The Moses Stone

55

'So we carry on?' Bronson asked, as they drove back to Tel Aviv.

They'd made it down the hillside to the car park 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 – beside 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 centre 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 website 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 minibar, 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.'