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Chronology and 607 BCE · Claim record

The astronomical diary VAT 4956, held in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin and edited by Abraham Sachs and Hermann Hunger as Diary No. -567, opens: 'Year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.' The observations it records place that year in 568/567 BCE, which would put Nebuchadnezzar's eighteenth year, when Jerusalem was destroyed, in 587 BCE.

Claim ID claim-chronology-vat4956-year-37Concerns 1988Explicit statement
Explicit statement · 1988 Verified

The astronomical diary VAT 4956, held in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin and edited by Abraham Sachs and Hermann Hunger as Diary No. -567, opens: 'Year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.' The observations it records place that year in 568/567 BCE, which would put Nebuchadnezzar's eighteenth year, when Jerusalem was destroyed, in 587 BCE. electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment VAT.4956, 1988electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment VAT.4956, 1988Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626-556 B.C.) in the British Museum, 1956

The organisation’s position or later explanation: The organisation argues that thirteen sets of lunar positions on the tablet match 588/587 BCE and that the tablet therefore supports 607 BCE (The Watchtower, 1 November 2011, pp. 25, 27; its box on the tablet is on pp. 26-27).

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

electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment VAT.4956, “Astronomical diary for year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar II (ADART I, Diary No. -567), obverse line 1”

1988 · pp.46-53 (ADART I, No. -567) · Abraham J. Sachs and Hermann Hunger (edition); Reinhard Pirngruber (digital edition) · Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna (print edition)

“Year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Month I, (the 1st of which was identical with) the 30th (of the preceding month), the moon became visible behind the Bull of Heaven”

The opening line of the tablet, which fixes the whole set of observations that follow to a named king's named regnal year. The eBL record gives the holding museum as the Vorderasiatisches Museum, the find-site as Babylon, the CDLI number as P421595, and the edition as Sachs and Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia, Volume I: Diaries from 652 B.C. to 262 B.C. (1988), pp. 46-53, No. -567.

Official source Archived or alternative copy

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. The eBL public API record for VAT.4956 was downloaded on 19 September 2026 and the transliteration and English translation read line by line. The eBL viewer page itself is a JavaScript application and returned no text to an automated fetch; the API returns the same edition as structured data.

Scan provenance. electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen. The edition reproduced there is that of Sachs and Hunger, digitised by Reinhard Pirngruber for the Astronomical Diaries Digital project (Austrian Academy of Sciences), CC BY-SA 3.0.

Corroborated by. src-chr-e-wiseman-1956-p30-37th-year, src-chr-e-ebl-vat4956-year-numbers

Notes. The eBL designation 'Diary No. -567' uses the astronomical year numbering in which -567 is 568 BCE.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-ebl-vat4956-line1

Peer-reviewed / scholarly Verified

electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment VAT.4956, “Astronomical diary for year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar II: the month III lunar eclipse”

1988 · pp.46-53 (ADART I, No. -567) · Abraham J. Sachs and Hermann Hunger (edition); Reinhard Pirngruber (digital edition) · Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna (print edition)

“The 15th, one god was seen with the other; sunrise to moonset: 7° 30'. A lunar eclipse which passed by […]”

The single lunar eclipse recorded on the tablet. It is one datum among roughly thirty lunar and planetary observations; the Watch Tower's 2011 argument concentrates on it and on one lunar position.

Official source Archived or alternative copy

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. Read in the eBL API record on 19 September 2026. The eBL bibliography for this tablet also carries a discussion entry for F. Richard Stephenson and David M. Willis, “The Earliest Datable Observation of the Aurora Borealis”, Under One Sky (2002), pp. 421-428, with the note “This and other observations in the month imply that the auroral display occurred on the night of March 12/13 in 567 BC”. That date is Stephenson and Willis’s conclusion as reported by eBL, not a finding of eBL’s own, and their chapter was not opened.

Scan provenance. electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen. The edition reproduced there is that of Sachs and Hunger, digitised by Reinhard Pirngruber for the Astronomical Diaries Digital project (Austrian Academy of Sciences), CC BY-SA 3.0.

Corroborated by. src-chr-e-stephenson-willis-2002

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-ebl-vat4956-eclipse

Peer-reviewed / scholarly Verified

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

1956 · p.30 · D. J. Wiseman · The Trustees of the British Museum, London

“a fragmentary text, B.M. 33041, which is a religious rather than a 'Chronicle' version of historical events in the thirty-seventh year of Nebuchadrezzar (568/7 B.C.)”

Discussing the Babylonian invasion of Egypt, Wiseman dates Nebuchadnezzar II's thirty-seventh year to 568/567 BCE on the basis of a tablet entirely independent of the astronomical diary VAT 4956.

Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. Read in the ETANA PDF on 19 September 2026; running head '30 CHRONICLES OF CHALDAEAN KINGS' immediately above. On the same page Wiseman dates the final siege of Jerusalem to '588-586 B.C.'

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-ebl-vat4956-line1

Notes. The same volume, on p. 30, refers to 'the siege of Jerusalem for a time in 588-586 B.C.', i.e. the mainstream range, not 607.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-wiseman-1956-p30-37th-year

Claim page

A direct link to this claim is https://jwtruth.org/evidence/claim-chronology-vat4956-year-37/. 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.