Exile
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The Lachish letters and the last days of Judah
Judaean soldiers wrote to each other on broken pottery while the Babylonian army closed in. One of them reports that he can no longer see the signals from Azekah. Jeremiah names Azekah and Lachish as the last two cities holding…
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Belshazzar and the fall of Babylon
For centuries Belshazzar was the standard example of a biblical invention: no such king appears in any Babylonian list. Then the tablets were read. He existed — and almost everything else Daniel 5 says about him does not hold.
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The fall of Jerusalem, 597 BCE
A Babylonian clerk dated the capture of Jerusalem to the day. 2 Kings 24 describes the same event. They agree on almost everything that can be compared — and the numbers that disagree are inside the Bible, not between it…
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Obadiah
Obadiah, the shortest book in the Hebrew Bible: the charge against Edom, how the reference to the fall of Jerusalem anchors its date, its overlap with Jeremiah 49, and what is known of Edom’s end.
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The Neo-Babylonian decades, 626–539 BCE
Eighty-seven years, from the revolt that founded the Neo-Babylonian empire to the night it ended — with the biblical texts placed beside the events, so the gap between the two bands is visible.
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Wiseman, Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (1956)
The critical edition of the Neo-Babylonian chronicle tablets in the British Museum, including B.M. 21901. Open access.
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Lamentations
Five poems, four of them acrostics, the third a triple acrostic and the fifth twenty-two lines without the alphabet. The form is the argument.
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Ezekiel
The most precisely dated prophetic book in the Hebrew Bible — and the one that records, in its own pages, an oracle that did not come out as stated.
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Jeremiah
A prophet who lived through the destruction his book announces, in a book that survives in two substantially different ancient editions. Both facts make it unusually rewarding to check.
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Daniel
Two languages, two halves, and four centuries between the dates proposed for it. Daniel is where most arguments about biblical prophecy begin, and where the external record is most awkward for everyone.