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.
'You've cracked it?' Charlie Hoxton asked. He put down a bottle of local Dancing Camel beer he'd bought that afternoon and walked across to the table where Baverstock had been working.
'I wondered at first if there might be three missing tablets, not just one, but if that were the case, the lines in the corners made no sense. So I tried to reassemble the tablets into a square and looked again at the inscription. The answer was childishly easy. You read the first word at the right-hand end of the top line of the first tablet, which is the one we don't have, of course.'
Baverstock gestured at the scatter of papers on the table. He'd prepared four sheets of A4, and written the English versions of the Aramaic inscriptions he'd managed to translate on three of them, then slid them into position. The fourth sheet, the one at the top right, was blank apart from a short line in the bottom left-hand corner, that mated with similar lines drawn on the other three pages.
'Then,' Baverstock went on, 'you read the word in the same position on the next three tablets, reading anticlockwise, of course. That gives you: "by Elazar Ben", so the first word, the missing word, is probably "selected" or "ordered", or something similar. The next word on the tablet that we don't have is almost certainly "Ya'ir", to complete the proper name of the leader of the Sicarii at Masada. But that word doesn't occur on the top line of the inscription. Instead, you take the first word from the line below, and repeat that process for each tablet. It's a very simple but clever code.'
'Right, got that, I think,' Hoxton muttered impatiently.
'All clever stuff. But all I want to know is what the bloody tablets say.'
'I already know what they say,' Baverstock snapped, and handed over another page.
Hoxton carefully read what the ancient-language specialist had written down in block capitals.
'Very impressive, Tony,' Hoxton nodded. 'Now tell me what all that lot means. What are we actually looking for?'
'I would have thought it was obvious what the inscriptions refer to,' Baverstock replied sharply. 'The decoded text explicitly mentions the "copper scroll" and "scroll blank silver".'
'But unless there are two copper scrolls, that relic has already been found,' Dexter said.
Baverstock snorted. 'That's the point. Look at the inscription, and you'll see that the discovery of the Copper Scroll at Qumran actually validates what's written on these tablets. That relic was found in Cave Three in 1952; the people who prepared these clay tablets put it in there. Look at the text.'
Baverstock underlined the relevant passage with a pencil. 'Let me just fill in a few of these blanks with my best guesses,' he said, scribbling on the sheet. 'Right. That reads something like: "The copper scroll that we took from Ein-Gedi we have hidden in the cave of Hammad the place of the scrolls of . . ." The next word's missing, because it's on the fourth tablet. Then the text continues: "beside the settlement known as Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca". That's as clear a statement as you'll ever find describing the hiding of the Copper Scroll.
'I don't know what this word is here, between "of" and "beside", but it presumably refers to either a place or a person. It might be Jericho or Jerusalem, say, or possibly the name of the person or tribe that owned the other scrolls. It's a pity we don't know what it is,' Baverstock mused, 'because it might once and for all solve the mystery of who actually wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it's interesting that the inscription specifically states that the Copper Scroll came from Ein-Gedi.'
'Where's that?'
'Ein-Gedi was an important Jewish settlement built around an oasis not far from the west side of the Dead Sea, fairly close to Qumran, in fact. And that gives us another clue – or rather a confirmation – that the people who prepared these tablets were members of the Sicarii. About the only raid on Ein-Gedi of any significance, according to the references I've found on the internet, was in AD 72 or 73, and was carried out by a raiding party of Sicarii from Masada. That ties in quite nicely with the first few words of the inscription because at that time the Sicarii were led by Elazar Ben Ya'ir. About seven hundred inhabitants of Ein-Gedi were slaughtered, and the raiders made off with whatever they could lay their hands on. It looks like one of the objects they found was the Copper Scroll, and another was the Silver Scroll.'
Hoxton and Dexter were both studying the inscription while Baverstock offered his explanation.
'What about these "tablets of the temple"?' Hoxton asked. 'Did they come from Ein-Gedi as well? And what are they?'
Baverstock shook his head. 'The inscription doesn't say that the Sicarii looted them, so it's possible they already owned them. The complete phrase probably states "the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem". Maybe they were decorative stone slabs, or perhaps they were tablets with prayers or something engraved on them. Whatever they were, they're not important to us. What we're after is the Silver Scroll.'
'And the big question, of course,' Hoxton said, 'is where we start looking. This inscription says that the Copper Scroll was hidden at Qumran. Does that mean that the Silver Scroll was put there as well?'
'No,' Baverstock said. 'The two relics are referred to quite separately. The Copper Scroll was left in the cave at Qumran, but the other scroll was concealed in a cistern somewhere else. At the moment, I'm not sure what the author of this inscription meant by the expression "the place of something end of days". The simplest interpretation would be "the place of the end of days", but I'll need to do a lot more research before I can tell you what he was referring to. And while I'm doing that, you'd better sort out the hardware we need. When we move, we'll probably have to move fast.'