The year was 605 B.C. In the Middle East the Assyrian Empire was in decline; a half-dozen years earlier its proud capital, Nineveh, had fallen. For more than a decade, Babylon1 and Egypt had each been struggling to replace Assyria as the leading world power. In early summer of 605 B.C. these two powerful enemies met in battle at Carchemish (2 Chronicles 35:20; Jeremiah 46:2), an important city situated on what is today the border between Turkey and Syria. Babylon won a decisive victory over Egypt (2 Kings 24:7). This changed the entire course of world history and greatly affected God’s people.
The Babylonian commander who engineered the crushing defeat of Egypt was the young crown prince, Nebuchadnezzar, destined to become king after his father’s death later that summer. Shortly after the battle, he led his armies south about 400 miles (perhaps following retreating remnants of the Egyptian army) and attacked Jerusalem.
Daniel identifies the year as “the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim,” king of Judah at that time. Critics of the Bible claim to have found a contradiction between this statement and the statement of the prophet Jeremiah that the battle of Carchemish took place “in the fourth year of Jehoiakim” (46:2). The apparent discrepancy can be explained by the fact that ancient historians commonly used several different systems for computing the length of a king’s reign.2
Jehoiakim, third last king of Judah, was a wicked king. Although he was the son of pious king Josiah, “he did evil in the eyes of the LORD” (2 Chronicles 36:5). The prophet Jeremiah, who lived during Jehoiakim’s reign, characterized him as having his eyes and heart “set only on dishonest gain, on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion” (Jeremiah 22:17). We can see one particularly flagrant example of Jehoiakim’s wickedness when he burned up the scroll of Jeremiah’s prophecy because it predicted God’s judgment on Judah and her wicked king (chapter 36). The king’s conduct is all the more evil in view of the fact that his primary task as Israel’s king was to keep her citizens loyal to Yahweh, their Savior-God.
Nebuchadnezzar’s purpose in his first campaign against Judah and Jerusalem was not to destroy the nation and its capital, but rather to frighten the people into surrendering their independence and thus to make Judah a vassal state of Babylon. It was in Babylon’s interest to have a reliable buffer state between her and Egypt.
“The Lord delivered Jehoiakim . . . into his hand.” It was not Babylon’s military muscle, but the Lord, who was responsible for delivering wicked King Jehoiakim into the hand of the Babylonians. It is significant that God is referred to here not as “LORD” (Yahweh), the Old Testament name that describes him as the Savior, but as “the Lord,” the name that describes him as the sovereign Master and Ruler of all. Jehoiakim must have surrendered peacefully, because the Babylonians permitted him to rule over Judah for another eight years.
According to the heathen view, Babylon’s victory over Judah showed that Bel, the Babylonian god, was superior to Yahweh, Israel’s God. To announce this, Nebuchadnezzar carried some of the sacred vessels and equipment from Jehovah’s temple in Jerusalem back to Babylon and placed them in Bel’s temple. A century earlier the prophet Isaiah had predicted this would happen (39:6); now his prophecy was being fulfilled: “The time will surely come when everything in your palace . . . will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the LORD.”
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1 The nation of Babylon is sometimes referred to as Babylonia, in order to distinguish it from its capital city, also called Babylon. The term Chaldea is another word for Babylonia.
2 According to one explanation, Jeremiah used a system that calculated a king’s first year of reign from his first day in office. By contrast, the Babylonian method calculated the king’s first year from New Year’s Day to New Year’s Day. Any part of his reign prior to his first New Year’s Day in office was not counted in his first official year. It is evident that a difference of one year in the length of a king’s reign will result, depending on which of the two systems a Bible writer is using. An alternate explanation is that two different calendars were in use among the Jews. One was their religious calendar, with its first month (Nisan) in the spring. Writing from Jerusalem, the religious center of the nation, Jeremiah used this calendar to date the king’s reign. The other calendar was the agricultural calendar, with its first month (Tishri) in the fall, the beginning of the Israelite agricultural season. Daniel used this one, resulting in an apparent, but not actual, difference in dating the battle of Carchemish.