The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

364 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
visibility of a heavenly body above the horizon), which in turn
could have changed the date of the first and last visibility of a
heavenly body by a day or two.
It should be emphasized that this might possibly be a problem
with astronomical texts that report only phenomena close to the
horizon. Observations of lunar and planetary positions related to
specific stars and constellations higher in the sky would not be
affected, and it is usually these that are the most useful for
chronological purposes. Most of the about 30 lunar and planetary
positions recorded on the astronomical tablet VAT 4956 belong to
this category.
None of Furuli’s “potential sources of error” weakens the
reliability of VAT 4956. I am aware of only one scholar who has
tried to overcome the evidence provided by this diary, namely, E.
W. Faulstich, founder and director of the Chronology-History
Research Institute in Spencer, Iowa, USA. Faulstich believes it is
possible to establish an absolute Bible chronology without the aid
of extra-Biblical sources, based solely on the cyclical phenomena of
the Mosaic law (sabbath days, sabbath and jubilee years) and the
cycle of the 24 sections of the levitical priesthood. One
consequence of his theory is that the whole Neo-Babylonian period
has to be moved backward one year. Because this conflicts with the
absolute dating of the period based on the astronomical tablets,
Faulstich argues that VAT 4956 contains information from two
separate years mixed into one. This idea, however, is based on
serious mistakes. I have thoroughly refuted Faulstich’s thesis in the
unpublished article, “A critique of E. W. Faulstich’s Neo-
Babylonian chronology” (1999), available from me upon request.
(C) Are most astronomical positions calculated rather
than observed?
The “most acute problem for making an absolute chronology
based on astronomica1 tablets,” Furuli claims, is that many,
“perhaps most positions of the heavenly bodies on such tablets, are
calculated rather than observed.” (p. 15) Is this true?
As discussed in chapter 4 of the present work (pp. 154–156
above), Babylonian astronomers at an early stage were able to
predict certain astronomical phenomena, such as the occurrences
of lunar eclipses and certain planetary positions. These calculations
presuppose that they had worked out theories for dating and
locating such phenomena. In fact, about 300 texts have been found