The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Appendix 365
containing lists of lunar and planetary positions at regular intervals.
(See above, p. 156.) Such arithmetical tables were termed
“ephemerides” by Professor Otto Neugebauer, who published all
extant tablets of this kind in his three-volume work, Astronomical
Cuneiform Texts (1955). All these tablets are late, almost all dating
from the 3rd to the 1st centuries B.C.E.
Does this mean, then, that all or most of the phenomena
recorded on the astronomical tablets might have been computed
rather than observed, as Furuli claims? Were the Babylonian
astronomers able to do this? Are there indications in the recorded
data that they did just that?
(C-.1) Phenomena the Babylonian astronomers were
unable to calculate
Although the Babylonian astronomers were able to calculate
and predict certain astronomical events, the observational texts —
diaries, planetary texts, and eclipse texts — contain reports of
several phenomena and circumstances connected with the
observations that could not have been calculated.
That the diaries usually record real observations is shown by their
reports of climatological phenomena. For example, the scribes
repeatedly report when bad weather prevented astronomical
observations. We often find reports about “clouds and rain of
various sorts, described in detail by numerous technical terms, as
well as fog, mist, hail, thunder, lightning, winds from all directions,
often cold, and frequent ‘pisan dib’, of unknown meaning but always
associated with rain.” 98 Other recorded phenomena were rainbows,
solar halos and river levels. None of these could have been
retrocalculated much later. What, then, about the astronomical
phenomena?
As discussed in chapter 4 of the present work (p. 185 above),
there were a number of planetary phenomena recorded in the texts
that the Babylonian astronomers were unable to calculate. These
included conjunctions of planets with the moon and other planets,
with their distances. VAT 4956 records a number of such — for
the Babylonian astronomers — unpredictable and incalculable
phenomena.
With respect to lunar eclipses, the Babylonian astronomers were
certainly able to predict and retrocalculate the occurrences of lunar
98 N. M. Swerdlow, The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (1998), p. 18.