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

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, George88 said:

For the past decade, your audience has consisted of uninformed spectators and individuals who have abandoned their faith. God knows the truth and who to judge as unrighteous.

It's a point I find disconcerting too. Every Witness or ex-Witness that I know of who has ever reported their findings after looking into the actual observations on the Babylonian tablets, is now in one of the following categories:

1. Is still a Witness, but no longer believes that Nebuchadnezzar's 19th year was anywhere close to 607 BCE
2. Or, they are disfellowshipped.
3. Or, potentially both.

There seems to have been two exceptions still out there, but one has been equivocating. And the other has had their theory embarrassingly demolished (not by me), and hasn't responded since then that I know about. No one I know who has reported their findings still believes in the 607 doctrine. That might be scary, even for @xero. So, I can think of only a couple solutions:

1. The WTS can forbid anyone from trying to confirm the observations on the tablets themselves.
2. Or, the WTS can address the problem openly and without obfuscation and conjecture.

Naturally, I prefer the latter, because I think the first method won't work, and will ultimately backfire. @xero will likely delay his own findings as long as possible and overemphasize the potential for error and the "just don't know for sure" factor.

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, George88 said:

Thank you for mentioning the MUL.APIN. This is what I was referring to when I said the following to @xero, and highlighted "the Babylonian's own explanation in their own documents."

8 hours ago, JW Insider said:

and backed up by similar readings in Egyptian documents, and the Babylonian's own explanations in their own documents allows for a pretty good understanding. 

It's interesting, too, how many constellations have kept similar star groupings and even similar names. I had wondered early on especially, if we really had all the star names mapped correctly between the Babylonian system and our current identification of those same stars. This document provides the support. 

I never knew much of anything about Egyptian astronomy, but just noticed last night that the Egyptians, too, have writings and inscriptions that document their "mapping" of the stars, constellations, etc.

 

Steele has been involved in several projects related to mapping the Babylonian "fixed" stars, and related papers. I have not looked at this first one, but I was suprised to read in the "blurb" that astronomy texts may go as far back as the Old Babylonian Empire (Hammurapi), not just Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian.

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Babylonian Astronomy. II. The Thirty-Six Stars

B. L. van der Waerden

Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan., 1949), pp. 6-26

...BABYLONIAN ASTRONOMY . II. THE THIRTY-SIX STARS B. L. VAN DER WAERDEN OUR knowledge of Old Babylonian astronomy is rather scanty. The only text which can with certainty be dated as far back as the Hammurapi Dynasty is represented by the Venus tablets of Ammisaduqa, discussed else...

 

And it's more than just the MUL.APIN texts, too, of course:

 

The Cuneiform Uranology Texts: Drawing the Constellations

JOURNAL ARTICLE

The Cuneiform Uranology Texts: Drawing the Constellations

Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Eckart Frahm, Wayne Horowitz, John Steele

Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 107, No. 2, The Cuneiform Uranology Texts: Drawing the Constellations (2017), pp. i-iii, v, vii, ix, 1-33, 35-65, 67-69, 71-83, 85-115, 117-119, 121

.../ Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Eckart Frahm, Wayne Horowitz, John Steele. Description: Philadelphia : the American Philosophical Society, [2018] | Series: Transactions series, ISSN 0065-9746 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018015145 | ISBN 9781606180723 Subjects: LCSH: Astronomy , Assyro- Babylonian . | Astronomy...

 

[JW Insider]

2 hours ago, George88 said:

All the witnesses I have spoken to, excluding the one here, advocate, for the 607 BC destruction of Jerusalem.

I expect that this is true of 99% of all Witnesses. Certainly any that I speak with in the congregation would advocate for 607 BC, but the topic hardly comes up any more, and I'm certainly not going to bring it up. It's barely been mentioned in the publications since 2018, although it's been added to the extra material in the new NWT (simplified).

The Witnesses who no longer believe the Barbour/Russell version of 607 (606) are the ones who discuss the evidence in private email groups and closed forums. Not much danger of anyone changing their mind on a forum like this one.

2 hours ago, George88 said:

While some may not be concerned with the specifics of how that year was arrived at, they do place their trust in the Bible's calculations of 2520. Those who only back a single 1260 are in error.

Yes. I think that's about right. I think a lot of Witnesses believe that it's simply a matter of trusting the old Barbour/Russell 2,520, and they don't even give a thought to the fact that our doctrines have completely divorced it from the 1,260. Yet, several years ago, the very last mention of the 1,260 in the Watchtower was with the very verse in Revelation 11 that ties the 1,260 directly to the Gentile Times of Luke 21:24, and yet the Watchtower doesn't even mention that fact, only that the 1,260 "Gentile Times' number, should be measured in "days" (from December 1914 to early 1919) as opposed to the 2,520 which gets measured in years from 607 BCE to 1914 CE. I think it's a shame that so many of us actually believe it's a "Bible calculation." That's the power of indoctrination and tradition.

[JW Insider]

2 hours ago, George88 said:

Ultimately, the Watchtower does not compel anyone to believe in 607 BC

True. As long as you believe in 1914, it doesn't matter whether you know how it was calculated.

 *** w86 4/1 p. 31 Questions From Readers ***
Obviously, a basis for approved fellowship with Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot rest merely on a belief in God, in the Bible, in Jesus Christ, and so forth. . . .
Approved association with Jehovah’s Witnesses requires accepting the entire range of the true teachings of the Bible, including those Scriptural beliefs that are unique to Jehovah’s Witnesses. What do such beliefs include? . . . That 1914 marked the end of the Gentile Times and the establishment of the Kingdom of God in the heavens, as well as the time for Christ’s foretold presence. (Luke 21:7-24; Revelation 11:15–12:10) 

Technically, I have no problem with the approved association requirement, because it says it only includes "those Scriptural beliefs that are unique to Jehovah's Witnesses." The list included more than just the 1914 doctrine, and one of those other items in the list is already partly obsolete; it included a phrase that is no longer considered Scriptural. I highlighted Revelation 11 because this is the very chapter that associates only 1260, not 2520, with the Gentile Times. 

[JW Insider]

2 hours ago, George88 said:

However, it is important to highlight that these sources do not provide evidence to discredit the Watchtower's claims concerning 587 BC.

Of course they do provide such evidence that discredits the Watchtower's claims concerning these dates. Why do you think the Watchtower Society is the biggest opposer of all Neo-Babylonian tablets? Why do you think every article about them is written to sow seeds of doubt?

3 hours ago, George88 said:

Nowadays, individuals have turned their attention towards astronomical tablets that recount a vague tale of non-existence, merely because some tablets reference the 37th year of Nebuchadnezzar as if it were a remarkable discovery, when in fact, it can be interpreted in various ways.

You can interpret it however you like. Or you can throw the whole thing out. It changes nothing. It's just another line of independent evidence that helps people put a BCE date on all the years of Nebuchadnezzar's reign. But it's hardly the only one. In another post I'll provide the list that "J Halsey" added to the Internet. I don't know who he is and I never saw this until today. It seems fairly complete. 

3 hours ago, George88 said:

Also, the use of the 18th-19th year cycles is merely a further example of the lengths some people are eager to go to validate their conjectures since if we follow that pattern it intersects with 607/6 BC.

I have never heard anyone use 18 year cycles or 19 year cycles to validate any related conjectures. But if you are saying that if we follow that pattern it intersects with 607/6, then it sounds like you might be saying that you are the example of the lengths some people are eager to go to since you are the one claiming that these patterns intersect with 607/6 BC. I do agree that it's a stretch though, because NONE of these patterns have anything to do with 607/6 BC or 587/6 or 568/7 or 588/7. 

[JW Insider]

For anyone interested in the entire Neo-Babylonian chronology and the support from tablets, the following site looks to be fairly comprehensive. Just looking at one page here might help demolish the misconception that VAT 4956 is somehow important, and that somehow finding errors on it hurts the accepted chronology:

Here's the primary page I am referring to:

https://www.jhalsey.com/jerusalem-book/standard/timeline.html

available as a pdf, too:

For those afraid to look, I will provide some snippets:

[Pudgy]

I was afraid to look but when I did I realized the video had been filmed in front of a live studio ostrich.

[Pudgy]

To find out what is REALLY TRUE ….…. just look out the window.

[xero]

In all of our bloviating, can anyone supply me with the 13 sets of observations the WT is referring to?

Apparently Gemini and Chatgpt think that to share such information would upset the natural order of things and that I should have to go through the bloviating-overeducated-economically-useless to get to it.
 

 

[Srecko Sostar]

1 hour ago, Pudgy said:

To find out what is REALLY TRUE ….…. just look out the window.

...and then convince everyone in the personal interpretation of that reality. lol

[Pudgy]

…. beats having to work for a living ….,

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, xero said:

In all of our bloviating, can anyone supply me with the 13 sets of observations the WT is referring to?

Sure!

In the next post I will point out which items from both the front and the back were cherry-picked to see if they could fit 588 instead of 568.

The pictures, and translation below are taken from the following site:

https://www.lavia.org/english/Archivo/VAT4956en.htm 

[After this post I will copy a simpler translation for reference that also includes the theorized Julian dates if you are comparing between 568 and 588 BCE]

 

A typical translation is here, for the obverse side. You will see 18 lines, although the last two, as you can see from the picture, are mostly missing.