The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

430 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
Modern Akkadian scholars who have spent decades examining cuneiform
tablets are aware of these and other pitfalls, but Furuli’s experience in this area
seems to be limited. Although he says that he is “able to read and work with
original documents in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Akkadian” (p. 14), he
seems to have examined the majority of the tablets he discusses or refers to
only second or third hand, by consulting published copies, transcriptions,
transliterations, and translations in works written by other scholars—some of
which date from the late 19th century. That is evidently why, in the
Introduction, Furuli says he is “interested to be informed about tablets where
collation indicate [sic] errors in the published transliterations or transcriptions.”
(p. 14, ftn. 5; cf. also p. 58, ftn. 67) If such tablets are used in a scholarly work
in support of a revised chronology, the collations should precede, not follow,
publication. This stipulation is particularly important for a work that the author
claims is aimed at replacing Parker and Dubberstein’s classical study from 1956
on Babylonian Chronology.
For many years, I have asked modern Akkadian scholars to collate original
tablets with odd dates in published translations, including a number of those
used by Furuli and his coreligionists in support of their alternative chronology,
often with disastrous results for the suggested revisions. Therefore, when Furuli
claims that “scores of tablets have been published with anomalous dates,
particularly in the New Babylonian Empire” (p. 58), it would be interesting to
know which tablets he is referring to and to what extent he has had their dates
collated afresh.
The mysterious Marduk-shar-usur
As one example of “possible reading errors,” Furuli refers on page 60 to a
Neo-Babylonian tablet that Chad W. St. Boscawen found in 1877 among the
Egibi tablets that had just arrived at the British Museum from Iraq. The tablet
was dated to day 23, month 9 (Kislev), year 3 of a Neo-Babylonian king, whose
name Boscawen first read as Marduk-sar-uzur.
Boscawen placed the name in a separate Addenda of a paper that was read
before The Society of Biblical Archaeology in London on June 5, 1877. At a
discussion held the following month (not the next year, as Furuli writes), on
July 3, 1877, Boscawen stated that, on further examination, he had arrived at
the conclusion that Marduk-sar-uzur “is a variant name for Nergal-sar-uzur”
(i.e., Neriglissar). He explained:
“When we have some 2,000 tablets to go through, and to read names,
which, as everyone who has studied Assyrian knows, is the most difficult
part, because it is not easy always to recognize the same name, as it may
be written four or five different ways, you may judge it is an arduous
task. I have copied two apparently different names; but afterwards found
them to be variants of the same name.” (Transactions of the Society of Biblical
Archaeology (TSBA), Vol. VI, 1878, p. 78 and pp. 108-111)
Attempting to extend the Neo-Babylonian period (as required by the
Watchtower Society’s chronology), Furuli had argued in an earlier paper that
Marduk-shar-usur must have been an extra, unknown king who ruled for at
least three years during the Neo-Babylonian period. I discussed this idea at