Jeremiah 25:12, commentary and pictures

The word was given in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, very soon after Daniel was taken to Babylon and very soon after the beginning of the Babylonian captivity, as punishment for not heeding the word of the Lord. Because Israel remained unrepentant, God would use the Chaldeans as the instrument to chastise His disobedient people, with punishment in proportion to their intelligence and to the warnings they had despised. He gave Judah and the surrounding lands of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and Zidon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, to serve him and his descendants in a yoke of servitude for seventy years.

It belongs to a sentence of doom whose awful import could scarcely be understood, so its meaning was illustrated by the draining of a cup filled with the wine of divine wrath. Jerusalem and the cities of Judah and their kings were among the first to drink of this cup of woe, followed by Pharaoh king of Egypt with his servants and princes and all his people and many other nations of earth, until God's purpose should have been fulfilled. Submission was the lightest punishment a merciful God could inflict: the nations that brought their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and served him would be left to remain still in their own land to till it and dwell in it, while those that refused to serve would be consumed with sword, famine and pestilence. The captives already in Babylon and the vessels of the Lord's house that had been taken there were also to remain in Babylon until the seventy years elapsed.

The seventy years are the desolations of Jerusalem and the serving of the king of Babylon, and the testimony about their number is very plain, fixing seventy years as the length of time to elapse before the restoration of Israel from Babylon and the sure return from Babylon. It plainly foretells the duration of the captivity against those in Jerusalem and in Babylon who claimed the captivity would be of short duration and encouraged hope for a speedy deliverance and soon return, and God vindicated the truthfulness of Jeremiah by dealing summarily with some of these false prophets. When the seventy years are accomplished, God will deliver His people from captivity and punish the king of Babylon and that nation for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans, bringing the proud king of Babylon and the Chaldeans into subjection and making their land perpetual desolations.

The seventy years of Babylonian captivity are counted from the time Nebuchadnezzar first took a company of Hebrews from their Judean home to Babylon, dating the captivity from Jerusalem's fall to Nebuchadnezzar as distinct from the city's later destruction by the Chaldeans, and are completed at the beginning of the reign of Cyrus. Cyrus, whose generalship wrested universal rule from Babylonia, succeeded Darius the Mede after Darius died within about two years of the fall of Babylon. Daniel understood the number of the seventy years by books in the first year of Darius the Mede, more than sixty years after it was written and soon after the fall of Babylon and the beginning of the universal empire of Medo-Persia. The writings of Jeremiah containing this time were within reach of the exiles in Babylon and gave them ground for hope of speedy deliverance, and understanding that the time was nearing its close prompted Daniel to pray for Jerusalem and its desolate sanctuary for pardon and restoration.

The reign of Darius was honored of God, and Gabriel was sent to confirm and strengthen him when Daniel offered his prayer in the first year of Darius. The seventy years of captivity stands in a relation to the twenty-three hundred years to the cleansing of God's sanctuary that left Daniel perplexed and astonished. The end of the seventy-year captivity comes before the decree that enabled Ezra and other Israelites to return to Jerusalem, identifying Artaxerxes' decree as the third decree for restoring and building Jerusalem issued after that captivity ended.