The Watchtower, “When Was Ancient Jerusalem Destroyed?—Part Two”
“Therefore, neither the Babylonian chronicles nor the business tablets provide a basis to establish with certainty that Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 B.C.E.”
The argument rests on dated receipts that the article says overlap at the transitions between reigns: tablets of Amel-Marduk’s accession year dated to the fourth and fifth months (BM 80920, BM 58872) while Nebuchadnezzar II was still ruling in his sixth and even tenth month of his 43rd year (BM 55806), and a similar overlap between Amel-Marduk and Neriglissar (BM 75106, BM 61325, BM 75489). From this the article asks: “Could others have ruled between the reigns of these kings? If so, additional years would have to be added to the Neo-Babylonian period.”
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Provenance and verification note for The Watchtower, When Was Ancient Jerusalem Destroyed?—Part Two
Confidence note. Full document fetched from the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and read in full; the quotation, the paragraph and the page were confirmed against the article text and its embedded page markers (span class=“pageNum”).
Notes. This is the organisation’s positive proposal: unrecorded extra kings or interregna lengthening the Neo-Babylonian period by the missing 20 years.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-o-w-2011-1101-business-tablets