. Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626-556 B.C.) in the British Museum, 1956Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626-556 B.C.) in the British Museum, 1956electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment BM.21946, 2026

The organisation’s position or later explanation: The organisation does not dispute the tablet but holds that the Babylonian chronicles 'provide an account for only 35 years of the Neo-Babylonian period' and so cannot fix the chronology (The Watchtower, 1 November 2011, p. 23).

Show the evidence (3 sources)
Peer-reviewed / scholarly Verified

Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626-556 B.C.) in the British Museum, “Transliteration and translation of B.M. 21946, obverse lines 11-13”

1956 · p.73 · D. J. Wiseman · The Trustees of the British Museum, London

“In the seventh year, the month of Kislev, the king of Akkad mustered his troops, marched to the Hatti-land, and encamped against (i.e. besieged) the city of Judah and on the second day of the month of Adar he seized the city and captured the king. He appointed there a king of his own choice (lit. heart), received its heavy tribute and sent (them) to Babylon.”

This is the editio princeps of the tablet usually called the Babylonian Chronicle Chronicle 5 or the Jerusalem Chronicle. The passage records Nebuchadnezzar II's capture of Jerusalem and of its king in his seventh regnal year.

Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. The complete 1956 volume was downloaded as a PDF from etana.org on 19 September 2026, converted to text with pdftotext and read directly. The running head immediately above this passage reads 'TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION 73'.

Scan provenance. Full scan of the British Museum volume hosted by ETANA (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives), an academic digital-library consortium. Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum, 1956.

Corroborated by. src-chr-e-wiseman-1956-p33-second-adar, src-chr-e-ebl-bm21946

Notes. The tablet's British Museum registration number is 1896,0409.51.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-wiseman-1956-p73-seventh-year

Peer-reviewed / scholarly Verified

Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626-556 B.C.) in the British Museum, “Introduction: the historical background”

1956 · p.33 · D. J. Wiseman · The Trustees of the British Museum, London

“The date of this conquest of Jerusalem is now known precisely for the first time, namely, the second of Adar (15/16th March 597 B.C.).”

Wiseman explains that the chronicle states Nebuchadnezzar 'besieged Jerusalem (literally: the city of Judah) and seized it on the second day of the month Adar', and converts that Babylonian date into the Julian calendar.

Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. Read in the ETANA PDF on 19 September 2026. The running head above the passage reads 'INTRODUCTION 33'.

Scan provenance. Full scan of the British Museum volume hosted by ETANA (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives), an academic digital-library consortium. Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum, 1956.

Corroborated by. src-chr-e-wiseman-1956-p73-seventh-year

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-wiseman-1956-p33-second-adar

Peer-reviewed / scholarly Verified

electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment BM.21946, “Catalogue record for the Babylonian Chronicle BM 21946”

2026 · Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen

The academic catalogue record for the chronicle Wiseman published. It gives the museum as the British Museum, the museum number as BM 21946, the accession number as 1896,0409.51, the CDLI number as P555785, the genre as Chronicle, and the standard edition as A. K. Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (1975), pp. 99-102 no. 5 — that is, Grayson’s Chronicle 5.

Official source Archived or alternative copy

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. The eBL API record for BM.21946 was downloaded on 19 September 2026 and the museum number, accession number, CDLI number, genre and bibliography read from its structured fields. The record contains no continuous sentence, so no quotation is recorded for it: its description field is empty. The string “TCS 5” does not appear in the record; the identification of Grayson’s volume with Texts from Cuneiform Sources 5 is standard bibliography, stated here as context and not as a quotation. The British Museum’s own collection-online page could not be opened.

Corroborated by. src-chr-e-wiseman-1956-p73-seventh-year

Notes. britishmuseum.org refused every automated request made in this session (HTTP 403 to earlier attempts; no response at all to curl with a browser user-agent). See the notes file.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-ebl-bm21946

Claim page

A direct link to this claim is https://jwtruth.org/evidence/claim-chronology-bm21946-jerusalem-597/. Every source above opens the original document or the best available copy. If you believe the wording, date or context is wrong, report an error.