The Moses Stone (27 page)
“But they did publish details of some of them, surely?”
“Yes, but only the less important stuff. The texts found in Cave One were released between 1950 and 1956. In 1963 the writings from eight other caves were published in a single volume, and two years later details of what was known as the Psalms Scroll, found in Cave Eleven, was released. And, of course, translations were quickly made of these texts by scholars all over the world.
“But the Cave Four material wasn’t published until 1968, and then only a small amount of it. By that stage, Father de Vaux seemed to have decided that his lasting legacy would be to deny access to the scrolls to all other scholars, and he imposed a strict secrecy rule that allowed only members of his original team or their specific designates to work on them. De Vaux died in 1971, but his death changed nothing: scholars still had no access to the Cave Four material, or even to photographs of the scrolls. That lasted until 1991—almost half a century after their discovery—when a complete set of photographs of the Cave Four materials was found, almost by accident, in a library in San Marino, California, and subsequently published.”
“But if the Essenes or whoever lived at Qumran didn’t write the scrolls, who did?” Bronson asked.
“Nobody knows. The most probable explanation is that they originated with some devout religious sect in Jerusalem, and were hidden in the Qumran caves by a group of Jews fleeing from Roman troops during one of the regular periods of political unrest.”
“And exactly what’s in them?” Bronson asked.
“Most of them are scribal copies of known literary texts, mainly Old Testament biblical material, but obviously much earlier examples than had been previously available. There are thirty-odd copies of Deuteronomy, for example. There were also a lot of secular texts, most previously unknown, which shed new light on the form of Judaism that was practiced during what’s known as the Second Temple period. That was when the Temple in Jerusalem had been reconstructed after the original—Solomon’s Temple—was destroyed in 586 BC. The Second Temple period ran from 516 BC until AD 70, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple and ended the Great Jewish Revolt that had started four years earlier.
“And the Copper Scroll,” Angela finished, “is completely out of whack with everything else that was found at Qumran. In 1952, an expedition sponsored by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities was working in Cave Three and found a unique object designated 3Q15—that simply means it was the fifteenth relic found in Cave Three at Qumran. It was a thin sheet of almost pure copper, some seven feet in length, which had apparently snapped in two when it was being rolled up by whoever had prepared it. After two thousand years in the cave, the metal was badly oxidized, incredibly brittle and fragile, and clearly couldn’t simply be unrolled. It was unlike anything anyone had seen before, at Qumran or anywhere else, because of both its size—it was the biggest piece of ancient text ever known to have been recorded on metal—and its contents.
“The problem the archaeologists had was deciding how to open it. They spent nearly five years looking at the scroll before they came to a decision, and then they did the wrong thing. They sent it to the Manchester College of Technology where it was sawn in half lengthways using a very thin blade. That opened up the scroll completely and gave the researchers a series of curved sections of copper that they could study. Unfortunately, the Manchester people—and almost everyone else—failed to notice two things about the scroll.
“When it was discovered, the spaces between the sheets of rolled copper were filled with a hard-packed material, almost like fired clay. This was assumed to be nothing more than an accumulation of dust and debris over the millennia, but it wasn’t. Nobody thought to check the conditions in the cave at Qumran where it was found. If they had, they’d have discovered that the soil in those caves was a very fine dust, almost a powder, which contains no silicon that would allow it to solidify. Even if the soil is dampened, it simply returns to powder when it dries out. Whoever had written the scroll had covered one side with a layer of clay before rolling it. And then they had fired it in a kiln to turn the clay into something almost as hard as pottery.”
“Why? To protect the copper?”
“Oddly enough, most likely exactly the opposite. Most researchers now believe that the authors of the Copper Scroll expected the metal to corrode away, and their intention was to leave the text of the scroll imprinted on the clay. That was the other thing the Manchester team failed to register.
“The scroll is primarily written in Mishnaic Hebrew with a handful of Greek letters whose purpose and meaning is still unknown. In fact, there are fourteen Greek letters on the scroll, and the first ten of them spell out the name ‘Akhenaten.’ He was a pharaoh who ruled Egypt in about 1350 BC, and his main claim to fame is that he founded what was probably the world’s first monotheistic religion. But the Copper Scroll dates from at least a millennium later than this, so why his name is on it remains a complete mystery.”
“Why did the authors of the scroll go to such trouble?”
“Probably,” Angela said, “because of the contents. It looks as though they wanted to make certain that the record would survive for as long as possible, much longer than a papyrus scroll might, for example. And the reason for their determination was because almost all that’s on the Copper Scroll is a list of treasure, possibly that of the First Temple in Jerusalem and, if the quantities listed are correct, today it would be worth in excess of two billion pounds.”
50
“So the Copper Scroll’s really a treasure map, then?” Bronson asked.
“No, not a map, exactly. It’s a list of sixty-four locations, sixty-three of which are supposed to be where large amounts—sometimes tons—of gold and silver are hidden. The sixty-fourth listing gives the location of a duplicate document that apparently provides additional details of the treasure and where it’s been hidden. Some people think this might be what’s become known as the Silver Scroll.
“The only snag with that is that nobody has any idea if the Silver Scroll exists or, if it does, where it might be found. The location given in the Copper Scroll simply says that the supporting document is to be found ‘In the pit, adjoining on the north, in a hole opening north-wards, and buried at its mouth,’ which is hardly what you’d call a precise location.”
“So what happened to the Copper Scroll?” Bronson asked.
“When Father de Vaux found out about it, he realized immediately that it was a flat contradiction of everything that he and his team had been proposing. An ascetic religious community could hardly be the custodians of—if the figures have been translated correctly—some twenty-six tons of gold and sixty-five tons of silver. So he did what academics and scientists usually do when presented with hard evidence that conflicts with their own cozy little world view. He declared that the Copper Scroll was a hoax, a forgery or a joke.
“None of these suggestions was convincing. If it wasn’t a genuine document, you have to ask why the creators of the scroll went to so much trouble when they made it—I mean, why would they bother? Though we don’t know a hell of a lot about any of the communities that existed in Judea during this period, it’s never been suggested that any of them were great practical jokers. Even if they had been, why would they go to so much trouble to produce the scroll, and then hide it away in a remote cave where nobody would be likely to find it for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years? Don’t forget, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found entirely by accident.
“But the real point is that the listing on the Copper Scroll is just that—a listing. Each item is recorded, with its location, but without any embellishment. It reads just like an inventory of goods, nothing more, and that does give it a kind of authentic feeling.”
“And these people in Manchester just cut the thing in two?” Bronson said.
“Exactly. They failed to appreciate that the clay was at least as important as the copper and removed it as the first step. I don’t know how they did it, but whatever technique they used also damaged the copper, so it was a kind of double-whammy. They’d probably have done better to leave the clay alone and remove the metal piece by piece. Instead, they coated the outside of the scroll in a strong adhesive and cut lengthways down it with a very thin saw-blade. That resulted in a couple of dozen curved sections of copper that the researchers could then start translating, but of course the very act of cutting the metal partially destroyed some of the text.”
“Has any of the treasure been found?” Bronson asked. “I mean, that would validate the scroll, wouldn’t it? It would immediately prove that the listing was genuine.”
Angela sighed. “If only it was that easy. The locations specified in the scroll probably meant something at the start of the first millennium, but they mean almost nothing now. The listing contains things like: ‘In the cave next to the fountain owned by the House of Hakkoz, dig six cubits: six gold bars.’ That’s fine if you know who ‘Hakkoz’ was, and where his fountain was located, but after two thousand years the chances of finding the treasure with a description as vague as that are pretty slim. And in fact, we do know something about this particular family or house, which is more than can be said for most of the names recorded on the Copper Scroll, because ‘Hakkoz’ is in the historical record. A family with that name were the treasurers of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, but frankly that doesn’t help much, because we don’t know where they lived and, of course, it could have been a completely different Hakkoz family that was referred to in the scroll.”
Bronson stood up, stretched his aching back and walked across to the mini-bar to get another drink.
“But what I don’t understand is what this has to do with the Silver Scroll and Moses’ tablets of stone.”
Angela took the glass he was holding out for her. “Look what the inscription says next. The reference to the Silver Scroll implies they hid it in a cistern somewhere, and later in the text it states that—somewhere—they concealed some tablets. But not just any old tablets. They were ‘the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem,’ and that’s really exciting. It also means that Yacoub could have been right—there’s at least a possibility that these tablets could be the Mosaic Covenant. So this piece of Aramaic script, some of which was on the clay tablet Margaret O’Connor found, is a description of three separate relics being hidden away—a copper scroll, a second scroll made of silver, and these Mosaic tablets. And now I think I know why, and I think I know when. The importance of one single word in that text has only just dawned on me.”
“Which word?” Bronson asked, leaning forward.
“This one,” Angela said, pointing.
“ ‘Ben’?” Bronson asked.
“Yes. There’s a very famous fortress not too far from here called Masada, which finally fell to the Romans in AD 73 after a long siege. The rebels holed up there were known as the Sicarii, and their leader was a man named Elazar Ben Ya’ir.
Ben
,” she emphasized. “Neither of the dictionaries we’ve been using list proper names, and that could explain why we haven’t been able to translate this word here.” She pointed at a series of Aramaic characters on the laptop’s screen. “I think that this text could be an actual description of the Copper Scroll being hidden in a cave at Qumran by a bunch of Sicarii who’d escaped from Masada just before the citadel fell. That would also explain why the Copper Scroll is so completely different to all the other Dead Sea Scrolls—it was never meant to be a part of the same collection.
Ben
,” she emphasized. “Neither of the dictionaries we’ve been using list proper names, and that could explain why we haven’t been able to translate this word here.” She pointed at a series of Aramaic characters on the laptop’s screen. “I think that this text could be an actual description of the Copper Scroll being hidden in a cave at Qumran by a bunch of Sicarii who’d escaped from Masada just before the citadel fell. That would also explain why the Copper Scroll is so completely different to all the other Dead Sea Scrolls—it was never meant to be a part of the same collection.
“Think it through, Chris.” Angela’s hazel eyes were sparkling with excitement. “The Copper Scroll is completely different to the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was an inventory of hidden treasure: the other scrolls dealt almost exclusively with religious matters, most of them actually biblical texts. Absolutely the only feature it shares with them is the language inscribed on it—Hebrew—though even that’s odd. The script on the Copper Scroll is Mishnaic Hebrew, a form of the language used to express in writing the oral traditions of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses.” She leaned back in her chair and thought for a few seconds. “The only explanation that makes sense is that this scroll—the Copper Scroll—came from a completely different source.”
Bronson nodded. Angela’s logic was, as usual, compelling. “I know what you said before, but isn’t it at least possible that the other objects—the ‘scroll of silver’ and the ‘tablets of the temple’—were also hidden somewhere at Qumran?”
Angela shook her head. “I don’t think so. If they’d hidden everything in one place, I would expect the inscription to say something like ‘and at Qumran we hid the two scrolls and the tablets,’ but the text describes hiding the first scroll and then goes on to talk about concealing the other objects. That suggests they hid one relic there and went somewhere else to hide the others.”
She looked at Bronson. Her determination to solve this mystery was almost palpable.
“It’s up to us to find out where they put them,” she finished.
51
“Got it,” Tony Baverstock muttered, running his eyes over the sheet of paper in front of him again.
The three men were in his room at the Tel Aviv hotel. Ever since they’d arrived in Israel, Baverstock had been poring over the translations of the Aramaic text he’d copied from the clay tablets.
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