Book excerpt: Dwight Hutchison's historical novel, MUL.BABBAR, The White Star Over Bethlehem, shows how non-Jewish Babylonian astronomers and others could have shifted from their traditional ideas to believing in the Jewish Messiah. Relatively discreet events involving the synodic cycle of MUL.BABBAR (Jupiter) in the late first-century BC probably left plenty of ancient astronomers scratching their heads. The royal celestial events were at the heart of Babylonian astronomical science (but not at the heart of their astrology).