The Moses Stone

49

The longer Angela and Bronson worked at the translation, the easier it seemed to get, and although the first line had taken them over an hour to crack, they managed to get the entire inscription finished in just under three hours, which Angela didn't think was bad going, even though there were still three words that had stubbornly refused to yield their meanings.

They rewarded each other with a drink from the minibar and then started the most difficult phase of the entire operation – trying to decipher what the Aramaic text actually meant. As he'd done before, Bronson wrote out the words they'd translated, in the order they appeared on the clay tablet: land cavity describes of the copper -----

of four tablets Ir-Tzadok took perform

belief south of of we of

secure width ----- ---- the have

to and we the the and

the cubit altar place scrolls the

Then he reversed the order to allow them to read the words in the correct sequence:

----- copper the of describes cavity land

perform took Ir-Tzadok tablets four of

of we of of south belief

have the ----- ----- width secure

and the the we and to

the scrolls place altar cubit the

Bronson looked at what he'd written, then flicked back through the other pages in front of him.

'Right,' he said, 'I'll incorporate these words in the full translation and then maybe we'll be able to see the wood rather than just the trees.'

He worked for a few minutes, then passed over the final version – or at least the final version with the information they had to hand:

----- by ----- ben ----- ----- perform the ----- task of the -----

----- have completed ----- ----- and now ----- ----- the last

----- the copper scroll ----- ----- took from ----- ----- we have

----- ----- the cave ----- ----- the place ----- ----- scrolls of

----- ----- the settlement ----- ----- Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca -----

scroll of silver ----- ----- ----- we ----- ----- the cistern -----

----- place of ----- end of days ----- the tablets of ----- temple

of Jerusalem ----- ----- ----- the ----- ----- we concealed -----

----- altar of ----- ----- describes a ----- ----- four stones -----

the south side ----- a width of ----- ----- and height -----

----- cubit to ----- ----- cavity within ----- ----- of our ----- -----

belief now ----- ----- secure we ----- ----- to our ----- ----- the

invaders ----- our land

'I can probably fill in another couple of the words we haven't deciphered.' Angela pointed at their translation. 'I think that section reads "the settlement known as Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca". I just wish we had a few more . . .'

Her voice died away as she stared at the page, and Bronson looked at her sharply. 'What is it?' he asked.

'The lines just before it,' she said. 'From the tone of what you've read in this translation, how would you describe the person who wrote it?'

'I don't follow you.'

'I mean, do you think that person was a priest, or a warrior, or what?'

Bronson read the text again and thought for a moment. 'There's not a lot to go on apart from that last section, where it looks as if he could be justifying fighting the invaders. So if I had to guess I'd say he was probably a warrior, maybe a member of the Jewish resistance or whatever they had in those days.'

'Exactly. Now look at this section, from where it says "the copper scroll" to "the cave". Remember that around the beginning of the first millennium the Jews didn't have an army. They weren't organized in the way that the Romans were, into formalized fighting units. They were more like gangs of fighters that would band together against the common invader when it suited them. The rest of the time they fought amongst themselves when they weren't raiding settlements to steal food and money and weapons.'

'Like guerrillas?' Bronson suggested.

'Precisely. With that in mind, I think we can make a bit more sense of that section of the text. Put the words "which we" in front of "took from" and that could be a description of a raid. They hit some settlement, and one of the things they took from it was a copper scroll.'

'So?'

'So they obviously realized it wasn't just any old copper scroll, because it then looks as if they hid it in a cave, and probably a cave at Qumran because the reference to Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca occurs very shortly afterwards.' Angela paused and looked at Bronson. 'What do you know about Qumran?' she asked.

'Not a lot. I know the Dead Sea Scrolls were found there, and I think they were written by a tribe called the Essenes, and then they hid them in the nearby caves.'

Angela nodded. 'That's one view, but it's almost certainly wrong. There was a community at Qumran, and the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in eleven caves located just to the west of the settlement. The scrolls contain multiple copies of the books of the Old Testament, and include every book of the Hebrew Bible apart from the Book of Esther. About eighty per cent were written on parchment, and the rest – with one exception – on papyrus. Those are the facts. Everything else is a matter of interpretation.

'One of the problems is that the archaeologist who first excavated at Qumran in 1949 – he was a Dominican friar named Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique in Jerusalem – started with the caves and the scrolls, assumed that the Qumran community had prepared them, and used that as the basis for his deductions about the people of that community. That's a bit like somebody excavating the remains of the Bodleian Library in a thousand years' time, finding only some of the ancient Roman texts that are stored there and assuming that the people of Oxford were Latin-speaking and addicted to gladiatorial games.'

'A lot of people at Oxford do speak Latin,' Bronson pointed out, 'and it wouldn't surprise me if some of them were into gladiators as well.'

Angela smiled. 'OK, but you can see what I'm driving at. The point is that Father de Vaux made the assumption that, because the scrolls had been hidden close to the Qumran community, they must have been written by members of that community, though there was actually no empirical evidence whatsoever to support this hypothesis. And if the Essenes did write the scrolls, why did they choose to hide them so close to where they were living? It would have been pointless as a means of concealment. But once de Vaux had got that idea set firmly in his mind, it slanted his view of every single piece of evidence that he looked at.

'He came to the conclusion that the people of Qumran were members of a Jewish sect called the Essenes, a very religious group. When he started looking at the settlement itself, he claimed to have identified a scriptorium – a place where monks or scribes would have copied or prepared manuscripts – based purely on his discovery of a bench, two inkwells and a handful of writing implements.

'But there are plenty of different possible interpretations: it could have been a schoolroom or a military or commercial office, for example. And not even the tiniest fragment of a scroll has ever been found in the socalled scriptorium, and that is just ridiculous – if it really had been a room used only for that purpose, it would have been full of the tools and materials used by the scribes. At the very least you would have expected to find some scraps of blank papyrus or the remains of scrolls in the ruins.

'To support his belief that the Essenes were devoutly religious, he also identified several cisterns on the site as Jewish ritual baths, or miqva'ot. If he'd looked at Qumran in isolation, without knowledge of the scrolls, he would probably have assumed that the cisterns were just receptacles for holding water, which would be the obvious and logical deduction. De Vaux also ignored numerous other significant items that were recovered from the site. Don't forget, archaeologists are very good at ignoring inconvenient facts – they've had a hell of a lot of practice.'

'But I thought archaeology was a science,' Bronson said. 'Scientific method, the peer review process, carbon dating and all that?'

'Dream on. Just like everyone else, archaeologists have been known to fudge results and disregard things that don't fit. Now, if Father de Vaux's theory was correct, then the Qumran Essenes would have lived lives of abject poverty, but other excavations on the site recovered money, glassware, stoneware, metal implements and ornaments, and assorted other relics, all of which seemed to imply that the inhabitants had been both secular and fairly well-off.'

'But if Qumran wasn't a religious site, what was it?'

'More likely suggestions are it could have been a wealthy manor house; a principal or second home for an important local family; a stopping-off point for pilgrims en route to Jerusalem; a pottery factory; even a fortress or a fortified trading station.

'The other thing de Vaux did was try to stop anyone outside his select group of researchers from gaining access to the scrolls, or even seeing photographs of them. At least, that applied to those found in Cave Four, which represented about forty per cent of the total material recovered.'

'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, were 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 are also a lot of secular texts, most previously unknown, which shed new light on the form of Judaism that was practised 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 1,350 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.'