The Watchtower, “When Was Ancient Jerusalem Destroyed?—Part Two”
“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 attached to the paragraph that dismisses the chronicles and business tablets. It is the organisation’s own statement that the contemporaneous dated documents form a complete year-by-year series for the 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 was confirmed word for word against the article text.The Watchtower Online Library prints the footnote block at the end of the document, after the last page marker, so the page recorded here is the page carrying the footnote's reference marker in the body text, read from the page marker immediately before it.
Corroborated by. src-chr-o-w-2011-1101-business-tablets
Notes. The most significant concession in the series and easy to miss: it concedes that the dated contemporaneous record is continuous, and rests the 20-year gap entirely on the possibility of unattested breaks between reigns.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-o-w-2011-1101-ftn-e