Week 29 Jeremiah 25
Most chapters in the bible aren’t dated but yesterday I found one that was. In the first verse of this chapter Jeremiah said that a prophecy had come to him during the 4th-year of Jehoiakim’s reign…which happened to be the 1st-year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign in Babylon (that was 605 BC).
In that same chapter Jeremiah went on to predict that Nebuchadnezzar would eventually attack and conquer Jerusalem. Since I found out yesterday that Jerusalem was captured by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC – roughly eight years later – Jeremiah’s forecast had to wait awhile before people realized it was true. Of maybe long enough that by then they’d forgotten it.
Anyway not only did Jeremiah predict that Nebuchadnezzar would attack Jerusalem and Israel’s geopolitical neighbours but also that: this whole country will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon for seventy years. But when the seventy years are fulfilled I will punish…the land of the Babylonians for their guilt.
I was already searching up Nebuchadnezzar so it was easy to find when Babylon was conquered – 539 BC. 605 BC to 539 BC is closer to 66 years than 70 so I’m not sure what to do with the discrepancy. Maybe 2500 years ago the practice was to round-up to the nearest decade.
Anyway apart from the technical debate over the 70 years in Jeremiah’s forecast his prediction about the fall of Babylon is still pretty impressive.
Note: see Jeremiah 25:1. Quote from 25:11-12 (NIV)