Archaeology - Proving the Truth of Scripture - Part 11

The Babylonian Chronicles

Nebuchadnezzar's siege, capture of Jerusalem, and deportation of King Jehoiachin confirmed!

A Babylonian scribe with no interest in Israel or its history confirmed the Bible’s dates of key historical events. The Babylonian Chronicles are a series of 45 cuneiform tablets, written by Babylonian scribes recording the political and military events of their own empire, with no theological agenda regarding Israel whatsoever. They were written to track the reigns of Babylonian kings, their military campaigns, and significant political events, and administrative record-keeping. One of these tablets, known to scholars as the Jerusalem Chronicle, was acquired by the British Museum in the early twentieth century and deciphered in the 1950s. What it contains lines up with biblical history in a way that has been examined and confirmed repeatedly by historians.

These chronicles match the 2 Kings 24:10 passage, which records Nebuchadnezzar’s siege and capture of Jerusalem and the deportation of King Jehoiachin, dated to the eighth year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign by the biblical count. A discrepancy of exactly one year that scholars have resolved by recognizing the different calendar systems used by Babylonian and Judean record-keepers, which is itself a confirmation of the chronicle’s authenticity rather than a contradiction.

The same chronicle series also records the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BC, in which Nebuchadnezzar defeated the Egyptian army, an event referenced directly in Jeremiah 46:2, where the prophet dates an oracle specifically to the army of Pharaoh Necho which was defeated at Carchemish by Nebuchadnezzar. The is Bible confirmed again as true and correct even in its historical timetable.