The Watchtower, “The Book of Truthful Historical Dates”
“One must first measure back in time across the gulf that separates the present from the ancient Biblical record of the past, to a stationary point in history, to a fixed date of the past, to an absolute date, if you please. … One such fixed or absolute date is in connection with the events recorded in the fifth chapter of Daniel, verses one to thirty-one. … The year was 539 B.C.E. on the Gregorian calendar, four years after the Buddhist Era began in India.”
An article in the series that also produced the 1975 expectation. It defines an absolute date as one “where sacred and secular historical events coincide and are linked in perfect agreement with current methods of measuring time distances”.
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Provenance and verification note for The Watchtower, The Book of Truthful Historical Dates
Confidence note. Full document fetched from the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and read in full; the quotation, the paragraph and the page were confirmed against the article text and its embedded page markers (span class=“pageNum”).
Corroborated by. src-chr-o-w-1968-0501-absolute-date, src-chr-o-it1-chronology-pivotal-539
Notes. Publication reference confirmed from the document’s own citation code, w68 8/15.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-o-w-1968-0815-absolute-date