The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

362 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
He supports this by quoting a scholar, Curtis Wilson, who in a
review of a book by R. R. Newton made such a claim, stating that,
“The position of the planet is specified only within an interval of
30°.” 93
But anyone with even a cursory acquaintance with the
Babylonian astronomical tablets knows that Wilson’s claim —
repeated by Furuli — is false. Although it is true that many
positions recorded on the tablets are given with reference to
constellations along the zodiacal belt, the great majority of the
positions, even in the earliest diaries, are given with reference to
stars or planets. The division of the zodiacal belt into signs of 30
degrees each took place later, during the Persian era, and it is not
until “toward the end of the 3rd century B.C.” that “diaries begin
to record the dates when a planet moved from one zodiacal sign to
another.” 94 During the entire 800-year period from ca. 750 BCE to
ca. 75 CE the Babylonian astronomers used a number of stars close
to the ecliptic as reference points. As Professor Hermann Hunger
explains in a work also used by Furuli:
In order to give the position of the moon and the planets a number of
stars close to the ecliptic are used for reference. These have been called
“Normalsterne” [Normal Stars] by Epping, and the term has remained in
use ever since. (ADT, Vol. I, p. 17; emphasis added.)
On pages 17–19 of the same work, Hunger lists 32 such normal
stars known from the tablets. Noel Swerdlow states: “By far the
most numerous observations of planets in the Diaries are of their
distances ‘above’ or ‘below’ and ‘in front of’ or ‘behind’ normal
stars and each other, measured in cubits and fingers. 95
Such detailed observations are shown by VAT 4956, in which
about two-thirds of the lunar and planetary positions recorded are
given in relation to normal stars and planets. And, in contrast to
positions related to constellations, where the moon or a planet
usually is just said to be “in front of,” “behind,” “above,” “below,”
or “in” a certain constellation, the records of positions related to
normal stars also give the distances to these stars in “cubits” (of ca.
22.5 degrees each) and “fingers” (1/24 of the cubit), as Swerdlow
points out. Although the measurements are demonstrably not
93 C. Wilson in Journal of the History of Astronomy 15:1 (1984), p. 40.
94 H. Hunger in N. M. Swerdlow [ed.], Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination
(London: The MIT Press, 1999), p. 77. Cf. B. L. Van der Waerden, “History of the
Zodiak,” Archiv fur Orientforschung 16 (1952/1953), pp. 216–230.
95 N. M. Swerdlow, The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (Princeton, New Jersey,
1998), p. 39.