The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

518 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
day, and year, respectively). No. 238 is listed on page 16 as one of the tablets dated to
Nebuchadnezzar. The date is evidently very fragmentary, as Krückmann has put both the
month and the year within parenthesis, while the day number is shown as illegible:
Monat Tag Jahr
(IX) – (42)
As can be seen, the suggested year number is "42", not "43".
So why does Furuli date the tablet to VIII/?/43? The reason obviously is that Furuli has
never consulted Krückmann’s work. As I demonstrated in my review of volume I of Furuli’s
work on ancient chronology, most of the dates presented in his tables had been simply
borrowed from web lists published by the Hungarian Assyriologist Janos Everling.
Everling’s lists (presently not available on the web) were based upon works that had been
published all the way from the latter part of the 19 th century and up to about 2000. The lists
contain over 7,000 tablets from the Neo-Babylonian period alone. In the introduction to
his lists Everling explicitly warned that the dates in the lists had neither been proof-read nor
been compared with the original tablets. The result is that Everling’s lists contain numerous
errors. In my review of Furuli’s volume I it was shown that he had borrowed extensively
from Everling’s lists without collations, with the result that the errors in Everling’s lists were
repeated in Furuli’s tables.
This is also true of Everling’s reference to Krückmann 238, whom he misquotes as follows:
“TuM 2/3, 238. (Nbk. 43.08.o, )”
Furuli seems to have simply taken the date from Everling’s lists without collation and
without checking Krückmann’s work. If he had done anything of this, he would have
discovered that Everling had misquoted Krückmann 238.
Contenau XII.58:
The date of this tablet, VI/26/43, is correct and is the latest dated tablet from the reign of
Nebuchadnezzar. As the earliest known tablet from the accession year of Evil-Merodach is
dated to V/20/acc (BM 75322), the overlap between the two rulers is reduced from six
months as shown by Furuli’s tables to one month and 6 days, as is also shown in GTR4,
page 324. As I argued on the same page, the reason for this brief overlap probably is that
Nebuchadnezzar had died earlier, but that Evil-Merodach’s accession was not generally
accepted immediately due to his wicked character. Some scribes, therefore, continued to
date their tablets to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar for a few weeks. This is a much more
natural explanation of the “overlap” than the idea that “extra years” have to be added
between the two reigns – an idea that conflicts with all other relevant sources from this
period.
(4) Evil-Merodach to Neriglissar
“90 anomalous tablets”?
As mentioned earlier, Rolf Furuli has repeatedly claimed, both in this book (pp. 65, 86) and
elsewhere, that there are about 90 “anomalous tablets” that contradict the traditional Neo-
Babylonian chronology and therefore requires an extension of this chronology. On page 86
he states that these 90 tablets are “mentioned in chapter 3.” About a dozen of such claimed
anomalous tablets have already been discussed above, nine of which were presented in
Furuli’s Table 3.3 on page 59. Fresh collations by competent scholars showed that most of
them did not have any “anomalous dates” at all.
The longest table with such claimed “anomalous dates” however, is Table 3.4 on pages 60-
62. It starts in the first two columns with 17 tablets, continuously dated in each of the
months II, III, IV and V of the 2 nd and last year of Evil-Merodach, the last of the tablets
being dated to V/17/02 (month 5, day 17, year 2). These dates are then followed in the next
two columns by 37 tablets, continuously dated in each of the months V, VI, VII, VIII and