Matthew 24:7
Matthew 24:77Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.
is one of the load-bearing JW proof-texts for the composite-sign apologetic. Wars, food shortages, earthquakes, and pestilences are read as cumulative empirical evidence that the last days began in 1914. Watchtower publications cite news reports of natural disasters, supply chain crises, and conflicts as ongoing fulfilment, often paired with and .
Read with v. 6 ("but the end is not yet"). Jesus is explicit: these events should not lead to eschatological conclusions. They are precisely what he told his disciples NOT to be alarmed by. Every generation since AD 33 has experienced wars, food shortages, earthquakes, and pestilences simultaneously. The University of Nanking documented 1,828 famines in China over 2,000 years; Europe saw 400 widespread famines in 600 years. The Watchtower itself admitted in 1983 that the worst recorded famine in history was the Chinese famine of 1876-79, before 1914. The trajectory of famine, war, and disease is downward, not upward, over the past century — life expectancy has roughly doubled, and acute starvation has dramatically declined. Jesus's warning pre-empted the very apologetic the Watchtower builds.
The NWT renders limoi as "food shortages" rather than the standard "famines." The substitution is doctrinally load-bearing for the JW last-days apologetic: "famines" describes acute episodic starvation events that have actually decreased over the past century, while "food shortages" is a softer, ongoing category that fits modern news cycles about commodity prices, supply chains, and intermittent regional shortages. The shift re-codes Jesus's apocalyptic vocabulary into something that daily news headlines can plausibly fulfil. Standard English translations preserve "famines" because the Greek limos in classical and koine usage names catastrophic hunger events, not chronic malnutrition or supply disruption.