The Moses Stone (30 page)

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Authors: James Becker

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adventure

BOOK: The Moses Stone
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“I’m fine. The shot didn’t hit you?”
Angela shook her head. “I thought he was firing at you,” she said. “What happened in there?”
Bronson grinned. “We had a difference of opinion, but fortunately I had the element of surprise.”
“He’s dead?”
“No, just sleeping it off. Just as well I had this flashlight.”
Bronson pointed at her improvised weapon, which she’d dropped and was now tumbling away down the hillside. “What were you going to do with that?” he asked.
“I’ve no idea, but I wasn’t going to leave you up here.”
“Thanks,” he said, suddenly feeling a lot happier. “Now, let’s go. Just because I’ve dealt with one man doesn’t mean there aren’t others watching for us. We need to hurry.”
55
 
“So we carry on?” Bronson asked, as they drove back to Tel Aviv.
They’d made it down the hillside to the parking lot in record time, and he was driving as quickly as the road conditions allowed. He had to assume that somebody had followed them from their Tel Aviv hotel to Qumran, and he intended to get back to the city and find another place to stay as soon as they could.
“Yes,” Angela replied. “If anything, I’m even keener to find the Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant, especially now that it seems others are after them as well. I think we can assume that, can’t we?”
Bronson nodded, his eyes on the road.
“But what I can’t work out,” Angela continued, “is who—besides us—is looking for these relics.”
“I don’t know, but when I looked at that man’s face up there in the cave I knew I’d seen him before. I’ve got a good memory for faces, and I’m sure he was one of the people in the photographs Margaret O’Connor took in the
souk
in Rabat, which means he was one of the Moroccan gang. I guess he’d been told to follow us and try to recover the clay tablet that Yacoub thought we’d got.”
“You should have killed him. And then taken his gun.”
Bronson shook his head. “Killing him would have been a really bad idea,” he said. “Leaving him with a sore head means the Israeli police probably won’t get involved, and that suits me just fine. I would have grabbed his pistol, but it fell into a crevice in the rocks and I couldn’t get it out.” Bronson paused and looked at Angela. “If we carry on, this could get pretty dangerous for us both. Are you prepared for that?”
“Yes,” Angela said firmly. “We have to find that scroll.”
 
That evening, Bronson and Angela ate an early dinner in Angela’s room in the small hotel they’d hastily moved to when they returned from Qumran. Bronson had chosen a place well away from the center of Tel Aviv, where he hoped they’d be less likely to be spotted by any watchers, and where surveillance might be a little easier for him to detect. When they’d finished their meal, they had over an hour before their appointment with Yosef Ben Halevi, so they took another look at the translated inscription.
Angela logged on to the Internet and the Aramaic translation site she’d found earlier, and started inputting all the Aramaic words they could read, including those from the tablet stored in the museum in Paris, just in case there had been any mistranslations there, while Bronson looked up the same words in the printed Aramaic dictionary.
After about half an hour she sat back in her chair. “There seem to be only a few possible changes,” she said, “and none of them are important, as far as I can see. In the first line we had ‘settlement,’ and that could also mean ‘village’ or ‘group of habitations.’ In the third line, ‘concealed’ could be ‘hidden’ or ‘secreted.’ In the fourth line the Web site suggests ‘cavern’ instead of ‘cave,’ and in the fifth line ‘well’ rather than ‘cistern.’ But those are all just different words that have almost the same meaning—it’s simply a matter of interpretation.”
Bronson cracked two miniatures of gin from the mini-bar, added tonic and gave one of the glasses to Angela.
“Any luck with the words you couldn’t translate before?” he asked.
“Some, yes. I’d be prepared to bet that the first word on the right-hand side of the top line is ‘Elazar,’ part of the name Elazar Ben Ya’ir. And I did finally translate this word.”
She pointed at “Gedi,” which she’d written on the fourth line of their translation of the Rabat tablet, replacing the blank that had been there previously.
“Where did that come from?” Bronson asked.
“Because I couldn’t find that word in any of the dictionaries, I wondered if it could be another proper name, like ‘Elazar,’ so I started looking for Aramaic versions of family and place names, and I found that.”
“ ‘Gedi’?” Bronson asked, pronouncing it like “Jedi” from the
Star Wars
films.
“Yes. But I don’t know of any locations near Qumran with that name that seemed relevant. I’m hoping that Yosef might have some ideas when we meet him.”
“And what about the word next to it? Any luck with that?”
Angela nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “That translates as ‘Mosheh,’ the Aramaic version of ‘Moses.’ And that means the sentence now reads ‘
the tablets of ----- temple of Jerusalem ----- ----- Moses the ----- -----
.’ If we take an educated guess at the blanks, the original probably said ‘the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem and of Moses the great leader,’ or maybe ‘famous prophet,’ something like that.”
Angela paused and glanced at Bronson. “But what’s obvious,” she said, “is that Yacoub was right—the ‘tablets of the temple’ almost certainly mean the Mosaic Covenant, the stones of the prophet Moses, the original covenant struck between God and the Israelites.”
Bronson shook his head. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m not,” Angela said, “but whoever wrote this inscription obviously believed it.”
“The Ten Commandments.”
“No. Everybody thinks there were ten commandments, but actually there weren’t. It all depends which bit of the Bible you look at, but the best two lists are probably in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, and both these sources state that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with fourteen commandments.”
“ ‘The Fourteen Commandments’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?”
Angela smiled at him. “No, not really. But if you study all of Exodus, you can find over
six hundred
commandments, including gems like ‘you shall not suffer a witch to live’ and ‘you shall never vex a stranger.’ ”
“When did Moses live, assuming he was a real person?”
“Well, as always with this kind of thing, the answer depends on which source you prefer. According to the Talmud, he was born in about 1400 BC to a Jewish woman named Jochebed. When the Pharaoh Feraun ordered that all newborn Hebrew boys be killed, she placed him in a basket of bulrushes and set him adrift on the Nile. He was found by members of the Egyptian royal family and adopted by them. That’s the story we’re all familiar with, and it’s pretty much the same story as that of King Sargon of Akkad in the twenty-fourth century BC, except that the river he floated down was the Euphrates.
“There are a lot of different versions of the myths and legends surrounding Moses, but most Christians and Jews believe he was the man who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and delivered them to the Promised Land in what is now Israel. What’s quite interesting is how often Moses appears in source books of different religions. In Judaism, for example, he appears in a whole host of stories to be found in the Jewish apocrypha, as well as in the Mishnah and the Talmud. In the Christian Bible he appears in both the Old and New Testaments, and he’s the single most dominant character in the Qur’an. The Mormons include the Book of Moses—that’s supposed to be his translated writings—in their scriptural canon. On a lighter note, the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, claimed that Moses owned a disintegrator pistol which was useful in fighting off the aliens who had invaded ancient Egypt.”
Bronson shook his head. “But do you mean Moses did exist or didn’t? And if he didn’t exist, how can the Mosaic Covenant ever have existed?”
“Nobody knows if Moses was a real flesh-and-blood man,” Angela replied, “but the historical validity of the Mosaic Covenant is quite difficult to dispute, simply because there are so many contemporary references to the Ark, the gilded box in which it was housed. The Jews carried something around in it, something that was of crucial importance to their religion.”
She looked at her watch and stood up. “We need to leave right now to meet Yosef.” She paused. “Listen, Chris, we don’t mention the clay tablets, and certainly not the Mosaic Covenant. In fact, just let me do most of the talking.”
56
 
Their new hotel was near Namal Tel Aviv—the port at the northern end of the city—in a maze of one-way streets, but close to Rokach Avenue, which Bronson hoped would offer them a fast route out of Tel Aviv if the need ever arose. Angela had arranged to meet Yosef Ben Halevi in a bar just off Jabotinsky, near the Ha’Azma’ut Garden and the Hilton Beach.
It was only a short walk in the relative cool of the evening, but Bronson decided they’d take the pretty route, simply so he could satisfy himself that they weren’t being followed. So instead of walking straight down Hayark or Ben Yehuda, they followed the Havakook pedestrian walkway past the Sheraton Beach, and then cut through the Hilton Hotel itself.
The city was buzzing, elegantly dressed couples strolling beside the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean as the sun sank below the western horizon in a chaotic artist’s palette of primary colors—reds and blues and yellows. But once they entered the tangle of narrow streets to the east of the Ha’Azma’ut Garden—many named after the world’s major cities, like Basel, Frankfurt and Prague—the scene changed. The hotels were replaced by white-painted low-rise apartment buildings, four and five stories high, walls studded with air-conditioning units, their ground floors a scattering of bars and shops, emblazoned with unfamiliar and exotic signs in Hebrew. Every available parking space seemed to be occupied, frustrating drivers who were nudging their slow-moving vehicles through the crowds of pedestrians as they looked for somewhere to stop.
“There it is,” Bronson said, leading Angela across the street toward the bar. He’d spotted nobody taking the slightest interest in them.
For some reason, Bronson had been expecting that Yosef Ben Halevi would be a venerable professor, bent, gray and stooped, and probably well on the wrong side of sixty. The man who stood up to greet them as they walked into the small and quiet bar was none of these things. About thirty, tall, slim and handsome, and with a mop of curly black hair, he cut an almost Byronic figure.
“Angela,” he said, his smile revealing perfect teeth, their whiteness dazzling against his tanned face.
Bronson disliked him immediately.
“Hullo, Yosef,” Angela said, raising her face to be kissed on both cheeks. “This is Chris Bronson—he used to be my husband. Chris, this is Yosef Ben Halevi.”
Ben Halevi turned to Angela as they all sat down. “You were very mysterious on the phone,” he said. “What are you doing out here, and how can I help you?”
“It’s a little complicated—” Angela began.
“Isn’t it always?” Ben Halevi interrupted, with another brilliant smile.
“We’re here on holiday, but I’ve also been asked to do some research into certain aspects of first-century Jewish history, because of some inscriptions that have turned up back in London.”
“A working holiday, then?” Ben Halevi suggested, with a glance at Bronson.
“Exactly. Specifically, I’m looking into events that took place in the vicinity of Qumran, toward the end of the first century AD.”
Yosef Ben Halevi nodded. “The Essenes and the Sicarii, I suppose? With a side order of Roman legions and the Emperors Nero, Vespasian and Titus, probably.”
The man clearly knew his subject, and Bronson was glad that Angela had chosen such a quiet place to meet him. There were only a handful of people in the bar, and they could talk freely at their corner table without any danger of being overheard.
Angela nodded. “One of the things that puzzles me is the word ‘Gedi,’ which seems to be a proper name, or perhaps part of one. Does that ring any bells with you?”
“Certainly. It depends on the context, obviously, but the most obvious answer is that it’s a reference to Ein-Gedi. And, if it is, that’s a probable link to the Sicarii. Where did you come across it?”
“It’s part of an inscription we unearthed,” Angela said smoothly.
“Right, Ein-Gedi,” Ben Halevi said. “It’s a very fertile oasis lying to the west of the Dead Sea, what the ancients used to call Lake Asphaltitus, not far from both Qumran and Masada.”
“Only an oasis?” Bronson said. “That’s not very exciting.”
“It’s not
only
an oasis. It’s been mentioned numerous times in the Bible, particularly in Chronicles, Ezekiel and Joshua. It even gets a probable name-check in the Song of Solomon—Ein-Gedi is the most obvious interpretation of the word ‘Engaddi’ that occurs in one verse—and allegedly King David hid there when he was being pursued by Saul. It was a really important place throughout quite a long period of Jewish history.”

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