Jeremiah 25:11

We have seen the promises that God made to Abraham—to be the father, first, of the Jewish race according to the flesh, and second, of all nations who were to embrace the faith. The development in history of the City of God will show how these promises were kept. The end of the preceding book brought us up to the reign of King David. I shall now begin with his reign and treat of what ensued in as much detail as the theme of this book requires. There is a period that begins with the prophecies of Samuel and continues through the seventy years of the Babylonian captivity (which Jeremiah had foretold) and ends with the rebuilding of the temple, after the Israelites came home. This period is known as the age of the prophets, although, of course, the patriarch Noah, in whose lifetime the whole earth was destroyed by the flood, and others before and after him up to the time of the kings were prophets also. At least, they prefigured, in some fashion, many things touching the City of God and the kingdom of heaven and sometimes actually prophesied. Consequently, it is not too much to speak of these men as prophets; some of them are explicitly in Holy Scripture, for example, Abraham and Moses.

(Verse 11 and following) And these nations will serve the king of Babylon for seventy years. And when seventy years have been completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, says the Lord, for their iniquities, and the land of the Chaldeans, and I will make it an eternal wasteland. And I will bring upon that land all my words that I have spoken against it, all that is written in this book, which Jeremiah prophesied against all the nations.

[Daniel 5:2] "Being now drunken, he therefore gave order that the golden and silver vessels be brought in which his father, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken away from the temple which was in Jerusalem, in order that the king might drink from them..." The Hebrews hand down some such story as this: that up until the seventieth year, on which Jeremiah had said (Jeremiah 25:11) that the captivity of the Jewish people would be released (a matter of which Zechariah also speaks [Zechariah 1:12] in the first part of his book), Belshazzar had esteemed God's promise to be of none effect; therefore he turned the failure of the promise into an occasion of joy and arranged a great banquet, scoffing somewhat at the expectation of the Jews and at the vessels of the Temple of God. Punishment, however, immediately ensued. And as to the fact that the author calls Nebuchadnezzar the father of Belshazzar, he does not make any mistake in the eyes of those who are acquainted with the Holy Scripture's manner of speaking, for in the Scripture all progenitors and ancestors are called fathers. This factor also should be borne in mind, that he was not sober when he did these things, but rather when he was intoxicated and forgetful of the punishment which had come upon his progenitor, Nebuchadnezzar.

The fixing of time during which the captivity should last would be of great use, not only for the confirmation of the prophecy, when the event (which in this particular could by no human sagacity be foreseen) should exactly answer the prediction, but for the comfort of the people of God in their calamity and the encouragement of faith and prayer.

Seventy years - The duration of the Babylonian empire was really a little short of this period. But the 70 years are usually calculated down to the time when the Jews were permitted to return to their country (compare Jer 29:10).