This commentary is preserved in a fragmentary tablet from the British Museum's "Babylon Collection," published in CT 41 39. It was edited by Labat many years ago, but this edition is now substantially outdated. A new fragment (BM 43343) was identified and joined to the main manuscript by I. L. Finkel. A preliminary transliteration of it was made from photos kindly made available by U. Gabbay. This transliteration was generously collated by I. L. Finkel in June 2015, and the collations and ideas suggested by Finkel are acknowledge in the notes below.
The colophon of the tablet states that its copyist was Nabû-apla-uṣur son of Nabû-aḫḫē-iddin, of the Iddin-Papsukkal family, and that it was copied from an original from Borsippa and owned by another member of the same family. Although it is not dated, the presence of a lišlim-formula on the top edge of the tablet suggests that it may date to the Hellenistic period.
The tablet contains a commentary on the menology Iqqur īpuš. This text consists of paragraphs which describe activities as favorable or unfavorable depending on the month in which they are carried out. Two different recensions of Iqqur īpuš are known: the série mensuelle, which groups the prognoses of the series according to the month they refer to; and the série générale, in which prognoses for each month are given under the title of the activity or event in question. The present tablet contains a commentary on the seventh section of the série mensuelle, which deals with the month Tašrītu (VII). However, in the edition below the references to the base text refer to the paragraphs of the série générale rather than to those the série mensuelle, since no manuscript of the latter for the Tašrītu section is known.
This commentary uses both double and triple cola, the former to introduce quotations from the base text and the latter to separate successive commentarial entries (see the section Technical Terms and Signs). In addition, it uses the unusual technical terms ša išṭuru, "what is written" (obv 5-6), which seems to be an equivalent of ša iqbû, "what is said" (on the latter, see Technical Terms and Signs); and ana ... šaṭir, "it is written about ..." (obv 8), which is apparently identical with the more common ana ... qabi, "it is said about ..."
Very few of the comments in this text try to elucidate philological problems. As often the case of commentaries on divination texts, the main concern of the present tablet seems to be to demonstrate the validity of its base text. This occurs, for instance, in the section of the commentary that deals with a line of Iqqur īpuš that equates the month Tašrītu with the god Šamaš (rev 9'-14'). The commentary tries to justify the association with an astrological syllogism: since (a) the month of Tašrītu is the month in which the constellation "Scales" become visible, and since (b) that constellation is elsewhere said to be equivalent to Saturn, and since (c) Saturn is elsewhere equated with Šamaš, then the association between Tašrītu and Šamaš is justified.
At least on one occasion the commentary redefines the scope of the main text by means of a sophisticated mathematical operation. In lines obv 17-18 the prognosis "[he will ...] for ten years" is said to mean "when the night lasts 6 double hours" (i.e., during the equinox), on account of the fact that the reciprocal of 10 is, in the hexagesimal system, 1/6. With this ingenuous operation a prognosis pertaining long-term events is set on a specific date.
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