Calculations
2941: Solomon begins ignoring the Jubilees
2947: Solomon begins ignoring the Sabbaths
3360: The 70 years of Babylonian domination begin
Jeremiah 25-29 is the section of Scripture dealing with Jeremiah’s prophecy about the 70 years in which Judah would be subject to Babylonian rule. However, to time the 70 years correctly, we have to pay very careful attention to the wording of the relevant Scripture passages.
In Jeremiah 27:4-8, God said that it pleased Him to give dominion over the whole world (the nations known to Israel, not far flung peoples like Native Americans) to Nebuchadnezzar. The nations would serve him (Nebuchadnezzar), his son (Evil-Merodach), and his son’s son (Belshazzar), at which point, Babylon would be judged. This judgment came when Darius the Mede killed Belshazzar (Daniel 5:30-31) and inflicted the judgment on Babylon by the Medes prophesied in Isaiah 13 and Jeremiah 51.
In 2 Chronicles 36:20-21, we see that after the destruction of Jerusalem, “those who escaped from the sword he carried away to Babylon, where they became servants to him and his sons until the rule of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths. As long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years.” This verse therefore ties the Babylonian domination to the Sabbath.
It does not, however, explicitly say that there were 70 years of Babylonian domination after the conquest of Jerusalem. It just said the land “kept Sabbath to fulfill 70 years.” Moreover, Jeremiah 25:11 says that “these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years,” not Judah specifically. In Jeremiah 25:15ff and chapter 27, we see that the nations (both Israel and the countries around it) are offered a choice: voluntarily drink the cup of God’s wrath and submit to Babylonian domination or else be destroyed by Babylon’s military might.
While God made very clear through Jeremiah that any captives and articles of God that had already gone to Babylon would remain there for the entirety of the 70 years, God nonetheless attempted to give Judah the chance to voluntarily submit to Babylonian rule and thereby avoid complete destruction (no doubt Daniel and his three friends were attempting to secure the same mercy for Judah in their roles as chief officials and advisors to Nebuchadnezzar). It wasn’t until the 19th year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign that God had decided that enough was enough and allowed Jerusalem to be sacked (even during the siege preceding the destruction, Zedekiah still had the option to surrender and spare himself and the city, as seen in Jeremiah 38:17).
Note that this process of the nations (including Judah) being subjected to Babylonian rule didn’t necessarily begin in 3364 exactly – it could have begun shortly before, and the time of Judah’s full desolation after 3364 would fulfill the remainder of the 70 years. I therefore posit that the 70 years began in the Sabbath year of 3360. To explain why, I will take up James B. Jordan’s idea that the 70 years of Babylonian domination made up for Sabbath years that Israel neglected to observe (which explains 2 Chronicles 36:20-21 – Jubilee, Part 3) but modify it a bit.
The first thing to note is that the 70 years of Sabbath keeping had to include the ten new Sabbath years that would occur naturally during the 70 years. Therefore, the 70 years only made up for 60 missed Sabbaths, not 70. If 3360 was the final missed Sabbath year before the destruction of Jerusalem, then assuming 60 Sabbaths total were missed, the last Sabbath kept would be 3360 – (7 x 60) = 2940, the year the First Temple was dedicated.
Would it make sense for Solomon’s final observed Sabbath to be the year he dedicated the Temple? I believe so, using the following reconstruction of events:
When Solomon was born, the Lord loved him, and presumably it was in 2 Samuel 12:24-25 that the Lord confirmed to David that his second son with Bathsheba was the Solomon whom God told David would be his heir (1 Chronicles 22:9). After David’s death, Solomon loved the Lord and walked in his father’s statutes (1 Kings 3:3). When God appeared to him in a dream and offered him a gift, Solomon asked for wisdom, which pleased the Lord, who agreed to give him not only wisdom but also riches and honor and peace.
Starting in 1 Chronicles 22 and 28-29, we see that David had charged Solomon with building the First Temple and had made preparations for it on Solomon’s behalf. Therefore, Solomon knew his job was to build a temple.
In 2 Chronicles 1, however, we see the author begin to document Solomon’s decline into failure immediately after describing him receiving wisdom. 2 Chronicles 1:13-17 describes Solomon violating two of the three commandments for kings in Deuteronomy 17:16-17: multiplying horses from Egypt and multiplying silver and gold (he also later violated the third, multiplying wives).
The structure of Bible narratives doesn’t always run perfectly linearly, as evidenced by Genesis 1-2, which describes the week of creation through Day 7, then returns to Day 6 for more details about Adam and Eve. Similarly, the end of 2 Chronicles 1 is likely a broad statement about Solomon’s reign, with 2 Chronicles 2 going back to early in his reign.
Solomon was commissioned to build a temple, but we see in 2 Chronicles 2:1 that he was already planning to build a palace for himself. Thus, we can see that despite the wisdom God gave him, the seeds of the sinful desire that would ultimately lead to the splitting of the kingdom were already present before temple construction began. While God promised Solomon riches, He never told him to flaunt them or drench himself in money and excess.
2 Chronicles 8:16 says that the work of Solomon was “well-ordered” from the beginning of Temple construction to the end of it. This no doubt means he observed the Sabbath of 2933, built the Temple as ordered, and both observed the Sabbath of Sabbaths and dedicated the Temple at its completion in 2940.
At that point however, Solomon began to go off the rails. My theory is that he didn’t release the Israelite labor force in the Jubilee of 2941. We know that he never enslaved Israelites and put them to permanent forced labor, as he did with the Canaanites in the land (1 Kings 9:20-22; 2 Chronicles 8:7-10). However, he did raise a labor force out of Israel, in which each man had to alternate between working for a month, then returning home for two months (1 Kings 5:13-14). That force should have been released with the Jubilee of 2941, but 1 Kings 12:4 and 2 Chronicles 10:4 imply that it was still in effect when Solomon died. In fact, it was this issue that caused the kingdom to split.
Solomon would have kept the labor force in place to maintain the pace of construction he was set on. Recall that he spent 13 years building his palace, almost twice as long as was spent building God’s house. Thus, he clearly was more focused on the glory of his own house than God’s. Furthermore, after refusing to release the Israelite labor force, he ignored the Sabbath of 2947, no doubt because of a faithless concern that food production would suffer, and therefore so would his efforts.
Thus, after completing the temple, Solomon continued to apply his labor force to build a whole slew of public works projects (1 Kings 9:15-19), along with his palace. Afterwards, God appeared to Solomon a second time (1 Kings 9:1-9; 2 Chronicles 7:12-22), but His promise to recognize the temple was coupled with a stern warning against apostasy and the consequences of him or his sons rejecting God, including destroying the buildings Solomon just completed. This is most likely because Solomon was already on a bad path, and God was trying to get him to course correct.
Unfortunately, he did not. Solomon kept ignoring the Sabbath year (and he would have ignored the next Jubilee if he had reigned long enough) and finally lost the unity of the Israelite kingdom by building high places for the false gods his wives worshipped (1 Kings 11:1-13). The later kings of Judah, no matter how righteous, never challenged the foundational sin of ignoring the Sabbaths (nor did they tear down Solomon’s high places until Josiah became king – 2 Kings 23:13), much as American leaders today never challenge certain sacred cows, such as the lending of money at interest.
In fact, we know Judah toyed with the idea of proclaiming liberty as a way of forestalling its destruction during the days of Zedekiah, but ultimately didn’t go through with it (Jeremiah 34:8-22 – this is not the Jubilee law, but still a closely related part of the Mosaic Law). It wasn’t until Babylon destroyed Jerusalem that this foundational sin established by Solomon was finally fully dealt with.
3368: Cyrus the Great is born (Daniel 5:31)
3430: Cyrus the Great conquers Babylon
3431: Cyrus the Great returns the Jews to Judah
3432: 70 years of anger end
3434: 70 years of fasting and mourning end
In 2 Chronicles 36:21-22 and Ezra 1:1, we see that the 70 years of Jeremiah ended when Cyrus king of Persia released the Jews from captivity in his first year as king and returned them to Judah to rebuild the Temple. However, we also see in Daniel 9:1-2 that in the first year of Darius the Mede, Daniel perceived that the 70 years of Jeremiah were at an end and prayed for the restoration of his people (note in particular that he asked God to “not delay” in verse 19). God responded by sending the angel Gabriel to give Daniel the prophecy of the 70 Weeks, which would start with “the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem” (Daniel 9:25) and run up to the coming of the Messiah.
There are two possible explanations for this duality between Cyrus the Persian and Darius the Mede:
- Darius the Mede was the king who conquered Babylon (Daniel 5:30-31), he was followed later by Cyrus, there are two 70-year periods foretold by Jeremiah in play here, and there was a gap between Daniel’s prayer and the restoration of the Jews.
- Darius the Mede is a royal alias for Cyrus the Persian, and both names refer to Cyrus the Great, the man who is recorded in secular history as having conquered Babylon.
Obviously the latter option is much more simple and logical, and as Jordan has explained thoroughly in his various articles exploring the chronologies of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, the Jews were accustomed to using multiple names for kings, even though Americans find this practice strange. Per Jordan’s analysis (I’m currently unable to find the exact article where he discussed this), in Daniel 6:28, the word for “and” can also be an appositive translated “that is,” indicating an alias. Ezra 6:14 also connects Cyrus to his title “Darius,” such that this verse says, “And they built and finished it, according to the commandment of the God of Israel, and according to the command of Cyrus (Darius) and Artaxerxes king of Persia.”
Therefore, the 70 years ended in 3430, a Sabbath of Sabbaths, when Cyrus conquered Babylon and became emperor. Cyrus then released the Jews at the beginning of his first year, 3431 (much as Hezekiah began restoring the Temple worship system at the beginning of his first year – 2 Chronicles 29:3), which was also the first year of Gabriel’s 70 Weeks.
Now, two prophets who were active during the time period of the rebuilding of the Temple were Haggai and Zechariah the son of Berechiah (per Zechariah 1:1 and 1:7, Zechariah was a descendant of Iddo the prophet, probably the Iddo of 2 Chronicles 9:29, 2 Chronicles 12:15, and 2 Chronicles 13:22 – in Ezra 5:1 and Ezra 6:14, Zechariah is called “Zechariah the son of Iddo” because “son” can also mean “male descendant”). The book of Zechariah mentions a king named Darius, but we have to do further analysis to determine whether this is Darius the Mede or Darius the Persian (the king who completed the Second Temple, whom I will discuss shortly).
We find our answer in Zechariah 1 and Zechariah 7. In the second year of Darius (Zechariah 1:1), we see that God had been angry with Jerusalem and the cities of Judah for 70 years (Zechariah 1:12). Then in the fourth year of Darius (Zechariah 7:1), we find that the people of Judah had been fasting and mourning for 70 years (Zechariah 7:5) as a result of something to do with the end of the inhabitation and prosperity of Jerusalem and the cities around it (Zechariah 7:7).
The simplest explanation is that:
- This Darius is Darius the Mede, AKA Cyrus the Great.
- Cyrus indeed became king in 3430, at the end of the 70 years of Babylonian domination.
- Cyrus’ second year was 3432, and the 70 years of anger started with the besieging of Jerusalem in 3362.
- Cyrus’ fourth year was 3434, and the 70 years of fasting and mourning started with the destruction of Jerusalem in 3364.
Commentary
Point 1
3430 was the 70th Sabbath of Sabbaths from creation (which as always syncs up with the timing of Sabbaths from the settling of Israel in the Promised Land), which means 3431 was the 70th Jubilee from creation. Cyrus’ return of the Jews to their homeland in a Jubilee year is highly appropriate, and it explains why Cyrus is referred to as a “messiah” in Isaiah 45:1.
The fact that the rule of the Persian kings lasted 49 years, another cycle of seven Sabbaths (as I will discuss in the next section), further reinforces the Jubilee symbolism and demonstrates that the 70 Weeks of Years represented ten additional Jubilees that connected Cyrus the messiah to Jesus the Messiah.
Point 2
Solomon ignoring the Jubilee of 2941 fits the pattern of man sinning on the “first day” of a covenant, as 2941 was the “first year” of temple worship, immediately following Solomon faithfully dedicating the temple in 2940.
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