The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

380 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
ended when the Jews returned from the exile after the fall of
Babylon, as Furuli holds, why does our text show that the cities still
were being denounced in the second year of Darius, 520/519
BCE? Furuli has no explanation for this, and he prefers not to
comment on the problem.
The same holds true of Zechariah 7:4,5. How can the 70 years
of fasting have ended in 537 BCE, as Furuli claims, when our text
clearly shows that these fasts were still being held in the fourth year
of Darius, 518/517 BCE? Furuli again ignores the problem. He just
refers to the fact that the Hebrew verbs for “denounce,” “fast,”
and “mourn” are all in the Hebrew perfect, stating that, “There is
nothing in the verbs themselves which demands that the 70 years
were still continuing at speech time.” (p. 88) True, but they do not
demand the opposite, either. The verb forms in the passage prove
nothing.
But the context does. It clearly shows that the cities were still
being denounced “at speech time,” in 519 BCE, and that the fasts
were still being held “at speech time,” in 517 BCE, about 70 years
after the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 589–587 BCE. That
is why this question was raised in 519 BCE: Why is Jehovah still
angry at Jerusalem and the cities? (Zechariah 1:7–12) And that is
also why this question was raised in 517 BCE: Shall we continue to
hold these fasts? (Zechariah 7:1–12) Furuli’s interpretation (which
echoes the Watchtower Society’s) implies that the denunciation of
the cities and the keeping of the fasts had been going on for about
90 — not 70 — years, directly contradicting the statements in the
book of Zechariah.
Summary
In this review of Furuli’s book, we have seen a number of
insurmountable difficulties that his Oslo Chronology creates not
only with respect to the extra-Biblical historical sources but also
with the Bible itself.
The amount of evidence against Furuli’s revised chronology
provided by the cuneiform documents — in particular the
astronomical tablets — is enormous. Furuli’s attempts to explain
away this evidence are of no avail. His idea that most, if not all, of
the astronomical data recorded on the tablets might have been
retrocalculated in a later period is demonstrably false. Furuli’s final,
desperate theory that the Seleucid astronomers — and there were
many — systematically redated almost the whole astronomical
archive inherited from earlier generations of scholars is divorced
from reality.