The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

414 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
The interpolation of intercalary months to compensate for the difference
between the solar and the lunar year
Arguing that the interpolation of intercalary months in the Babylonian lunisolar
calendar might be another potential source of error, Furuli (p. 34) quotes
Drs. Ben Zion Wacholder and David B. Weisberg, who say:
“As Professor Abraham Sachs pointed out in a communication to us,
some of the readings of the intercalary months recorded in Parker and
Dubberstein’s tables may not be quite reliable, while a handful are
admittedly hypothetical. But even assuming the essential correctness of
Parker and Dubberstein’s tables, Professor Sachs maintains, the
supposition of a 19-year cycle prior to 386 B.C.E. may be reading into
the evidence something which possibly is not there.” (Ben Zion
Wacholder, Essay on Jewish Chronology and Chronography, New York, 1976,
p. 67)
Nothing in this statement is not also admitted by Parker and Dubberstein,
as can be seen in Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C.—A.D. 75 (1956), pp. 1-9. As
Wacholder and Weisberg further demonstrate in their work, the development
of the 19-year standard scheme of intercalary months was a gradual process
begun in the 7th century. The final stage took place in the 5th and early 4th
centuries, when the seven intercalary months of the 19-year cycle were fixed in
years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19. This process is also clear in PD.
Furuli concludes: “This means that calculations based on the Julian calendar
can be wrong as much as 44 days or even more if the intercalary months were
not added regularly.” (p. 35) This conclusion is based on the unlikely
supposition that sometimes four years could pass before an intercalary month
was added. But the weight of evidence, based on the economic and the
astronomical texts, shows that this never happened after 564 BCE. (See the
updated tables of documented intercalary months presented by Professor John
P. Britton in J. M. Steele & A. Imhausen (eds.), Under One Sky, Münster: Ugarit-
Verlag, 2002, pp. 34-35.)
On page 35, Furuli again uses Weir’s discussion of the Venus Tablet of
Ammisaduqa, this time as a basis for his claim that “a ‘best fit’ scheme is
accepted.” This is undoubtedly true of scholars who have used the Venus
Tablet of Ammisaduqa in their attempts to date the Hammurapi dynasty, but to
imply that such a best fit scheme is also used to fix the absolute chronology of
the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods by means of VAT 4956 and other
astronomical tablets—as if this were a last resort—is dishonest because it is
simply not true.
Different calendars used at different times
Furuli notes that different calendars were used in antiquity by different
peoples at different times. This, of course, is true. But because the use of the
Babylonian luni-solar calendar in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian eras is well
known, it is difficult to see how these other calendars can be “sources of
potential error” in the examination of the Babylonian astronomical tablets.
Furuli’s argument is a straw man.