The Lost Codex

PROLOGUE

Eylad Uziel walked carefully over the rough terrain of the Qumran caves. This was Bedouin territory in land governed by Jordan, but he was an Israeli — an unusual if not suicidal proposition. Then again, no one knew his true identity or nationality. Officially, he was the primary translator on the Catholic archaeological team led by Roland de Vaux, a French Dominican priest. Their sprawling, multiyear project was like no other in history: excavating the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Uziel, a soldier during Israel’s war of independence and a scholar before that, had been recruited into Mossad, the fledgling security service designed to gather information regarding threats to the state. Given Israel’s location, pinned in by hostile countries determined to wipe it off the face of the earth, Mossad’s charge was a vital asset during a time of unrest.

But Uziel’s assignment was extraordinary. In spring 1947 a Bedouin shepherd had stumbled onto a cave containing ancient scrolls on animal parchment that turned out to be a handwritten copy of the Old Testament, penned thousands of years ago under the threat of the advancing Romans and their conquering marauders. Uziel’s job was to blend in with the archaeologists working at the site, take stock of what was discovered, and perform a cursory accounting of its significance. Six years earlier, when the first cave had been discovered, the Bedouins who found the scrolls sold them to private antiquities dealers.

Israel, like the West Bank, was still under British rule at the time and powerless to stop the plundering of what its leaders felt was its legacy: the two-thousand-year-old documents were the earliest recorded portions of the Hebrew Bible ever discovered, copied by an ancient Jewish sect whose members likely believed that they were preparing an archive to preserve their religious and cultural traditions in the event the Romans sacked Jerusalem.

The scrolls belonged in a museum, not on the black market.

Uziel’s scholarly work, leading digs and excavating Israel’s hidden history in stone fragments, leather parchments, long-buried buildings, coins, and religious artifacts, also entailed providing analysis to the government and its burgeoning national museum, so that the ancient Jewish civilization that populated the Judean land over the centuries could be properly recorded, studied, and brought into historical perspective.

On November 29, 1947—the day of the historic United Nations vote in Queens, New York, that partitioned Palestine and led to the establishment of the state of Israel five months later — Uziel had purchased three scrolls from a Jordanian antiquities dealer.

Examining the manuscripts left him thirsty to see what other parchments had been holed away in that cave — and the adjacent caves that had been excavated in the subsequent years. Not far away sat the ruins of a complex that housed the Essenes, the Jewish sect whose community members were thought to be the scrolls’ primary scribes.

Despite Uziel’s efforts, and those of other Mossad and government agents, many of the ancient scrolls were still privately held — most notably, by a Palestinian family who had purchased them for a pittance from the Bedouin, who did not know the significance of what they had stumbled upon.

The Vatican had stepped in and taken custody of the rest, and despite requests from numerous Catholic and Jewish scholars, kept them under lock and key, sequestered for some as yet unstated reason.

Uziel made a case to the young Israeli government and national museum that they needed a set of eyes at the dig, overseeing any new discoveries.

Bolstering Uziel’s argument, intelligence analysts had heard rumors that Roland de Vaux’s deputy, Alberi Michel, was a bigoted, vindictive sort who was a fascist sympathizer and displayed flashes of anti-Semitism. Although Mossad could not verify such allegations, Uziel’s mission was approved and conceived in a way that the Israeli government could have eyes on the ground, ensuring that whatever remained of its cultural and historical treasures were not defaced, destroyed, stolen, or sold on the black market.

Uziel wore a straw hat with a wide brim and a white linen shirt, his skin brown from months in the intense sun. Standing on a precipice and looking out at the Qumran landscape, he drew a cotton rag across his brow. There was no breeze and the air was desert dry, despite the proximity of the Dead Sea, which sat off to his left, in plain view on this clear day. Directly in front of him were the undulating burnt sienna and cinnamon colored rocky outcroppings of the hills that sported small openings to the caves which had served as hiding areas for the clay jars that bore the scrolls.

A loud whistle echoed across the divide a few meters away, in the vicinity of Cave 11. Uziel made his way over, navigating the rough terrain and using rope ladders stretched across the stony surfaces.

“I’ve got something!” one of the men said in French. “Another scroll, a big one.”

Uziel quickened his pace. Finds of any magnitude were now few and far between, and witnessing the moment of its unveiling was a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Uziel climbed the rope ladder, slipping twice and nearly taking a header when his toe missed the rung and instead hit a protrusion in the rock face. “What do you got?” he asked in Arabic.

“Look, look!” Michel said. He tossed his whisker brush aside and squared his body in front of the excavated find. “Give me a hand.”

There were now three men in the mouth of the cave behind Uziel. He knelt beside Michel and helped him lift the clay vessel from the loosened dirt.

“How do you know there’s a scroll in here?”

“There’s always a scroll in these pots.”

Uziel gave him a look.

“And I peeked.”

Uziel laughed — more giddy with excitement than from the comment.

The two men carried the container carefully, the other workers standing aside as if in reverence of its contents. Twenty minutes later, they had the receptacle open and the scroll sitting on a work table that was shielded from the elements.

They put on clean work gloves, then Michel glanced at Uziel. “It’s big, like I told you.”

“I can see that.”

They held their breath as they began to slowly unroll it. After exposing three feet, they paused and Uziel hunched over the parchment. This was why he was here: to read, and translate, the Hebrew or Aramaic.

“Remarkably well preserved,” Uziel said. His eyes moved from right to left, line to line, when Michel nudged his left shoulder.

“What is it?” Michel asked. “What’s it say?”

Uziel kept reading. “This is … it’s different.”

“Different? How so?”

He carefully unrolled another foot and continued moving across the document. “Extraordinary.” He stopped and looked up. “Clear the table, give me more to read.”

“Tell me,” Michel said, staring at the black ink block letters. “What does it say?”

Uziel soldiered on, his lips moving as he spoke the Hebrew aloud. Ten minutes later, having reached the end, he reached for the chair behind him and sat down heavily.

“I swear it,” Michel said. “By the hand of Christ, I will strike you with my walking stick if you don’t tell me what it says.”

“Christ is an interesting choice of words.” He made eye contact and his elation turned to concern. “This could change history, my friend.”