God's Gold (35 page)

Back in Jerusalem I ended up where I had started, along streets where Jewish sedition had turned the Holy City bloodred in AD 69. The Wailing Wall was teeming with tourists enjoying the sounds, sights, and benefits of the twenty-first century. My memories of the West Bank seemed like from a different planet.

My quest was over, and the tides of history I'd chronicled washed over me in waves. The present felt unreal; mind and body were in chronic need of decompression. Pottering around the Old City of Jerusalem before flying back to London, I hoped that the urban buzz and oriental smells would bring me back down to earth. But instead I remained marooned between time and space.

After so many years pursuing the tail of a blazing comet, my final clue left me in a quandary. Should I try to return to the West Bank with a scientific team of archaeologists and a fluxgate magnetometer to bounce sonic pulses through the soil in search of caves and ancient cultural anomalies? Would the Israeli and Palestinian authorities even grant me a research license if they knew my true aims? What if the Temple treasure had already been looted from an underground cave in the grounds of the monastery of Saint Theodosius?

I flicked on my iPod and sat on a bench in front of the Wailing Wall watching Jews worshipping their God and Muslims quietly making their way onto the Haram al-Sharif to pray to Allah. The Herodian masonry separating both is less than ten feet wide, but a chasm broader
than the Red Sea divides their ideologies. The Black Eyed Peas playing “Where Is the Love” on my iPod questioned the disappearance of human values and equality, and the rise of human animosity.

The Temple treasure of Jerusalem means different things to different people. To many it is the gold at the end of the rainbow, the key to riches beyond dreams. If the menorah, Table of the Divine Presence, and silver trumpets materialized in the antiquities market, they would quite simply be priceless and stir up the mother of all political storms.

Out of curiosity, I had discussed the financial implications of the treasure turning up with Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, director of Royal-Athena Galleries in New York and one of the world's most successful antiquities dealers. He confirmed that these masterpieces are “the greatest religious treasures known to man, well beyond the value of any object or painting on the planet.” Eisenberg stressed that no precedent exists for marketing ancient art of such religious heritage. So there would be no objective means of setting a reserve price or insurance value for the Temple treasure. “Certainly some city tycoon would pay $1 billion for the
Mona Lisa
,” he pointed out, “which means that in the case of the value of the Temple treasure, the sky's the limit. You would be talking billions rather than hundreds of millions of dollars.”

But the spoils of Vespasian are not just the greatest biblical treasure on earth. As the symbol of an ancient Jewish House of God and dream of a messianic future, the Temple treasure is also a source of immense danger. Justinian was right. Both Judaism and Islam have a track record of manipulating archaeological remains to try to enhance rights to the Temple Mount. Only in 2004 was a famous ivory priestly scepter, long given pride of place in the Israel Museum as an eighth-century BC original from the Temple of Jerusalem, denounced as a forgery. Inscribed “Belonging to the Temp[le of YHW]H, holy to the priests,” we now know that while the artifact dates back to the thirteenth or twelfth century BC, the inscription is a modern fake. An inaccurate surface patina and incorrect syntax betray the mind and hand of the forger.

Even more controversial is a fifteen-line Hebrew inscription incised on a sandstone tablet, which surfaced in 2003. The text purports to be
a record of renovations ordered by Jehoash, the biblical ruler of ninth-century BC Judea. Here the king commands the Temple priests to take “holy money…to buy quarry stones and timber and copper and labor to carry out the duty with faith.” Again scientific tests of the patina and studies of the language have damned the object as an outright fake. Allegedly uncovered in a Muslim cemetery east of the Temple Mount, its convenient provenance is extremely suspect and undeniably invented for political purposes. The Temple treasure is intimately enmeshed in these deadly political claims for indigenous origins. If it surfaced it would be seen as a divine sanction for a Third Temple to arise on the Mount at the expense of the Dome of the Rock—an appallingly provocative idea that could not be implemented without vast loss of life.

The question of racial diversity—what makes people different—has long perplexed mankind. Ancient intellectuals understood cultural difference in terms of environmental determinism—they blamed it all on the weather. Rome maintained a sense of what, much later, would become know as natural selection. Vitruvius, for instance, believed:

The debate over geography, religious superiority, and the racial divide endures today in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Both Jews and Muslims alike claim the greater territorial rights to the Temple Mount. Why do politicians insist on focusing on ethnic differences rather than myriad religious and social similarities? Historians and archaeologists expose universal laws of human behavior that make a mockery of such arti
ficial philosophies. The prosperity, decline, and fall of the four civilizations I met during my quest for the Temple treasure—Israel, Rome, the Vandals, and the Byzantine Empire—confirmed parallel patterns of long-term action and reaction.

Take the Colosseum in Rome, for instance. Paid for by the emperor Vespasian with spoils plundered from the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, eventually even the greatest theater of antiquity succumbed to the beating waves of history. In 1452 Pope Nicholas V ordered the removal of 2,522 cartloads of its stones for lime production. That lime ended up bonding the walls of the Basilica of Saint Peter, today inside Vatican City. So in one sense, Israel's Jewish birthright does indeed still languish, “locked away,” in the heart of Rome. We are only ever custodians of ancient heritage.

In my own quest I also knew that if the Temple treasure came to light I would be guilty of fueling the battle for Jerusalem, and thus the Arab-Israeli conflict, by offering some people new dreams, others deadly nightmares. There and then in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City I decided to leave my revelations to fate. Looking out over the Wailing Wall and thinking of the glorious treasures it once housed, I recalled the words of Plato's
Laws,
written in the mid–fourth century BC, in which the Greek philosopher similarly pondered the ethics of digging up buried treasure and concluded:

Plato, of course, was writing about an ideal world that never existed. Even so, I like to think I am a hyperrealist and that my decision to end my pursuit for the long lost Temple treasure of Jerusalem at this stage was the most rational and responsible reaction. The amazing stories and lessons of the past are about knowledge, not possession. I had
reached the end of the line. Perhaps, as I write, the most powerful objects of biblical faith are locked away in some bank vault, with billions of pounds being negotiated on a private sale. I hope not and cross my fingers that the treasure hunters who had been scouring the West Bank left empty-handed.

One thing is certain, the Temple treasure isn't in the Vatican, nor crushed beneath the ruined cities of Rome, Carthage, Istanbul, or Jerusalem. The gold menorah, precious Table of the Divine Presence, and silver trumpets ended up in a “city of saints,” hidden in the grounds of the monastery of Saint Theodosius in the wilderness of Judea. As I bade my farewell to Jerusalem, I stared one last time at the Temple Mount, and offered up a little prayer that the treasures remain hidden for all time, sealed beneath swirling desert sands, far from the treacherous clutches of man.

Ancient Sources

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———.
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———.
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———.
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ROOTS ———————————————————————

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ISRAEL—LAND OF GOD ——————————————

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TEMPLE TREASURE ——————————————————

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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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REVOLUTION ———————————————————

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IMPERIAL ROME ——————————————————

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