The Lost Testament

21

That evening, Angela followed her usual routine once she got back to her apartment. She poured herself a large glass of wine, switched on the TV to inspect the day’s news, and flopped down on the sofa, kicking off her shoes as she did so. Once she’d seen the headlines, she used the remote control to turn off the set, and then opened up her laptop.

She worked her way quickly through her work inbox, marking the vast majority of the emails not simply for deletion, but also to be bounced back to the sender — her way of trying to spam the spammers. As she glanced down the list of senders of the unread emails, one message stood out. She hadn’t heard from that particular person for some months, and the area he worked in was of great interest to her.

She clicked it open, and read the fairly short message. The first couple of brief paragraphs were simply a polite catch-up, which her eyes skimmed over as she looked for the meat in the sandwich. Although she didn’t know Ali Mohammed particularly well, she knew that he was not inclined to waste words, nor to contact her simply to ask what she was up to. He would have a very specific reason for sending her a message, and she was keen to find out what it was.

His question was in the final paragraph. A colleague had given him a sheet of parchment to work on. The relic appeared to be old, he explained somewhat unnecessarily, and the writing on it was largely invisible. He would be working on it to try to decipher exactly what the text said, and if it was interesting he would be happy to send her a photograph of the parchment and a copy of the text.

But in the meantime, there were a few words that could be read on the parchment and he thought the subject matter might prove of interest to her, in view of her previous experiences with relics from this period and location. The period, he went on to explain, was most likely late in the first century BC, perhaps a few years earlier, and the location was almost certainly Judaea. Judaea under the Romans, in fact, because the text on the parchment was clearly written in Latin, implying that it had been penned by an official in either the Roman government or the Roman army. And there were, he finished, two proper names which could be read, at least partially, and he would be interested to know if she had heard of them in any relevant context.

The first name, he explained, was ‘ippori’ with two unreadable letters at the start of the word, which suggested it might be ‘Tzippori’. Nothing else he could think of fitted. That had convinced him that the parchment referred to events in ancient Judaea, because Tzippori, as he was sure Angela knew, was the old name for the town of Sepporis, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 4 BC, following the death of Herod. The second name was clearly Jewish in origin, but was also only partially readable, the letters which could be interpreted with certainty being ef bar he, the bar meaning ‘son of’.

‘Ef bar he,’ Angela muttered to herself, as she read the last paragraph again. It seemed to strike a chord somewhere in her memory, but for the moment she just couldn’t pin it down.

She quickly typed a reply to Ali Mohammed, telling him that she would be interested in reading the complete text of the parchment if and when he was able to decipher it, and assuring him that she would investigate the information he had already given her. She sent the email, closed the laptop and walked briskly to her kitchen. She pulled open the freezer and selected a frozen lasagne. When she was by herself, she never bothered cooking, relying mostly on ready meals of one sort or another.

She decided that she’d eat dinner, then spend some time researching the words Ali Mohammed had seen on the parchment.

But that plan was immediately shelved when Chris Bronson, her ex-husband and best friend, called and asked if she’d like to go out for a bite to eat.

It wasn’t a difficult decision for her to make.