I had an interaction with a Japanese adherent of Dispensationalism on Twitter/X some time ago, and I'd like to make a memorandum of it regarding the definition of the seventy-week period mentioned in the Book of Daniel and the seventy-year prophecy in the Book of Jeremiah.
The position I support is to find the real timeline of the Babylonian invasion of Judah, King Cyrus's decree to rebuild the temple, and work backward from the autumn of 28 AD, which is considered the start of Jesus's ministry. Furthermore, since ➡there are many prophecies in the scriptures that imply Christ's Second Coming will occur two thousand years later, I anticipate that God has revealed the time of Christ's First Coming to humanity through archaeological knowledge.
However, whenever this approach is taken, powerful counterarguments almost always fly in from established scholars and their surrounding believers. I would like to organize the typical composition of their attacks and the core of my counterargument against them.
Against the linear timeline presented in the Bible, traditional biblical commentators and Dispensationalists deploy criticisms such as: the seventy years in Jeremiah 25 is simply the period during which surrounding nations served Babylon, not the period of Jerusalem's desolation itself; or, if you look at Zechariah 7, people fasted for seventy years lamenting the fall of Jerusalem, which was in 518 BC, so one should calculate backward from there.
They thus dismantle the number seventy into several types and try to cut it up and use it like convenient puzzle pieces.
However, there is a great deception here. The "seventy years of fasting" in Jeremiah 25 prophesies the future, while the fasting in Zechariah 7 is merely a past recollection of the people having continued to mourn the memory of the tragedy that occurred in the past, generation after generation. To replace it with the basis for calculating the starting point of a historical timeline for the future and claiming there are multiple seventy-year periods is nothing more than a convenient twisting of the facts that ignores the context of the biblical text.
Why do they go so far as to chop up the starting point of history and try to make the ends meet? The root cause lies in the secular historical chronology upon which they depend.
Modern historians and biblical scholars have taken Ptolemy's Canon—left by Ptolemy, an ancient Egyptian astrologer and astronomer—as an infallible truth without any doubt. However, as specialized research has pointed out, trying to construct the history of the ancient Orient based on this Ptolemy's Canon itself is the source of historical and astronomical contradictions.
Modern scholars do not take the consistency of the Bible's prophetic numbers straightforwardly but try to forcibly adjust the Bible's numerical values to the framework of this distorted secular chronology. That is why, in order to make ends meet, they are forced to split the seventy years of Jerusalem's desolation and the seventy years of the nations' subjugation, and construct a complex and bizarre puzzle.
The viewpoint of capturing the real time of the Babylonian invasion at its foundation, and further capturing King Cyrus's temple reconstruction decree by counting back four hundred and eighty-three years from the autumn of 28 AD, the timeline derived from the Bible, directly contradicts the established theories of modern archaeology.
But that is not because the Bible's calculations are wrong. It is because we stand on the shift that the standard we should rely on should be the consistent prophetic dynamism shown by the biblical text, not the distorted historical chronology created by a secular astrologer.
By the way, there are some who present the leap-frogged conclusion that because the Septuagint does not add up to four thousand years from Adam to Christ, Ptolemy's claim must be correct; however, even with the Septuagint, the context of counting 483 years from King Cyrus's reconstruction decree—rather than from Artaxerxes— does not change.
The seventy years that Daniel deciphered from the Book of Jeremiah should have been a single, magnificent cycle of God, from the rise of the Babylonian Empire and the desolation of Judah to the historical liberation by King Cyrus and the rebuilding of the temple.
Since the Bible implies a six-thousand-year plan for human history, there is no need to prioritize current secular historiography, which is more prone to cognitive errors, over it.
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