Ann O'Maly

Arctic warming means we're getting an ice age here again? Â Â

You're not making sense. Again. VAT 4956 meets Saros cycle 59. None of your pictures display anything from Saros 59 and are thereby irrelevant to the lunar eclipse predicted on VAT 4956. Um. NBC 4897 isn't an astronomical text, you kumquat.Â

COJ's brief discussion of the NBC 4897 accounting tablet from the 4th edition of GTR. See p.131f. COJ's detailed discussion of the NBC 4897 accounting tablet, where he mentions this: I've read both the van Driel/Nemet-Nejat and Zawadzki articles. The tablet confirms the standard NB chronology and that no extra kings and timeline chunks can be inserted anywhere between Nebuchadnezzar II and Neriglissar.

You mean the 'quotation' consisting of two words: "seven times"? Nobody is disputing that Brown used that term in his exposition of Dan. 4 and the 2520 days. Well, you said something very similar in that 2012 email. I'll c&p my response: P. 135 is online (link provided in previous post). It does not support the suggestion that Brown equated Dan. 4's 'seven times' period with Luke 21:24's 'Gentile times.' P. 208 is not yet online for everyone to see. All you have to do is produce a scan of p. 208 and prove your claim. Nearly 20 years of sitting on this, Neil - are you going to? I dares ya! Â

Haha. You do not know my and Neil's history or the biting insults he's hurled my way in our time. We are both broad-shouldered and we understand each other. He evidently enjoys a good pummelling or he wouldn't keep coming back for more.Â

I'm amazed (or am I? I shouldn't be really) that you still claim this, repeating the Proclaimers book's error. I've lost count how many times you've been corrected on this point over the past decade or so by several individuals. @JW Insider has just corrected you again! and yet you persist. I'll c&p a portion of my email to you from 2012: Readers can see for themselves: https://www.scribd.com/document/299825677/The-Even-Tide-by-John-Aquila-Brown-1823 Â

"Stick with what we have authorized. You'll be safe." The article just underlines AMIII's admonishment and warning that 'unauthorized' internet activity exposes JWs to "spiritual danger." Is this forum and those like it GB authorized and approved? Of course not. And remember the Question Box from the km 9/07? "Stick with what we have authorized." There will always be those who love to research and openly discuss their views online, and thereby have to rationalize away the GB's clear counsel. I say GOOD! because this new article is another attempt at information control. Â

@Jay Witness said that - not me

Ask them to please put you on their Do Not Call list. You may get a visit once a year or two just to check you still live there or still don't want to be routinely called on ... excepting any occasional mistakes made by those who were either not told of the DNC or weren't paying attention. So to make sure ... Put up a sign: 'No religious callers' or 'No Jehovah's Witness proselytizers' or 'JWs beware: Rabid, salivating, two-headed apostate lives here. Knock at your own risk.' ? And JWs don't come to your door every day - c'moooon. Â

Yes, I see it.

His full name was given in some non-English editions of the Awake! Below is information from a cached webpage.

Referring to the Rama Singh 'Quotegate' incident wasn't meant to start a debate on whether or not it was a misused quote. That topic has been discussed before elsewhere. Singh thought it was; I and others have read his entire article, compared his quoted comment with how the Awake! writer apparently intended to use them, and come to our own conclusions. But my aim was purely to show that the QFR article's implication that guaranteed-non-altered 'spiritual food' can only be found on the jw. org site isn't really true.

Thanks for all your comments. Yes, I doctored the image. It was partly fun, partly to make a point. However, you all immediately noticed something was 'off' and you could compare with the original on the jw. org site. And yet, there is no guarantee that the spiritual food on the jw. org website hasn't been altered either. Consider this: A critic of JWs may allege that there was an Awake! article on the topic of Creation and Evolution that misused a respected scientist's quote. A JW may retort that the magazines NEVER misuse quotations because the writers research very carefully and honestly - there was even a recent Broadcast showing us this was so. The critic must be LYING! So the critic produces this scan with the relevant part marked in red: : But there is no sign of this particular quote on jw. org nor in the downloadable digital versions. Other than the red marking, has the image otherwise been doctored? Is this critic trying to pull a fast one? It turns out that the scientist complained to the Org about the magazine's use of his quote and the Org removed the quote from the website's article and the digital download editions. The quote will still be found in the original hard copies and downloaded editions saved to people's computers. The critic was telling the truth and, apart from the red marking, the scan was a true representation of the original page. You see, just because the publications are reproduced on other sites, it doesn't mean that the content has been tampered with. Equally, just because a publication appears on the jw. org website, there is no guarantee that the content has not been tampered with - whether it is due to a scientist's complaint about how his work was used, or due to new understandings in doctrine. Website content is so easy to edit now. @Anna made the point about it not violating copyright to post links to the jw. org site. True. The article says: But the receiver of the email-attached copy isn't getting it direct from the official website. S/he's getting it from a secondary source and we're back to this. Which raises a question: If one plays safe and emails a link to the Org's publications page instead, would the 'link share' count as a placement on the report slip? @Witness said about there still being Facebook pages for Lett and Morris. I guess we are to understand these are fraudulent. And finally, the reasons for the thread title: This is the GB's 'loving counsel' folks. Discussion of JW publications on these forums is dangerous, inappropriate, and some JW 'brothers' who have participated have made Jehovah the Org look bad. So, time to pack up, shut up shop and go home .... *sniff* ? .... Bwahahaha! Are you kidding? It's much too late to stuff the genie of free online discussion back into its bottle! To quote Leah Remini: Â

From the April 2018 Watchtower, p. 30-31. This is a bona fide, unadulterated copy (honest). What are your thoughts on this article? Btw, I hope the irony of posting this here is not lost on you guys, lol.

Aw, how awful for you, suffering this way. Why don't you de-stress by ignoring all threads on this topic and start some new engaging and thought-provoking ones of your own?Â

Establishment of 537 BCE for what exactly? The 539 BCE year for the overthrow of Babylon by the Persians is established using Babylonian sources - the Babylonian chronicles, the Babylonian kings list, and the Babylonian astronomical tablets. The exodus occurred many hundreds of years before our period under discussion so the alleged discrepancy is irrelevant. Egyptian chronology synchronizes with neo-Babylonian dates very well. Rohl does not have an issue with NB dates and agrees with its established timeline. I think this has been pointed out to you before. The primary Babylonian sources are contemporaneous with the events under discussion so have more evidential weight than histories written by other nations hundreds of years later. This is a non-argument. The Bible manuscripts are copies written long after the events they describe. So? The Insight book uses the Babylonian chronicles to verify Bible events all the time. The organization needs the Babylonian chronicles. I don't know why you imagine otherwise. Except that Watchtower takes issue with dates of Artaxerxes I's reign, but that's a whole 'nother topic. Cuneiform tablets give Cyrus a reign of 8 years [Correction: Arauna was right - it was 9 years - my faulty memory]. Both neo-Babylonian and Persian dates of succession are reliable. False. The most reliable information is NOT 'only a total eclipse.' Planetary and lunar configurations measured relative to fixed stars are reliable information also, and can be useful for dating purposes. Babylonians did properly describe some lunar eclipses so that they can be dated accurately, thereby helping to fix the NB timeline. I see you've utilized @JW Insider's list of ad hominem's and lobbed one out.

It wouldn't, Allen. The astronomer scribes knew the difference between addition and subtraction, having already learned those basic mathematical skills when they were children. If you are having difficulty with these math concepts, I recommend this website. Then hopefully you'll eventually figure out whether 18 is more or less than 37 and, if you become more advanced with how BCE dating works, which way we should count to get from 568 BCE to 587 BCE. You're welcome Â

For the sake of balance, here is a more scholarly examination of the festival's roots: JETS 58/2 (2015) 299–324 Read the whole article HERE.

Wait, what ...? Honestly, your whole post is so muddled I don't know what you are trying to argue. (Thank you, @JW Insider for responding to the 'tampering' thing, etc.)

LOL. Whoosh.

The BM numbers will have already been written in the reference works he consulted. But this raises the issue of how the same tablet can be assigned different numbers depending on how they were catalogued and the publication they appeared in, and it can make research pretty challenging for somebody initially trying to find their way around this subject.

The Babylonian Chronicles do not tell the whole story - that is true. But we were talking about an astronomical diary, weren't we? You seem to have confused two categories of texts. You were casting doubt on the diary's trustworthiness because "no one was there to authentic[ate] what was 'copied'" and because of some errors and "linguistic incompatibilities" (whatever that means). The same criticisms could be (and are) levelled at Bible texts. But surely, ancient writings should be taken on their merits and cross-checked with other contemporary writings. The fact remains that the astronomical data on VAT 4956 are representative of celestial observations made in 568-7 BCE. This isn't about subjective theological interpretation; nor is it about incomplete historical narratives or how a nation's history is spun; this is data that can be scientifically verified.Â

It's interesting that 539 BCE can be called a 'pivotal date' when the Bible doesn't provide a year date for Cyrus' conquest of Babylon. Instead, we have to derive the 539 BCE year date from, one of the Babylonian chronicles (which indicates the event happened in Nabonidus' 17th year), Babylonian astronomical tablets year-dated to kings' reigns, providing BCE anchor points, Babylonian king lists which we can use to count forwards or backwards from those astronomically fixed anchor points. In contrast, we can affirm 597 BCE because, the Bible dates the siege of Jerusalem and its surrender to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar's 8th year (inclusive counting), a Babylonian chronicle dates the same event to Nebuchadnezzar's 7th year (exclusive counting - cp. Jer. 52:28), some Babylonian astronomical tablets are year-dated to Nebuchadnezzar's reign, thereby providing BCE anchor points, simple math means we can count Nebuchadnezzar's years forwards or backwards from those anchor points, but paradoxically, Neil thinks it nonsense for 597 BCE to be termed a 'pivotal date.' Go figure! Â

Please only use the kristenfrihet source for the book, despite it being messy. It really should be in one pdf book form rather than in separate parts like it is, but this is the original scanned and authorized copy. The pdfs from other sites will give you a corrupted copy that has been edited and added to by a person called Tönis Tönisson (look at the copyright page and you'll see his name). He has even dishonestly inserted some comments in the body text that COJ didn't write.