God's Gold (10 page)

Against a backdrop of foreboding dark chocolate mountains nestles Qumran, a sprig of green relief and a peaceful oasis in the wilderness. The ancient settlement sits halfway up the mountainside, straddling a plateau with spectacular views of the Dead Sea's flat desert hinterland below, here and there interrupted by islands of date plantations. On clear days the Jordanian hills are framed dramatically against the eastern skyline. For both seclusion and security, Qumran occupies a perfect setting. But perfect real estate for what purpose: a religious retreat or well-defended stronghold?

By examining the ruined settlement near which the Copper Scroll was found in 1952, I wanted to confirm certain key points that would determine whether or not this document really held the secret to the lost Temple treasure of Jerusalem. In particular, was Qumran really a monastic settlement settled by the Essenes, the most pious sect of Jews in the ancient world? If so, who better to silently watch over a Temple treasure snatched from the jaws of Rome in AD 70. Or, as the latest research by Professor Yizhar Hirschfeld of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem favors, was the site actually a wealthy manor house owned by a rich and Romanized Jewish member of the ruling class of Judea?

This matter is crucial. If Qumran was not an Essene retreat, then there would be no reason to attribute the Dead Sea Scrolls to this sect. And if this was true, then the Essenes were not necessarily either the au
thors or the owners of the precious texts concealed in the nearby caves or possible keepers of the secret hiding place of the Temple treasure.

Qumran is one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world and also one of the most controversial. The settlement was thoroughly excavated between 1953 and 1956 after the same type of “scroll pots” recovered from the nearby caves containing the Dead Sea Scrolls was spotted overlying Qumran, leading to speculation that the scrolls were the concealed belongings of these mysterious inhabitants who both made the jars and wrote the texts.

History has not been especially kind to Qumran's excavator, Roland de Vaux, the director of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem. On the one hand, he successfully supervised rapid excavation, turning out quality preliminary reports. On the other, his scientific methodology was dubious by modern standards and his leap of faith between the physical evidence and interpretation somewhat creative. But what really troubles modern scholars are the thousands of small finds and pottery. Uncovered in three different chronological phases, these have never been fully researched or made available to fellow scientists through publication. So we remain unclear about which coins and finds relate to which periods of the site's history. Without this level of knowledge, the story of Qumran will remain forever jumbled and incomplete.

Consequently, Qumran has become all things to all men. De Vaux was a man of the cloth, a French priest with his own singular mind-set and background. Living in a communal environment in Jerusalem, it is hardly surprising that he read into the ruins a monastic life based on agriculture, stock-rearing, and basic industry. Clay inkwells found amid the ruins conjured up images in his mind of a scriptorium of the form common in medieval monasteries. No doubt, it was here, postulated de Vaux, that the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves were written.

The identification of Qumran and its caves as an oasis of Essene monastic life was based on what in the 1950s seemed to be a watertight holy trinity: de Vaux's archaeological results; the nearby scrolls, whose mystery gripped the imagination; and vivid historical descriptions of
Essene life around the western shore of the Dead Sea preserved in the writings of Josephus and Pliny the Elder.

The most influential factor was the Essenes. As a youth, the first-century AD historian Flavius Josephus was so obsessed by this sect that he spent three years living with one of its most pious members, Bannus, who only ate wild plants, wore clothes made of tree bark, and frequently immersed in cold water for purposes of ritual cleanliness. Back in the Eternal City, having turned from a Jewish commander into an imperial informer for Rome to help crush the First Revolt in Israel, Josephus wrote at length about this Jewish sect, for whose extreme and unwavering religious observance he held a profound respect.

The Essenes were not fun-loving. They rejected pleasure as evil and considered the conquest of passion virtuous. Rather than marry, Josephus tells us that the sect's line of succession continued because they “choose out other persons' children, while they are pliable, and fit for learning…and form them according to their own manners…they guard against the lascivious behavior of women, and are persuaded that none of them preserve their fidelity to one man.”

Personal possessions were renounced by the Essenes, who were renowned for their white robes worn until they literally dropped off their bodies. Of all Jewish sects, including the Sadducees and the Pharisees, Josephus considered the Essenes most religiously observant. After sunrise, he records, “they are sent away by their curators, to exercise some of those arts wherein they are skilled, in which they labor with great diligence till the fifth hour. After which they assemble themselves together again into one place; and when they have clothed themselves in white veils, they then bathe their bodies in cold water.” Purification conditioned the movements of everyday life.

Of key interest to the archaeological discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is Josephus's testimony that the Essenes were unusually studious and secretive. The sect studied the writings of the ancients dutifully, and newly recruited members swore “to communicate their doctrines to no one…and will equally preserve the books belonging to their sect.” This religious integrity eventually even impressed the Romans, who
mercilessly tortured captured Essenes in AD 68 to try to force blasphemy from their lips and to make them eat nonkosher food. Sect members responded by smiling at their suffering and laughing at their tormentors. In Essene doctrine the body was corruptible but the soul immortal.

Following de Vaux's excavation at Qumran in the 1950s, his picture of an Essene settlement remained common currency for over thirty years. Here, an extremist Jewish sect shied away from society, wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and hid them in the surrounding caves when the fearful tramp of Roman boots echoed along the desert roads during the First Jewish Revolt. The imprint of the Essenes was everywhere: the inkwells from a scriptorium linked the thoughts of a studious people to the physical scrolls themselves, the dominance of water systems and
mikvaot
proved their compulsion for ritual purity through cleanliness, and their pottery workshop reflected a self-sufficient economy closed to the outside world.

Confronted with such staggering physical remains, and before the scrolls and ruins of Qumran were fully studied, most scientists of the day would have arrived at precisely the same conclusions as Roland de Vaux. And though he remains an easy target because he never published a final excavation report, he was a meticulous recorder. Today, sixty years later, the vast body of diaries and artifacts he left behind have prompted an archaeological revolution over the mysteries of the “Qumran Triangle.”

The traditional picture of Qumran as a quiet “monastic” Essene outpost was recently shattered by the late Professor Yizhar Hirschfeld of the Hebrew University. Hirschfeld jettisoned the Essene-Qumran theory wholescale. His forceful new argument envisages the site as a manor house set among a wealthy estate—similar to the setting of a medieval castle—and owned by one of the king's favorite lords. Here a wealthy aristocrat and his estate manager and slaves reaped the riches from highly specialized produce: dates, bitumen, and balsam. Qumran, then, was the local version of a Roman villa, but with a tower and reinforced outer walls to defend against regional insecurity. In Judea, such fortified manor houses were known as
bari
s in antiquity. Hirschfeld be
lieves the Essenes did not live at Qumran but at Ein Gedi in a cluster of huts he excavated on a mountainside 650 feet above the ancient town. Such a remote shantytown, he believed, was a far more appropriate setting for pious, nonmaterialistic Jews.

Even though lords, knights, and manor houses smack rather inappropriately of medieval Europe and feudalism, and so require a leap of faith across the chasm of time and place, Professor Hirschfeld's theory has done “Qumranology” a great service. The site is now out of the closet. Qumran does only make sense among a wider regional canvas. Contrary to today's vivid image of the Dead Sea as a no-man's-land, the lowest place on earth was actually a bustling hive of activity in antiquity. Forget the relentless sun that can fry an egg. Ignore the lack of fresh spring water and the poor nutritional resources that suggest (according to anthropological studies based on Qumran's ancient cemetery) that only 6 percent of adult males lived beyond the age of forty (compared to 49 percent at Jericho). Set aside the superficial uselessness of the Dead Sea as a maritime resource.

The truth is that in the Hasmonean and Roman periods the oases of the Dead Sea were organically linked to Nabatea in modern Jordan by small ports strung along its shore. Here man overcame matter and a hostile environment to turn this wilderness into the equivalent of an ancient Silicon Valley. The region's unique geography may have supported extremely limited industry, but these were highly coveted and extremely lucrative. Most appealing were the royal date plantations King Herod bequeathed to his descendants.

Judean dates were world famous as gourmet food and for their medicinal qualities. In the Bible, Jericho was known as the “town of dates” (Deuteronomy 34:3) and in his
Natural History
Pliny the Elder remarked that the “outstanding property [of Judean dates] is the unctuous juice which they exude and an extremely sweet sort of wine-flavor like that of honey.” The shores of the Dead Sea were carpeted with oases of sweet-smelling date plantations two thousand years ago, stretching at least from Jericho in the north to En Boqeq on the southern shore, where hundreds of date pits from a first-century AD processing plant
have been unearthed. New research suggests that the so-called wine press at Qumran, as well as its satellite farm at Ein Feshkha, actually specialized in date honey.

If dates were the mainstay of the economy, traded the length and breadth of the civilized Roman world, the Dead Sea was also renowned for two other specialist products, balsam and bitumen. An inscription on the mosaic floor of a mid-fifth-century AD synagogue at Ein Gedi mysteriously refers to the “secret of the town” that must be guarded from outsiders. The mystery that made Ein Gedi such a wealthy oasis in the middle of a wilderness was almost certainly balsam. The historian Galen wrote in
De Antidotis
that this plant “is called
Engadinne
after the place where it grows most abundantly and is most beautiful, being superior in quality to that which grows in other parts of Palestine.” Although balsam is extinct today along the Dead Sea, this large shrub whose bark, shoots, and twigs yielded resin and juice coveted across the Roman world for perfumes and medicine, was used to treat headaches, eye disease, cataracts, and myopia. In the mid-third century AD, the medical writer Solinus knew about
opobalsamum
from the Dead Sea, and Statius described how
Palaestini liquores
was used to scent corpses in embalming.

Perfumes in general were a high-value luxury item in the Roman world that permeated the classes and everyday life. Pliny rather tartly recorded how

Various ancient historians, ranging from Josephus to Diodorus, Pliny, and Strabo, all agree that Judean balsam was the finest in the world. And securing the balsam plantations and local economic interests was the real key that drew the might of Rome to this isolated part of Israel in
AD 68. So valuable were the resources of the Dead Sea and its balsam groves that the area was subjected to a scorched-earth policy during the First Jewish Revolt.

The overpowering reason for Rome's invasion of the Dead Sea wilderness was money. In this Rome was highly successful, seizing and subsequently controlling the balsam plantations of the Ein Gedi region. As Pliny confirmed to his Roman readership:

Balsam and financial profit tell you all you need to know about why farmers worked so hard in the Roman era to make the geographically hostile western Dead Sea wilderness blossom. Economics is the main reason why Roman coins of Vespasian and his sons commemorating the Jewish War victory depicted a handcuffed Jew standing against a palm tree beneath whom sits a mourning Jewess and a pile of discarded armor. The date farms of Palestine were now controlled by Rome.

Was Qumran somehow involved in the lucrative luxury production and trade of dates and balsam, perhaps as a center of cultivation in its own right? If so, this would disprove the contention that settlement was a hub of Jewish learning. Strong grounds certainly exist to argue thus. Even though Qumran's own small date press probably only served the estate community, the industrial complex at its farm, Ein Feshkha, was a far bigger affair, most probably specializing in date honey. A thick burnt level excavated at Ein Feshkha, plus the subsequent appearance of Roman tiles stamped with the logo of the Roman army, certainly fits into the pattern of a deliberate imperial takeover in AD 68.