electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment VAT.4956, “Astronomical diary for year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar II: the month III lunar eclipse”
“The 15th, one god was seen with the other; sunrise to moonset: 7° 30'. A lunar eclipse which passed by […]”
The single lunar eclipse recorded on the tablet. It is one datum among roughly thirty lunar and planetary observations; the Watch Tower's 2011 argument concentrates on it and on one lunar position.
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Provenance and verification note for electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), fragment VAT.4956, Astronomical diary for year 37 of Nebuchadnezzar II: the month III lunar eclipse
Confidence note. Read in the eBL API record on 19 September 2026. The eBL bibliography for this tablet also carries a discussion entry for F. Richard Stephenson and David M. Willis, “The Earliest Datable Observation of the Aurora Borealis”, Under One Sky (2002), pp. 421-428, with the note “This and other observations in the month imply that the auroral display occurred on the night of March 12/13 in 567 BC”. That date is Stephenson and Willis’s conclusion as reported by eBL, not a finding of eBL’s own, and their chapter was not opened.
Scan provenance. electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen. The edition reproduced there is that of Sachs and Hunger, digitised by Reinhard Pirngruber for the Astronomical Diaries Digital project (Austrian Academy of Sciences), CC BY-SA 3.0.
Corroborated by. src-chr-e-stephenson-willis-2002
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-ebl-vat4956-eclipse