The Watchtower, “When Was Ancient Jerusalem Destroyed?-Part Two, footnote e”
“Business tablets exist for all the years traditionally attributed to the Neo-Babylonian kings. When the years that these kings ruled are totaled and a calculation is made back from the last Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus, the date reached for the destruction of Jerusalem is 587 B.C.E. However, this method of dating works only if each king followed the other in the same year, without any breaks in between.”
A footnote in which the organisation concedes that the dated business tablets cover every year of the Neo-Babylonian period and, added up, give 587 BCE. Its answer is that an unrecorded king might have reigned between two of them.
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Provenance and verification note for The Watchtower, When Was Ancient Jerusalem Destroyed?-Part Two, footnote e
Confidence note. Read in the Watchtower Online Library text of the article on 19 September 2026 in the [Footnotes] section. The Online Library prints all footnotes together at the end of the article, so the page is taken from the position of the footnote’s reference marker in the body: the marker for note e falls between the page markers for pages 24 and 25.
Corroborated by. src-chr-e-pd-1942-p9-10-transitions, src-chr-e-oracc-adadguppi-i29
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-w11-1101-footnote-e