Claim 12 of 15 · Case 12 · Jehovah’s Witnesses
Watch Tower teaching dates Jerusalem’s fall to 607 BC, while the standard historical date is 587 BC, and the 1914 chronology depends on the earlier date.
One claim from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
The Watch Tower Society teaches that Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 607 BC and that Judah then lay empty for exactly seventy years. From that date it counts forward to 1914 as the year Christ began to rule unseen, which is the backbone of its prophetic calendar. Standard scholarship, working from Babylonian business tablets, king lists, and astronomical records, dates the fall to 587 BC. The twenty year gap is not a rounding difference. It is the distance between the organization’s chronology and the historical record, and almost every historian outside the group holds the later date.
Backed by 2 pieces of evidence
The Babylonian record and the astronomical tablet VAT 4956
This is not a Christian argument against the Witnesses. It is ordinary ancient history, the same evidence used to date every other event of the period. The 607 date can be held only by setting this record aside.
Carl Olof Jonsson, “The Gentile Times Reconsidered”
This shows the problem is not an outsider’s misunderstanding. Someone who knew the teaching well examined the evidence and could not make 607 stand, which is why the date matters so much: the 1914 calculation is built on it.