The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran

by Robert Feather

  This chalice was carved from a single block of alabaster, or calcite, as a single bloom of the white lotus inlaid with blue pigment. It is characterized by sixteen to twenty oval-shaped petals and four oval-shaped sepals. Compare the Biblical description:

  There were three cups shaped like almond-blossoms, each with calyx [a whorl of leaves or sepal forming the outer case of the bud] and petals, on one branch…Their calyxes and their stems were of one piece with it, the whole of it a single hammered piece of pure gold.

  Exodus 37:19, 22

  The design of the golden seven-branched lampstand (‘Menorah’) has many pre-Exodus prototypes. One of the clearest of these is to be seen on a bituminous stone bowl from Susa, Elam (Ancient Babylonia), now in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Dated to 2300 BCE, it shows cherubs guarding several identical seven-branched trees that are very close in design to that of the Tabernacle lampstand description.

  There are many other correlative comparisons that can be made in other descriptive passages of the Tabernacle adornments and priestly costumes that were to be worn. Almost every single item relating to the Tabernacle, as described in the Bible, can be identified as being uncannily similar to items in the possession of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten’s successor.

  From the similarity of shape, construction, principles of operation and embellishments it is difficult not to conclude that the ‘Tabernacle’ and the ‘Ark of the Covenant’ were, at the very least, based on Egyptian designs and motifs – motifs that are evident in the Temple of Akhenaten. The close similarities of the Ark indicate that it was almost certainly of Egyptian origin and, like the other treasures carried off from Egypt by the departing Hebrews, was probably given to Moses by the surviving priests of Akhetaten.

  SACRIFICE

  I need to say something here about the Biblical accounts of animal sacrifice that were apparently part of the Tabernacle and later Temple rituals, as they are inconsistent with my previous contention that Akhenaten abhorred the unnecessary shedding of blood and the practice of ‘holocaust’ (burnt) offerings (see Chapter 9).

  The preparations required for sacrifices, as described in the Old Testament, are very similar to pagan sacrifices in ancient Egypt. For example, any animal sacrificed to the Egyptian god Amun had to be scrupulously clean, without any physical blemish and shaved clean of all its hair.

  In most respects the Children of Israel remained faithful to the fundamental beliefs advocated by Akhenaten, but there are certain ritualistic and superstitious practices, of which animal sacrifice is the most pertinent, that appear to have resulted from a ‘reversion’ back into pagan-like behaviour.

  I don’t claim to have a complete answer as to why this particular type of ‘reversion’ relating to sacrifice took place, either during the time the Israelites were wandering the deserts of Sinai or, later, when the Temples were built in Jerusalem. Part of the answer, I believe, lies in the fact that amongst those whom Moses led out of Egypt were a number of Ay-type ‘paper Akhenatenists’, who still hankered after the old rituals of Egypt. Aaron, Moses’ Biblical brother, who was appointed High Priest in charge of arrangements in the Tabernacle, was among these ‘back-sliders’. Sacrificial rituals are described in the Old Testament as being the responsibility of Aaron and his sons, and it was Aaron who later allowed some of the Israelites to dance around naked in front of an idol – the Golden Calf.

  This was not the only incident of major dissent within the camp. Different factions struggled for control of the priesthood and challenged Moses’ authority throughout the period in the wilderness, sometimes with fatal consequences.

  Wherever the Israelites went the treasures that they had brought out of Egypt were guarded by the most trusted tribe of Levis and the Kohathites12 – a grouping who in time would be punished for challenging Moses’ authority and be removed as exclusive trustees of the Ark of the Covenant.

  I am postulating here that the reasons for these squabbles were because the relatively impoverished Hebrew slaves brought out of Egypt by Moses were accompanied by a wealthy class of Egyptians, mainly comprising Egyptian priests – an almost certain scenario for the emergence of group rivalries, jealousies and even violence. All of these emanations were not long in appearing after the Exodus.

  The Old Testament adds credence to my contention that there were Egyptian priests amongst the followers of Moses. In Exodus 12 we find that the Hebrews leaving Egypt were accompanied by a ‘mixed crowd’, and Numbers 16 speaks of two rival factions of priests. One of these factions was led by leaders with Egyptian-style names – Korah, Dathan, Abiram and On, son of Peleth. (‘On’ being the ancient name for the Egyptian city of Heliopolis.)

  THE DNA FACTOR

  There is fascinating firm scientific evidence, 3,000 years after the event, that underlines the homogeneity of the Hebrew peoples but also reveals a genetically separate priestly faction with quite different DNA patterns.

  A January 1997 edition of Nature carried an article on the ‘Y chromosomes of Jewish priests’.13 The Y-chromosome is inherited paternally and does not recombine. Because of this fact the research teams at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the University of Toronto, University College, London and the University of Arizona who wrote the article, chose to study the genetic coding of Jewish males whose designation to the priesthood, through strict patrilineal descent, has continued for thousands of years right up to this day.14 The surnames of the priestly strain are generally derivations of the name ‘Cohanim’. The researchers concluded that there are clear differences in the frequency of Y-chromosome hapolytes*33 between an unbroken line of Jewish ‘priests’ and their lay counterparts. Quite remarkably, the difference is observable in both the Ashkenazi- (Central European) and Sephardi- (North African, Spanish, Middle Eastern) descended populations, despite the huge geographical separations of these original communities.

  The study showed that there is a ‘relative preponderance of the YAPDYS19B hapolyte in both Jewish populations, suggesting that this may have been the founding modal hapolyte of the Jewish priesthood’. The presence or absence of the YAP chromosome is thought to represent a unique evolutionary event dated to between 29,000 and 340,000 years ago. The significance of this latter statement is that the priestly strain must have pre-existed, by many thousands of years, events in biblical times.

  In other words the priestly group that were ‘chosen’ by Moses to provide the line of High Priests and prime guardians of the holy rituals, were already genetically different from the bulk of Hebrews and must have come, or originated, from outside the main Hebrew tribes.

  One possible consequence of the genetic-factor evidence is that Aaron and his family, who were designated to fill the role of High Priest, were of a different DNA grouping to the rest of the Hebrews. As the brother of Moses, in Old Testament terms, the proposition that Moses was an Egyptian becomes even more convincing. Another possibility is that Korah, as previously suggested (see p.131), was one of the leaders of the Egyptian priests that came out of Egypt with Moses, and that his family gave rise to the line of High Priests. This is quite a seductive theory in view of the similarity of the sound of his name and that of the ‘Cohanim’ or ‘Cohan’.

  EVIDENCE FROM THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

  There is more evidence that the secret teachings the Atenist-inspired priests might have brought out of Egypt predated the teachings of Moses. The Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, particularly those from Cave 4 at Qumran, give us very potent evidence. Amongst the fragmentary scrolls are two works known as ‘The Testament of Amram’ and ‘The Testament of Qahat’.15 The name ‘Qahat’ is translated by Eisenman and Wise as ‘Kohath’.16 Both these works record that holy texts, written long before the time of Moses, were handed down through the priestly line.

  It is worth looking at part of ‘The Testament of Amram’, which has been translated by Geza Vermes from the Aramaic:

  Copy of the book (text) of the words of the vision of Amram, son of Kehat, son of Levi, al[l that] he explained
to his sons and enjoined on them on the day of [his] death, in his one-hundredand-thirty-seventh year, which was the year of his death, [in] the one-hundred-and-fifty-second year of Israel’s exile in Egypt…to call Uzziel, his younger brother, and he ma[rried] to him Miriam, [his] daughter, and said (to her), ‘You are thirty years old’. And he gave a banquet lasting seven days. And he ate and drank and made merry during the banquet. Then, when the days of the banquet were completed, he sent to call Aaron, his son, and he was…years old.17

  In the text Amram is said to have died aged 137, indicating that Amram, whom the Bible names as being the father of Moses (and Aaron and Miriam), is, rather, the ‘spiritual father’ of Moses. Nevertheless we are given a very precise figure, which is not one of our ‘magic numbers’ conjured up for mathematical convenience (see Chapter 7 ). The place name ‘Amram’ became closely associated with the area of Akhenaten’s holy city of Akhetaten, after its destruction around 1300 BCE. I believe there was a ‘mixing’ of names, and that the Amram being referred to could well be Akhenaten himself, and the texts his texts, or is certainly a reference to Akhetaten.

  Akhenaten died c.1332 BCE, aged approximately thirty, so his allegoric death*34 some 107 years later, would have meant he lived until 1225 BCE – very close to the dates I propose (and many scholars prefer) for the time of Aaron and Moses. The implication is that the texts being referred to were passed down through a strand of the priestly line, who may have added to them, but that they originated from the time of Akhenaten.

  Incidentally, the Amram Testament refers to a seven-day banquet. What on earth were impoverished slaves doing, living it up in such an extravagant manner – unless of course they had loads of money and Royal connections!

  MANETHO, MEYER AND MOSES

  I have mentioned Manetho, a renowned thirrd century BCE Egyptian scholar and priest, several times before. But this is where Manetho’s evidence throws its full weight behind my theories.

  Manetho was born in the region of the northern Delta and lived and worked at Alexandria during the time of the Greek rulers. He left us two major treatises that have had a pivotal bearing on our understanding of early Egypt. The first was the earliest, almost complete, chronology of the Pharaohs, which has been crucial in establishing the dates and identities of Egyptian dynastic rulers. His second major contribution was a history of Egypt, of which his details on two versions of the ‘Exodus’ is of most interest in our search for the links between Akhenaten, Moses and the Qumran-Essenes.

  Unfortunately, although considering the 2,300 years that have elapsed since his time it is hardly surprising, none of Manetho’s writings have survived in their original form. What we do have are variants of his texts recorded by other Alexandrian historians, such as Chaeremon and Apion, and corroborations from other non-Egyptian writers, like Hecataeus, Diodorus and our old friend Josephus – the first century CE Jewish-Roman historian. Josephus recorded details of the ‘Exoduses’ and his accounts are considered to be derivatives of Manetho’s work.

  Manetho wrote most of his works at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, one of the new Greek rulers of Egypt, so they have a certain slant. Extracting the truth from Manetho’s evidence is therefore not easy; he was writing to cater for Greek sensibilities as well as trying to project historical Egypt as a worthy civilization that the Greeks might be proud to maintain. There is also the consideration that subsequent witnesses also had their own ‘hidden agendas’ in reworking Manetho’s texts. Many scholars have attempted to unravel ‘the truth’ in Manetho’s writings, and modern experts credit Eduard Meyer, a German scholar, as having come closest to the target.18

  Manetho wrote of two expulsions from Egypt. The first was of the Hyksos ‘shepherd-foreigners’ in the sixteenth century BCE, and the later one of foreigners and lepers at the time of Moses. He actually gives us the earliest, and almost certainly clearest, non-Biblical reference confirming an Exodus of the Hebrews under Moses’ leadership. Meyer concludes that the two Exodus versions were conflated in Josephus’s version, and allusions to ‘Solymites’ (builders of King Solomon’s Temple) and a destination of ‘Jerusalem’ are more appropriate to the later ‘Exodus’.

  It is in the personal names that Manetho quotes in association with the later Exodus that we find clues as to the connection between the Hebrews and Akhenaten. Clues that show they kept the memory of Aten in their midst.

  In the later ‘Exodus’ Manetho refers to ‘Osarsiph’ as a leader of a people that can only be the Hebrews. As Lucia Raspe, of Freie University, Berlin, points out,19 the name has ‘long been suspected of being a pseudo-translation of Joseph’, and the texts associate Joseph with service to the monotheism of the ‘Aten’ disc of Akhenaten and to Heliopolis.

  Two other names emerge in relation to Joseph and to the Exodus – Amenophis and Ramses. Amenophis has been identified as Amenhotpe, son of Hapu, who served as a royal scribe to Akhenaten’s father Amenhotep III (1387–1349 BCE) and was closely associated with Akhenaten. The Ramses of the Exodus period is identified as Ramses III. Immediately prior to the reign of Ramses III there occurred a well-documented period of thirteen years’ ‘chaos and upheaval’ during the reign of Ramses III’s father, Setnakhte. This anarchical situation is ascribed to a power struggle taking place at Court during what, I believe, was a period when ‘Aten’ was back in favour, promoted by powerful backers including Moses. There was an atmosphere of resurgent Atenism in the air.

  Setnakhte’s predessor, Merneptah, may also have had an encounter with the Israelites. In Chapter 7, I referred to the Merneptah stela as the first authenticated mention of the Israelites from an Egyptian source. It is in relation to this critically important stela that we find another pictorial indication of how the Egyptians identified the Hebrews.

  Figure 10 shows the hieroglyph passages inscribed on the front of the stela. Reading from the top of the stela downwards we learn of three battles against places in Canaan and a final encounter with a people:

  Ashkelon has been overcome

  Gezer has been captured

  Yano-am is made non-existent

  Israel is laid waste and his seed is not

  The final battle, which is the first attested mention of Israel in history, is against a people not yet settled in a place. The interpretation of this sequence of battles is generally taken to imply that the Israelites have not yet settled in Canaan, or may not even have reached it.

  Merneptah is killed somewhere near the Red Sea, c.1210 BCE, and this unusual demise of a pharaoh whilst still in office, ties in well with the biblical story of the pharaoh who pursued the Israelites and met a fatal end. What, however, is most intriguing is the connection that the historian Frank Yurco makes between the Merneptah stela and a relief carved on a temple wall at Karnak. As one of the foremost female archaeologists in the world, Kathleen Kenyon states in her book, The Bible and Recent Archaeology, published in 1987, that Frank Yurco, an American Egyptologists, argues persuasively that the Karnak relief, previously ascribed to Ramses II, really applies to the time of Merneptah. The relief, seen in Figure 11, shows the same sequence of battles as described in the Merneptah stela, with the bottom scene showing the victims being trampled under water by the chariots of the pharaoh.

  Figure 10: Pictorial of the Merneptah stela, with the name of Israel in hieroglyphs as ‘Y-sara- el’ in the middle of the penultimate line at the bottom. (After P. Kyle McCarter, Jr, Ancient Inscriptions, Biblical Archaeology Society, 1996, Washington DC.)

  Figure 11: Drawing of the relief at Karnak, attributed to Merneptah, showing a series of battle scenes, paralleling descriptions in the Merneptah stela. Note the bald heads with double fillet in the bottom scene which may indicate these are Hebrews. (After K. Kenyon, The Bible and Recent Archaeology, British Museum Publications.)

  If Frank Yurco’s interpretation is correct, and I believe the matching sequence of battles demonstrates its validity, the final scene on the Karnak relief is a depiction of Israelites, or Hebrews. The hea
dresses of the Canaanite battle scenes above identifies those being attacked as Asiatics, but when it comes to the battle scene with the Israelites, their headgear in a rarely seen form – bald heads with double thin fillets around the top part of the head. This is exactly the same headgear that is seen on the figure leading the procession in the Great Temple of Akhetaten, illustrated in Chapter 10, who I maintain is that of the biblical figure of the Hebrew Joseph. The headgear used to identify the Hebrews in the Karnak relief is the same as that used to identify Joseph, the Hebrew Vizier at Pharaoh Akhenaten’s Great Temple!

  At the end of this period of ‘chaos and upheaval’ the throne was occupied by Setnakhte, and his name reveals a predilection towards Akhenaten’s monotheism. The ‘nakhte’ element of his name identifies him with the name ‘Nakhte’, or Vizier – as Joseph was referred to at the time of Akhenaten. Moreover, his throne name of ‘Userkaura Meryamun’ identifies him with ‘Meryra’ – the High Priest at Akhenaten’s Court. What better time for Moses to take advantage of thirteen years of destabilization and a favourably disposed king to seek release of his adopted people?

  Chaeremon’s version of Manetho’s ‘Exodus’ quotes Moses as being a leader of the afflicted people whom he leads out of Egypt. The Egyptian name he gives for Moses is ‘Tisithen’ and this name, as a number of scholars conclude, almost certainly preserves the name of ‘Aten’ in its etymology, reaffirming the association I have previously made between Moses and Atenism.

  To summarize the analysis of Manetho’s works, he records:

  Joseph as a contemporary of Akhenaten

  Setnakhte as the probable Pharaoh of the ‘Exodus’

  Moses as leading the Hebrews from Egypt somewhere between 1206 and 1189 BCE

  Moses’ name testifying to an allegiance to the monotheism of Akhenaten.