Jeremiah 25:1
The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, that was the first year of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon; The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, that was the first year of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon;
The word concerning all Judah came in the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah, which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, very soon after the beginning of the Babylonian captivity when Daniel had been taken to Babylon. It predicted the captivity of many of the Jews as punishment for not heeding the word of the Lord. The Chaldeans were to be the instrument by which God would chastise His disobedient people.
Their punishment was to be in proportion to their intelligence and to the warnings they had despised. The sentence of doom was that Judah and Jerusalem would drink first from the cup of divine wrath, followed by other nations, and the judgments would come swiftly. The prophecy plainly told the number of the years for the desolations of Jerusalem, seventy years, and made the promise of the return sure.
More than sixty years later, in the first year of Darius the Mede in 538 B.C. when the seventy years were nearing their end, Daniel prayerfully studied this prophecy in the books together with the letters of Jeremiah 27-29 and the restoration record of Jeremiah 30-31. He knew the promise of return, yet he could not see how the seventy-year captivity related to the twenty-three hundred years to elapse before the cleansing of the sanctuary, so in perplexity he studied these testimonies anew until he understood the seventy-year count.