This tablet is the reason 597 BCE can be given as a date rather than an estimate. It is a Babylonian administrative chronicle covering the accession year to the eleventh year of Nebuchadnezzar II, and its entry for the seventh year records the capture of the city of Judah, the seizure of its king, the appointment of a king of the Babylonians’ own choosing, and the removal of heavy tribute to Babylon.
The entry is dated to the second day of the month of Addaru. Converted to the Julian calendar it falls in March 597 BCE, and that conversion is not a matter of opinion: Babylonian month names and regnal years are tied to an astronomical framework that is independently established.
Why this source carries weight
It is independent of the tradition it can be used to check. The chronicle was compiled by the administration that took the city, in a genre whose purpose was to keep an accurate record of reigns and campaigns for the state’s own use. Its author had no interest in a Judahite theological account and almost certainly no knowledge of one.
It is also brief and unrhetorical, which matters. Royal inscriptions boast; chronicles of this type record. That does not make the chronicle disinterested, but it makes its silences less loaded than those of a display inscription.
What it does and does not settle
It settles that Jerusalem was taken by Nebuchadnezzar, that its king was removed, that a replacement was installed, and when. Those points can be laid directly beside 2 Kings 24, which names the removed king as Jehoiachin and the replacement as Mattaniah, renamed Zedekiah.
It does not mention Jehoiachin or Zedekiah by name, does not describe the deportation in the terms the biblical text uses, and stops well before the destruction of 587. Anyone citing this tablet for the destruction of the temple is citing the wrong tablet.
How it is cited here
By CDLI P-number, which resolves to the artefact record and returns the museum number the citation claims. The standard critical edition is Grayson’s Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, where it is Chronicle 5; Wiseman’s Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings published the tablet with photographs and copy.