The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Appendix 367
B.C., Diaries begin to record the dates when a planet moved from one
zodiacal sign into another. The rest of the Diaries’ contents is nonastronomical.
Hunger adds:
Almost all of these items are observations. Exceptions are the solstices,
equinoxes, and Sirius data, which were computed according to a scheme
. . . furthermore, in many instances when Lunar Sixes, lunar or solar
eclipses, or planetary phases could not be observed, a date or time is
nevertheless given, marked as not observed. Expected passings of
Normal Stars by the moon are sometimes recorded as missed because of
bad weather, but never is a distance between moon and Normal Star
given as computed. 101
In summary, Furuli’s claim that “perhaps most positions of the
heavenly bodies on such tablets, are calculated rather than
observed” is groundless. It is refuted by statements in the tablets
themselves and by the fact that they contain data that the
Babylonians were unable to calculate. These circumstances are
diametrically opposed to the suggestion that the data in the
astronomical diary VAT 4956 might have been calculated later so
that possibly “there never was an ‘original tablet’.” (Furuli, p. 30)
(C-3) A theory of desperation
If the entries on the observational tablets — diaries, and lunar
and planetary tablets — record mostly demonstrably genuine
observations, and if the Babylonian astronomers were unable to
compute and retrocalculate many of the astronomical and other
data reported, how, then, is it possible for anyone to wriggle out of
the evidence provided by these tablets?
Because the tablets often contain so many detailed observations
dated to specific regnal years that they can be safely fixed to
particular Julian years, the only escape is to question the
authenticity of the regnal year numbers found on the tablets.
This is what Furuli does. He imagines that “a scribe could sit
down in the 2nd century and make a tablet partly of some
phenomena covering many years, partly on the basis of theory (the
three schemes) and partly on the basis of tablets from a library”
that might show real observations. Then, upon discovery that the
dates on the library tablets conflicted with the theoretical data,
“these erroneous data could be used to ‘correct’ the correct data of
101 H. Hunger in Swerdlow (ed.), Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination (1999),
pp. 77, 78. (Emphasis added)