The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

410 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
Van der Waerden, “History of the Zodiak,” Archiv für Orientforschung 16,
1952/1953, pp. 216-230) 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.” (H. Hunger in ADT, Vol. I, p. 17; emphasis added)
On pages 17-19, 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.” (N. M. Swerdlow,
The Babylonian Theory of the Planets, Princeton, New Jersey, 1998, p. 39)
Such detailed observations are shown by VAT 4956, in which about twothirds
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” (ca. 2–2.5 degrees)
and “fingers” (1/24 of the cubit), as Swerdlow points out. Although the
measurements are demonstrably not mathematically exact, they are considerably
more precise than positions related only to constellations. As Swerdlow
suggests, the measurements “may have been made with something as simple as
a graduated rod held at arm’s length.” (Swerdlow, op. cit. p. 40)
By parsing all the astronomical diaries in the first two volumes of
Sachs/Hunger’s ADT, Professor Gerd Grasshoff “obtained descriptions of
3285 events, of which 2781 are complete without unreadable words or broken
plates. Out of those are 1882 topographical events [i.e., positions related to
stars and planets], 604 are lunar observations called Lunar Six … and 295 are
locations of a celestial object in a constellation.” (Gerd Grasshoff, “Normal
Stars in Late Astronomical Babylonian Diaries,” in Noel M. Swerdlow [ed.],
Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination, London: The MIT Press, 1999, p. 107)
Thus, two-thirds of the positions are related to stars or planets, whereas only
about 10 percent are related to constellations.
In further support of his claim about the “crudeness of the observations”
recorded on the Babylonian tablets, Furuli gives a lengthy quotation from B. L.
van der Waerden. Unfortunately, Furuli has grossly misinterpreted van der
Waerden’s statements.
Van der Warden is discussing, not the crudeness of the observations, as Furuli
claims, but the crudeness of the calculations that the Babylonian astrologers
performed for the position of the moon at a point of time when the zodiacal
sign in which the moon stood could not be determined by observation, either because
of bad weather or because it was in daytime, when the stars are not seen. These
calculated positions had to be deduced from observed lunar positions near such