• The Coming “Great Tribulation” Foreshadowed
    The Watchtower—1970 | January 15

    • Thus, in a very literal sense, Jerusalem continued to be “trampled on” by the Gentiles (non-Jewish nations) from the time of the first destruction and desolation of Jerusalem and Judah by the Babylonians in the year 607 B.C.E.d But someday those Gentile Times were due to be fulfilled, namely, 2,520 years after their beginning back there in autumn of 607 B.C.E. That means in 1914 C.E.​—Luke 21:24.

  • The Coming “Great Tribulation” Foreshadowed
    The Watchtower—1970 | January 15

    • d “Till the times of the Gentiles shall be fulfilled, that is, till the time that the periods which are appointed to the Gentile nations for the completion of divine judgments . . . shall have run out. . . . Such times of the Gentiles are ended in the case in question by the Parousia . . . the kairoi ethnon [times of the Gentiles] would be the kairoi [times], which were familiar to all from the prophecies, and which had already begun to run their course, so that at the time of Jesus and long before they were regarded as in process of fulfillment. This is the reason for our having oi kairoi [the times] with the article (compare xix. 44).”​—Pages 530, 531 of Critical and Exegetical Hand-Book to the Gospels of Mark and Luke, by H. A. W. Meyer, Th.D., and copyrighted in 1884.