Trying to nail down 612 BCE as the date of Nineveh's destruction

[Pudgy]

…

[xero]

Ok, so if I'm reading this guy right, the Bible's discussing Nebuchadnezzar being king has nothing to do with his being king from the Babylonian official perspective, but from the perspective of the Jews?

Timeline: Nebuchadnezzar's Reign and the Desolation of Jerusalem

• 625 B.C.E. - Nebuchadnezzar begins his rule as King of Babylon. (from the Jews perspective, not Babylonian)
• 617 B.C.E. - Key figures including Daniel, Ezekiel, and King Jehoiachin are exiled to Babylon.
• 614 B.C.E. - Daniel's training as an advisor ends.
• 607 B.C.E. - Jerusalem is destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. The beginning of the 70-year period of desolation prophesied by Jeremiah.
• 606 B.C.E. -
  • Ezekiel prophesies against Tyre.
  • The siege of Tyre begins, marking the start of 70 years where it is "forgotten" (per Isaiah's prophecy).
• 605 B.C.E. - Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar's dream.
• 590 B.C.E. -
  • Ezekiel prophesies Egypt's 40-year desolation and confirms the siege of Tyre has now ended (after 13 years).
• 588 B.C.E. - Egypt's 40-year desolation begins (prophesied by Ezekiel).
• 548 B.C.E. - Egypt's desolation ends.
• 539 B.C.E. - Babylon is conquered by the Medo-Persian Empire.
• 537 B.C.E. - Cyrus the Great releases the Jewish exiles, ending the 70-year desolation of Jerusalem.
• 536 B.C.E. - The 70 years prophesied regarding Tyre end. Tyre assists the Jews in rebuilding Jerusalem.

Egypt's Desolation: A Key Piece of Evidence

Ezekiel prophesied the plundering and desolation of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar, specifying a 40-year period (Ezekiel 29:17-19, 12).

• Secular Chronology: If Ezekiel's exile began in 597/598 B.C.E., the prophecy is dated to 570 B.C.E. This aligns with records like Vat 4956 suggesting Nebuchadnezzar's campaign against Egypt in 568 B.C.E. However, this creates a conflict, as the 40-year desolation would end in 528 B.C.E., before Cyrus' decree to release exiles in 537 B.C.E.
• Bible Chronology: If Ezekiel's exile began in 617/618 B.C.E., the prophecy is given in 590 B.C.E. This places Egypt's desolation squarely in Nebuchadnezzar's 37th year (588 B.C.E.), with the 40-year period ending in 548 B.C.E. This scenario allows for Egypt's restoration before the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C.E, aligning with historical records of Egypt's alliance with Babylon's last king.

Key Points and Arguments for 607 B.C.E

• 70-Year Desolation of Jerusalem: Counting 70 years from Cyrus' decree of restoration in 537 B.C.E. confirms 607 B.C.E as the correct date for Jerusalem's destruction.
• Tyre's Prophecy: If Jerusalem's destruction occurred in 587 B.C.E., the 70-years associated with Tyre would not fall in line with the Jews' return and the recorded actions of Tyre in assisting them.
• Egypt's Desolation: The prophecy about Egypt's 40-year desolation further supports 607 B.C.E. as the accurate date.

[JW Insider]

15 hours ago, xero said:

I'm not a fan of goal-post shifting, inventing of new goal-posts, or editing of people's comments and arguments. There is a natural flow which gets interrupted when those uncomfortable with a conversation try to steer it or control it.

As you probably already know, the WTS publications are correct when they state:

*** kc p. 187 Appendix to Chapter 14 ***
Business tablets: Thousands of contemporary Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablets have been found that record simple business transactions, stating the year of the Babylonian king when the transaction occurred. Tablets of this sort have been found for all the years of reign for the known Neo-Babylonian kings in the accepted chronology of the period.

Literate Babylonians from various cities all over the empire could write "17th year of Nabopolassar" [with the month and day] or "18th year of Nebuchadnezzar" [with the month and day] just as readily as we would write 2/25/2024. And there is apparently an average of about 1,000 of these contracts per year covering EVERY year of EVERY Neo-Babylonidan king.

This means that if you could just put them in the right order, you would have the entire string of dates covered from Nabopolassar, to Nebuchadnezzar, to Amel-Marduk, to Neriglissar, to Labashi-Marduk, to Nabonidus, to Cyrus, to Cambyses, etc.

At that point you would only need to identify the BCE year for any ONE of those years and you would know the entire Neo-Babylonian chronology of every king. Evidence for any one year, serves as evidence for every other year. All of them interlock with no exceptions and no contradictions.

In other words, if you had evidence somehow that the first year of Cyrus was 538 BCE, that would also serve as evidence that the 14th year of Nabopolassar was 612 BCE. If you had evidence that the last year of Nabopolassar was 604, that would serve as the same evidence that Nebuchadnezzar's accession year was 605, and his first year was 604, and his 18th was 587 and his 43rd was 562. 

This is why a discussion of the actual 'solid' evidence for the Neo-Babylonian chronology is the best foundation for discovering the date of Nineveh's destruction, or the fall of Jerusalem, or the fall of Babylon, or the start of Evil-Merodach's reign.

I think you can tell, @xero, that a discussion that focuses on just the secular evidence would be useful to more easily reach exactly the same goal. And that goal could not only be more easily reached, but also more easily verified and double-checked and triple-checked, and quadruple-checked from various independent sources. 

I say this because there is no astronomical event recorded for the 14th year of Nabopolassar which is the evidenced date for the Fall of Nineveh.

• But there is an astronomical event dated to the accession year of Nabopolassar in 626 BCE. That fact alone can tell us that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE.
• There is a separate astronomical event dated to the 18th year of Nabopolassar in 616. That fact alone can tell us that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE. And putting those two independent pieces of evidence together we have double-checked the date.
• But when the entire string of Neo-Babylonian kings is put in the right order, we also have astronomical observations reported for Neb 14 = 591, Neb 16 = 589, Neb 18 = 587, Neb 25 = 580, Neb 26 = 579, Neb 27 =578, Neb 28 = 577, etc. Each one of those pieces of evidence is ALSO therefore evidence that Nabopolassar 14 = 612, so that even an observation under Nebuchadnezzar becomes evidence that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE. 

Of course, this also means that, when you put the entire string of Neo-Babylonian kings in order, any evidence that 539 is the correct date for Cyrus conquering Babylon is the same evidence that Nebuchadnezzar's 18th is 587. There is no such thing as choosing one without the other, UNLESS you are willing to discard the evidence from literally THOUSANDS of business documents, and also discard the double-checked, triple-checked, . . . octuple-checked astronomical data. And it would be highly hypocritical, because whatever reason you tried to give for discarding THOUSANDS of piecies of excellent evidence would apply moreso against the much weaker and less attested evidence for Cyrus in 539.

The reason for moving that kind of a discussion to another thread is because there will invariably be someone who is so fearful of the actual evidence that they will quickly say that first you have to prove exactly when the 70 years started and ended. Or, first you have to tell me why secular scholars haven't decided on whether it was Nebuchadnezzar's 18th or 19th year when Jerusalem was destroyed. Or, first you have to prove that Russell was really wrong in promoting Zionism. Those types of new goal posts and moving of goal posts can be distracting to someone who is more interested in the strength of the evidence for attaching BCE dates to the Neo-Babylonian chronology. 

[xero]

13 hours ago, JW Insider said:

• But there is an astronomical event dated to the accession year of Nabopolassar in 626 BCE. That fact alone can tell us that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE.
• There is a separate astronomical event dated to the 18th year of Nabopolassar in 616. That fact alone can tell us that Nineveh fell in 612 BCE. And putting those two independent pieces of evidence together we have double-checked the date.

What are these two?

[JW Insider]

On 2/26/2024 at 5:57 AM, xero said:

What are these two?

Those particular two events are simply Saros interpolations, which won't make as much sense as direct evidence until we are ready to re-build the entire king list and test it against the known ancient "spreadsheets" of Saros eclipses (LBAT 1415, 1417, 1418, 1419, 1420 & 1421) listing them for every "18 years" -- and then combined with evidence from another document. This was why I wanted to start with Nebuchadnezzar and then work backward and forward from there. 

However, I can do one better. It turns out that I was wrong when I said there were no observations/events associated with  Nabopolassar's 14th year. I had stopped looking at further astronomical readings when I was satisfied I had seen enough to assure myself. 

But there may be a couple more, one of which should touch on Nabopolassar's 14th:

https://www.jenseits-des-horizonts.de/download_pdf/bsa_044_04.pdf

So it's those first two tablets, referenced in the footnotes 3 & 4. The first is Hunger, Sachs, and Steele, No 52.

That tablet is reported elsewhere to show observations for:

• Nabopolassar  7 = 619 BCE
• Nabopolassar 12 = 614 BCE
• Nabopolassar 13 = 613 BCE
• Nabopolassar 14 = 612 BCE [edited to add: possibly stops at Nab 13=613BCE]

Since the above PDF shows the readings stopping in 613 and doesn't include Nabopolassar 14 = 612 BCE, perhaps it is partly cut off or damaged at that point. Or the readings go past December of 613 still in the same regnal year 613, but technically 612. I haven't seen a picture of it, although I might have a photocopy of the correct pages of Hermann Hunger's "Astronomical Diaries and Texts V" in my files from a time I copied several pages from those volumes at the NYPL Reference Library. I kind of doubt I have it though, because I knew nothing about this one when I did my readings for the posts here: https://www.theworldnewsmedia.org/topic/88343-secular-evidence-and-neo-babylonian-chronology-nebuchadnezzar-cyrus-etc/?do=findComment&comment=152186 

Another one, (Text Number 5) related to the above, is also in Hermann Hunger's Astronomical Diaries and Texts V, and it has the year of the king (16) but not the name of the king. It reports an eclipse that matches September 15, 610 BCE. That is of course the 16th year of Nabopolassar, as it lands right there in among the readings above in Text Number 52.

I'm out of state right now, but will check these out for myself in a few days.

[JW Insider]

Thanks @George88 for the details from Britton: "An Early Observation Text for Mars:"

I don't know how many people have tried this, but you can create a kind of time-lapse "movie" with several of these astronomy applications (software) by simply pointing in a fixed, specific direction (il.e. due West) but zooming out to get a picture of the entire night sky and setting the time to give you a picture of what it looked like at say 9pm Babylon time (or Baghdad, Iraq or thereabouts). Then you quickly click through days going either forward or backward to watch the movements of the planets and the changing path and phases of the moon. On some apps you can just hold down the arrow key and run through about 20 days per second, creating a kind of movie showing the new position for 9pm every day.

What is most interesting is the path of planets like Mars when they move at a steady pace across the sky from night to night, but then will slow down to almost no movement and smoothly changes direction. (Mars in retrograde.) It makes you wonder just how closely the ancient astronomer/astrologers were able to figure out exactly when it turned retrograde because it slows down so much. It's like the date for the Roman Sol Invictus being around December 25 when accurate measurements show that the Winter Solstice was actually on December 21/22. (The idea, of course, is that the hours of sunlight in a day got shorter and shorter, but by December 25 they were sure the days were getting longer again.) 

You might expect a similar 3-day delay in determining Mars in retrograde. And this is pretty much what happens with the earliest Mars readings:

 

What I am talking about is in the second paragraph above where you would expect the observation to be "late by several days" which is exactly what happened for the ancient measurement of when "Mars stood still."

I included the paragraph above just to show that if you are using the software, and yours doesn't have "Babylon" you will be off by no more than a day if you pick a modern city closer to Baghdad or a different city 100 miles away.  

[JW Insider]

 

@xero, I think in your checking of eclipse lists for the time, you are aware that Ptolemy's Almagest also recorded this one which exactly matches 21/22 April 621 BC:

As you are aware, the 5th year of Nabopolassar in 621 BCE puts the 14th year of Nabopolassar in 612 BCE.

1. In the 5th year of Nabopolassar (127th year from Nabonassar, 27/28 Athyr of the Egyptian calendar a lunar eclipse began at the end of the 11th hour in Babylon. The maximum obscuration was 1/4 of the diameter from the south (Almagest V 14).

Here is the translated text from the Almagest itself. He runs an era going all the way back to Nabonassar, and with some of his readings he also includes the time from the death of Alexander the Great AND Nabonassar AND the parallel Egyptian calendar AND to the archonship era in Athens.

Below I also included the first portion of the next eclipse he records regarding Cyrus' son Cambyses, it's one of the two that the "Insight" book uses to date Cyrus. Of course the WTS publications don't tell you that it is also found in Ptolemy, for obvious reasons. Ptolemy lists 10 Babylonian eclipses and 4 of them have already been found duplicated in cuneiform tablets from Babylon:

https://classicalliberalarts.com/resources/PTOLEMY_ALMAGEST_ENGLISH.pdf

page 253:

 

[JW Insider]

43 minutes ago, JW Insider said:

@xero, I think in your checking of eclipse lists for the time, you are aware that Ptolemy's Almagest also recorded this one which exactly matches 21/22 April 621 BC:

As you are aware, the 5th year of Nabopolassar in 621 BCE puts the 14th year of Nabopolassar in 612 BCE.

1. In the 5th year of Nabopolassar (127th year from Nabonassar, 27/28 Athyr of the Egyptian calendar a lunar eclipse began at the end of the 11th hour in Babylon. The maximum obscuration was 1/4 of the diameter from the south (Almagest V 14).

Because of the need for the WTS publications to sow seeds of doubt about Ptolemy, the Watchtower made the following statement about that same 621 BCE eclipse. The mistake they made is pretty obvious once you have seen Ptolemy's writing.

*** w69 3/15 pp. 185-186 Astronomical Calculations and the Count of Time ***
LUNAR ECLIPSES
Lunar eclipses, as found in Ptolemy’s canon and presumably drawn from data in the cuneiform records, have been used in efforts to substantiate the dates usually given for particular years of the Neo-Babylonian kings. But even though Ptolemy may have been able to calculate accurately the dates of certain eclipses in the past, this does not prove that his transmission of historical data is correct. His relating of eclipses to the reigns of certain kings may not always be based on the facts. Additionally, the frequency of lunar eclipses certainly does not add great strength to this type of confirmation.
For example, a lunar eclipse in 621 B.C.E. (April 22) is used as proof of the correctness of the Ptolemaic date for Nabopolassar’s fifth year. However, another eclipse could be cited twenty years earlier in 641 B.C.E. (June 1) to correspond with the date that Bible chronology would indicate for Nabopolassar’s fifth year. Besides, this latter eclipse was total, whereas the one in 621 B.C.E. was partial.

To me, that's just embarrassing. I don't think it was 'deviant scholarship' as @Arauna would have called it had I made a similar mistake. I think it was just grasping at any straws possible to sow seeds of doubt in Ptolemy's work. The problem, of course, is that Ptolemy said it was partial, and it shows up as partial in my software exactly as Ptolemy reported. But the Watchtower claimed that a better one 20 years earlier would be a TOTAL eclipse. In other words, someone in the Writing Dept found a reference, or went to the trouble themselves to find an eclipse exactly 20 years earlier (necessary to feed the 1914 theory) and somehow overlooked the fact that they were choosing a NON-matching eclipse over the matching eclipse. Rolf Furuli made the exact same attempt with lunar information from Nebuchadnezzar's 37th year, and made some of the same "wishful-thinking" errors over and over again.  
 

[xero]

@JW InsiderHave you fact-checked this remark?
"While not all of these sets of lunar positions match the year 568/567 B.C.E., all 13 sets match calculated positions for 20 years earlier, for the year 588/587 B.C.E."
https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/wp20111101/When-Was-Ancient-Jerusalem-Destroyed-Part-Two/

I read through these two articles and what I got was that the description on the tablets better suited 588/587 BCE.

[JW Insider]

2 hours ago, xero said:

@JW InsiderHave you fact-checked this remark?
"While not all of these sets of lunar positions match the year 568/567 B.C.E., all 13 sets match calculated positions for 20 years earlier, for the year 588/587 B.C.E."

Yes. It's one of the first sets of items I ever checked against the astronomy applications. It's a summary of Rolf Furuli's book. And this is an even bigger embarrassment to the WTS than the Nabopolassar 5th year eclipse that I mentioned in my previous post. 

The article was smart not to use Furuli's name, because his previous book on chronology had also been full of some amateur errors. (And in order to hide the fact that he was merely trying to create "scholarly-looking" support for the WT chronology he said he was developing the "Oslo Chronology." That's where he's from.) And using his name would have led people to the Internet, where his book and his theory had already been thoroughly debunked. And, in the worst-case scenario, it would have potentially driven more Witnesses to do what you are doing, obtaining software to look it up for themselves.

But unfortunately, while removing Furuli's name, the article tends to imply a kind of "editorial 'we'" which implicates the WTS itself, and the article therefore implies that the WTS knows others who have validated Furuli, or has itself tried to verify these readings. Obviously, they didn't or they would discover exactly what you will discover when you check it out for yourself.

The problem starts with the fact that there is a well known copyist's error on the tablet. (Most all the astronomy tablets we have are copies, or even copies of copies.) There is actually more than one error, but none of the others are significant. This copyists error is considered to be off by one day, although some experts say that it may actually be that it was the name of the star that is off, and it is still the correct day. (When I use the term "experts" I mean many of the same people that the WTS quotes as experts in "Insight" etc.)

I wrote up my own findings, but they are not as well-documented and well-presented as has been done by others. The person who presented it best in my opinion has been on this forum. Her name is Ann O'maly, although I expect that's a "screen name" meant to be a pun on the word "anomaly." Her write-up on it is on academia.com, and we also discussed it here on the forum. I'll point you to both in the next couple of posts, and we can discuss it again from there.

[JW Insider]

Spoiler alert, @xero: Most of the readings are a much better fit for 568, and only a few can be said to be OK for 588. Except for the single well-documented, copyist's error, that was recognized 100 years ago, most of the other supposed "matches" for 588 require that we also believe the Babylonians had made a mistake in starting their new year more than a month later than it should have been started. Not only is there no evidence that this EVER happened, the Babylonians were much more careful and meticulous about which lunar month started the New Year than the Hebrew calendar. The Hebrews never added the leap month except just after the 12th month. The Babylonians to make sure the New Year always started even closer to the Spring Equinox, would often add the leap month just after the 12th month but sometimes calibrated to add it just after the 6th month when necessary. (This is done because the lunar months only provide about 354 days in the year, so that loss of 11 days from the solar year requires a leap month every 3 years or so.) But we already have excellent evidence for the exact method the Babylonians were already using for their leap months, because the thousands of business tablets identified whether there had just been a month 6 or month 12 leap month. (aka intercalary month)

That means that even most of the "coincidental" readings are bogus, even though Ann O'maly generously allowed the 588 readings themselves to be compared against 568, anyway, in spite of the fact that they weren't real readings because the month was impossible. 

[JW Insider]

@xero, here is the comparison done by Ann O'maly. I got almost exactly the same results running the tests on "Stellarium" and "The Sky." Keep in mind, that the moon pretty much travels across the same path from night to night, so there will ALWAYS be other years when very similar lunar/stellar configurations are seen by coincidence alone. In fact, every 18 years 11 days 8 hours the moon will repeat an eclipse, very often with an additional eclipse usually visible 5 or 6 months from that 18 year cycle.

You are always going to get SOME very similar readings in ANY two years that are compared.

The paper is much longer but it is well summarized with the chart I copied there and here:

Posted December 11, 2020

The older the diary, the more it has been recopied, and the more likely a few errors would creep into it. This will be true of VAT 4956 for which the planetary positions interspersed throughout certain lines of the diary provide excellent evidence that Nebuchadnezzar's 37th year was 568/7 BCE. But the lunar positions on other interspersed lines of the same diary match only 17 dates of the 23 lunar positions, and 17 out of those 23 positions are a match (73.9%).

These are discussed very well here, where the author ("Ann O'maly") has compared the accuracy score, to another proposed date, 20 years further back for Nebuchadnezzar's 37th year:

https://www.academia.edu/44227088/Fact_checking_VAT4956_com

The final tabulation is almost identical to the results anyone can get with computer-based astronomy programs. The final column on the right is the score given to the lunar positions for 568/7 which matches the timeline above. (Green is good, red is not.) The left column is a good indication of how well (actually, how poorly!) the lunar positions might match a date 20 years earlier, or even perhaps for any other random year. This attempt to make it match another date scores about 5 out of the 23 positions (21.7% vs 73.9% for the more accurate year).