The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Furuli’s Second Book 517
“I looked at the piece yesterday and you may very well be right. The two
month names (4 and 7) are rather similar in cuneiform writing, one written
SHU, the other DU6. The tablet is eroded and the sign is not very clear. I
have little experience in this period – so I’ll have to look at it again, but I can
certainly not exclude reading DU6 (that is, month 7).”
Thus the date on this tablet, too, is damaged, and the month may very well be 7, not 4. The
claim that the date is anomalous, then, cannot be proven.
In conclusion none of these tablets can be shown to be dated as early as month IV of the
accession year of Evil-Merocach. The earliest tablet from his reign with a clear date is still
BM 75322, dated to month V, day 20 of his accession year, as is also shown in GTR4, pp.
323, 324.
What about the three tablets dated to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar after the accession of
Evil-Merodach in month V? According to Furuli’s table, these three tablets are dated to
months VI, VIII, and X of the 43d year of Nebuchadnezzar:
Month/day/year:
VI/26/43
Tablet no.:
Contenau XII.58
VIII/?/43 Krückmann 238
X/?/43 BM 55806
I will start with the last of the three tablets.
BM 55806:
Back in 1987 I wrote to Professor D. J. Wiseman in London and asked him to collate about
20 oddly dated tablets I had found listed in the then recently published BM catalogue CBT
VI (1987). Wiseman checked all the 20 tablets and sent me his observations in a letter dated
October 7, 1987. Most of the dates turned out to be modern printing or reading errors.
With respect to the date of 55806, X/?/43, Wiseman said that, “The reading seems to be ab
(is this an error for shu?).”
Ab is month V, and Shu (SHU = Du’uzu) is month IV.
The tablet was also collated in 1990 by C. B. F. Walker, who gives the following comments
in his list of “Corrections …,” p. 3:
“Month appears to be written ITU.AD; year number highly uncertain, and
partly erased. Pinches, CT 55, 138, copied ITU.AB = month 10. If the year
is really 43 then the month must be understood as AD = Abu.”
As shown by Walker’s comments, the date is severely damaged. Not only the day and the
month, but also the year is highly uncertain. (This is actually admitted by Furuli himself on
page 18!) Walker’s mentioning of CT 55 refers to volume 55 of a series of BM publications,
Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum. Vols. 55, 56, and 57 contain
economic texts copied by T. G. Pinches during the years 1892-1894, published 90 years later
by the British Museum Publications Ltd in 1982. As shown above, collations of the original
tablet by modern specialists show that Pinches evidently misread the month name, which
most probably is V rather than X. The tablet cannot be shown to be dated after the
accession of Evil-Merodach.
Krückmann 238:
“Krückmann” refers to Oluf Krückmann, Neubabylonishe Rechts- und Verwaltungstexte,
published in Leipzig 1933. It is also referred to as TuM 2/3 as it is Vol. 2/3 in the series
Texte und Materialien der Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities im Eigentum der
Universität Jena. Vol. 2/3 contains copies of 289 cuneiform tablets, many of which are
fragmentary. In a chronological table the tablets are briefly described, and when the dates, or
at least parts of them, are legible, they are given in three separate columns (giving month,