World English Bible, “Jeremiah 25:11-12”
“This whole land will be a desolation, and an astonishment; and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years. “It will happen, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation,” says Yahweh, “for their iniquity. I will make the land of the Chaldeans desolate forever.””
The companion passage. Here the seventy years are explicitly the period during which “these nations” — not Judah alone — serve the king of Babylon, and they end with the punishment of the king of Babylon and his nation. Reading that punishment as the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE is the mainstream interpretation; it is an interpretation, and not something the verse itself states. The JPS rendering agrees on the wording: “those nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years”.
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Provenance and verification note for World English Bible, Jeremiah 25:11-12
Confidence note. Retrieved and read on 19 September 2026 from bible-api.com (translation_name “World English Bible”). The whole of verse 12 is now quoted: an earlier version of this record stopped at “for their iniquity” and closed the quotation mark there, which moved the end of the reported speech. The Hebrew and the JPS English of the same verses were separately retrieved from Sefaria; JPS reads “And those nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years” and “When the seventy years are over, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation and the land of the Chaldeans for their sins”.
Corroborated by. src-chr-e-jps-jer-29-10
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-web-jer-25-11-12