He perceives many of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls of the Qumran-Essenes, such as the Temple Scroll; New Jerusalem Scroll; the Aramaic Testament of Levi, Qahat, and Amram; Jubilees; and the Cairo-Damascus documents, as derivative of Ezekiel’s refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the Second Temple and standing outside normative Judaistic authority. In a sense he recognises two quite separate sets of biblical texts – Ezekielian and non-Ezekielian.
By going back to Ezekiel’s time of the sixth century BCE, Professor Wacholder bridges a large part of the gap between the Qumran-Essenes and Pharaoh Akhenaten, and his views forge Isambard Kingdom Brunel*60 size links in the intervening chain. Whilst I agree with many of the Professor’s contentions, I believe that some of Ezekiel’s apparently derivative scrolls contain material that predates the prophet by many centuries. But Professor Wacholder goes further. The Zadokite priests who feature in the Book of Ezekiel have generally been associated with the theocratic state founded by Jeshua ben Jozadaq and Zerubbabel – respectively, High Priest and rebuilder of the Second Temple after the return of many Israelites from captivity in Babylon.16 Ben Zion Wacholder disagrees with this view as follows:
I, however, differ with this accepted interpretation. As I see it, Ezekiel’s Benei Zadok (sons of Zadok) reflect a movement that stood in opposition to the sacerdotal authorities who controlled the First Temple from the time of Solomon, and whose descendants ruled Judea until the Seleucid persecution. In fact, the book of Ezekiel may be read, as indeed it was by the author of CD (Cairo-Damascus Documents) and many of the rabbinic sages, as an indictment of the preexilic high priests. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the book of Ezekiel served as a kind of textbook or systematic program for sectarian Judaism of the Second Temple era.17
If Ezekiel is in the direct linkage from Qumran to Akhetaten, then Professor Wacholder’s next assertion takes us back from First Temple times, c.950 BCE, a further 250 years. Whilst ‘Deuteronomistic’ ideology, visible in many parts of the Old Testament, shows Israel prospering when it obeyed God’s laws but suffering when it strayed into apostasy, Ezekiel contradicts this perspective.
As Ezekiel saw it, Israel had been an apostate nation ‘ever since their sojourn in the wilderness.’18
In other words, Professor Wacholder maintains, as I do, that there was a strand of separatist priestly followers stretching all the way back from Qumran to the wilderness of Sinai who had a different understanding of monotheism and its worship. This strand preserved an understanding and recalling of a form of worship far closer to that of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten than the rest of the Hebrew community.
Can one really believe that Ezekiel made up a detailed, divine vision of the Temple and its Holy City and by weird coincidence the details matched, in many respects, that of Akhenaten’s Temple and Holy City? A vision that saw a temple that far exceeded the actual size of the Temple Mount, set in an area of land far greater than the city limits of historical Jerusalem could accommodate. I think not.
After the re-establishment of the Second Temple, around 540 BCE, the Aaronite priests are again in command and effectively retain control of the High Priesthood right down to Seleucid times in 200 BCE.
When the Seleucid Greeks take control of the country the Aaronite high priests are out of favour and a Shilonite priest from the family of Onias seizes the opportunity to become High Priest. This priest, Onias IV, is ousted by the new High Priest, Menelaus, and flees to Egypt. There he does a very strange thing. He builds a new Hebrew temple at Leontopolis, near Heliopolis. The argument as to why I believe Onias IV was the Teacher of Righteousness, and why his description matches that described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, is set out in more detail in a sequel book to The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran. It is, I believe, at Leontopolis, in Egypt, that Onias IV had his knowledge of the Akhenaten strain of monotheism that had percolated down through the years of the Shilonite priests, reinforced by contact with the Theraputae19 and by the residual knowledge of Akhenaten that still resided at Heliopolis.
Again one could ask how the knowledge of Akhenaten could have survived for so long in Egypt. Much of the evidence has been set forth earlier in this book, but in this instance I note the views of Professor Jan Assmann.20
In one of the most brilliant pieces of historical reconstruction, Eduard Meyer was able to show, as early as 1904, that some reminiscences of Akhenaten had indeed survived in Egyptian oral tradition and had surfaced again after almost a thousand years of latency.21 He demonstrated that a rather fantastic story about lepers and Jews preserved in Manetho’s Aigyptiaka could refer only to Akhenaten and his monotheistic revolution. Rolf Krauss and Donald B. Redford were able to substantiate Meyer’s hypothesis by adducing more arguments and much new material.22
When Onias IV returned to Judaea, around 160 BCE, I believe it was he who led his followers to sanctuary at Qumran, where they established a settlement in many ways similar to those of the Theraputae in Egypt. One only has to look at the Old Testament writings of Ezekiel, who Professor Wacholder insists was a prime force in founding the Essene movement, to see why Onias IV might have led his disciples to Qumran. In Chapter 47 of Ezekiel the prophet relates how the cleansing waters of a Great River ran through a vast temple, and then how those same cleansing waters would one day flow into the Dead Sea at Ein Gedi and turn it into a sea that can sustain life. The Great River he was remembering can only be the Nile and the vast temple the Great Temple of Akhenaten. Ein Gedi, by the Dead Sea, is mentioned by Pliny in relation to an Essene settlement that he said lay to the north of it, and he was almost certainly referring to the settlement of Essenes at Qumran.
That the Qumran-Essenes thought of themselves as an élite group, more holy than the rest of the population, is beyond question. One might, however, question whether, in referring to themselves as ‘Zadokite priesthood’, the Community was associating itself with Zadok the High Priest who appeared to be opposed to the Shiloh priesthood, who I am suggesting were the ancestral predecessors of the Qumran Community. Part of the answer given by Professor Wacholder has already been cited, and additionally Professor Philip Davies, of Sheffield University, asserts that in his view the Essenes did not claim Zadok the High Priest as their founder or have any special attachment to the Aaronic Zadokites or their cause.23
THE TEMPLE
One of the troubling aspects of a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the words of Israeli scholar, of Bar Ilan University, Esti Eshel is; “their persistent reference to Temple priests being appointed at the time of Jacob. This is especially true for the Testament of Levi scrolls.”
As indicated in earlier chapters of this book, the evidence from the New Jerusalem Scroll and The Temple Scroll, as well as from the book of Ezekiel of the Old Testament, is to my mind conclusive, in that they are all talking of distant memories of a much larger temple – one that could never have been located on the Temple Mount. There just isn’t the room for it. The conventional explanation is that all these sources are talking about a visionary temple. This just cannot be the case; for no other reason than that descriptions of visionary temples would not need to include details of where the latrines were positioned!
Descriptions in The Temple Scroll of the Qumran-Essenes, considered to derive from pre-First Temple Jerusalem times, bear many similarities to The Great Temple at Akhetaten. Indeed knowledge of the Scroll has been attributed to Moses; in the Apocrypha (2 Baruch 49) and in Midrash (Samuel). How can this be? There was no temple in Jerusalem at the time, and yet Moses apparently had possession of a detailed plan of God’s Holy Temple.
There are many other puzzling aspects of The Temple Scroll, some of which are discussed below.
When my three Dutch airline friends Klosterman, Luz, and Margalit,24 researching in the 1980s and 1990s, identified ancient Akhetaten as the closest fit of any city in the Middle East to that described in the New Jerusalem Scroll, which by the way never mentions Jerusalem, they are tying the description to Akhenaten’s Holy
Temple. Their work was more recently resurveyed in a massive study by Michael Chyutin,25 an Israeli architect, who came to a similar conclusion (and also that the town plan of the pseudo-Hebrew settlement at Elephantine bore a remarkable similarity to that of Akhetaten).
Perhaps one of the most significant of Michael Chyutin’s findings relates to number mysticism, which he touched on in the 1994 official-backed Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. He found he could only make sense of the numbering system in the New Jerusalem Scroll when he applied Egyptian dimensional measurements. He later concluded that the measurements of the city alluded to in the New Jerusalem Scroll make use of Egyptian metrology dating back to at least First Temple times. There is also an implication that the author of the New Jerusalem Scroll was Egyptian educated and was heir to a tradition deriving from the Elephantine temple, in southernmost Egypt. The author’s inability to explain the sacred destiny of the city, why its proposed location for a vast temple does not include mention of Jerusalem (which, in context of the ideal Temple, also receives no mentioned in The Temple Scroll, Ezekiel, or even Deuteronomy) and why we are back to at least the ninth century BCE for descriptive purposes are major criticisms that have previously remained unresolved. Unresolved unless the conclusions of this book are taken on board.
When the Qumran-Essenes built their main settlement building at Qumran in ‘exact’ alignment to the main walls of Akhenaten’s Temple and constructed ten ritual washing pools, they were echoing a recorded memory of that Temple.
Uniquely, and unknown from anywhere else in Israel, one of the ritual washing ‘Mikvaot’ has four divisions – just as the ritual washing basins in the Temple at Akhetaten exhibited.
In a recent conference reviewing the previous fifty years of research into ‘Qumranology’ one paper discussed commentary on Isaiah’s three nets of Belial. The point was made that the Qumran Damascus Document defined the three nets, or traps of evil, as whoredom, wealth, and defilement of the Temple26 – but what temple was Isaiah talking about? The setting for Belial's traps is Jacob’s son, Levi, warning the inhabitants of the land – noticeably not mentioning Israel. Yet at the time of Jacob there was no Temple in Jerusalem, nor would there be for another 400 years.
The author of the paper, John Kampen of Bluffton College, America, goes on to make a scathing challenge to the entrenched notion that the Qumran-Essenes ‘spiritualised’ the activities of the Temple in Jerusalem, which they saw as being defiled during the reign of the Hasmoneans (164 to 63 BCE), through an alternative observance of Temple worship by replacing it with observance of the Law. For John Kampen:
(those) who propagate this view have misunderstood the relation ship of law and temple within it. Law does not take precedence over temple, the place of God’s presence. The problem is that Israel has not followed the correct law because it was rooted in the wrong temple.27
He concludes that the defiling of the Temple was something the Qumran Community had experienced in its own history, and for them the law did not take precedence over the Temple. The Temple the Qumran-Essenes were concerned about was, he insists, not the Temple in Jerusalem but an idealised future Temple. Whilst agreeing with the main thrust of his argument, the visionary Temple was, I maintain, based on a real design. Details in the Temple Scroll, for example, spell out the dimensions of the longest Temple wall as 1600 cubits, equivalent to 800m. The length of the longest wall of the Great Temple at Amarna has been measured, from detailed archaeological excavations, as being 800m. This, amongst many other congruent features, is no coincidence.
The temple being referred to is real, as conveyed by Yigael Yadin, archaeologist and a Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, in his study of the Temple Scroll, where he states that it ‘refers to the earthly temple of the present’, as well as one of the future.28 Israel had not followed the correct law, according to the Qumran-Essenes, because it was rooted in the wrong temple.
FOUND UNDER KANDO’S BED – THE TEMPLE SCROLL
The Temple Scroll, or 11QT as it is professionally known, is the longest (884.5cm) of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts and in some ways the most puzzling. Recovered in 1967 from Bethlehem, where it had been hidden under Kando’s*61 bed (see Chapter 1, note 4), it now resides in the Shrine of the Book building, in Jerusalem.
One of the more perplexing narratives in the Temple Scroll is the author’s assertion that the Lord revealed to Jacob at Bethel, as he did to the Levi (confirmed in another Dead Sea Scroll, the Testament of Levi), that the Levites would be the priests in the Temple of the Lord. There is no such mention in the Bible, where the Levi are not appointed until the time of the Tabernacle and Moses.
As Yigael Yadin points out in his seminal book, The Temple Scroll, it is quite mysterious that the Bible gives no divine law as to the construction of the Temple, and yet the writer of the Temple Scroll seemed to have access to a plan and a written law. Beyond a mention of this plan, in 1 Chronicles 28:11-19, there is no detail of it in the Old Testament – a real conundrum for biblical sages. However in Midrash Samuel it is recorded that God gave Moses the Temple Scroll, and that it was passed down through the generations to David and Solomon. That this original Temple Scroll, with its wealth of planning detail, ever came into the possession of Solomon or normative authority is extremely doubtful, as all its prescriptions severely contradict normative Judaism. It explains one of the main reasons why the Essenes rejected the Temple at Jerusalem – it did not conform to the plan that they had of the Temple.
Nor does later Rabbinic lore confirm that David had a set plan he gave to Solomon. In Midrash Tehillim (see Glossary) we find that King David proposed a measurement of 100 cubits for the height of the Temple, compared to the very modest 30 cubits specified in Deuteronomy, Chronicle, and 1 Kings for Solomon’s Temple.29
The logical conclusion is that the information in the Temple Scroll, in its original form, existed before Moses, and that it described the plan of a real temple that was not the Temple at Jerusalem. The details must have been handed down in secret through a distinct line of Levitical priests to the Qumran-Essenes, who based their copy on the original version.
Dating and understanding the Scroll is an ongoing controversy. According to Professor Lawrence Schiffman, of New York University, dating the Scroll hinges on the meaning of a section in it known in Hebrew as ‘Torah Ha-Melech’ – Law of the King. Much of this section comes from Old Testament sources but regulations relating to the Queen, provision of a round-the-clock royal bodyguard, the King’s army council, conscription in the case of war and division of booty are not found in the Bible. The stipulation regarding the Queen, in fact, goes against the Bible in requiring the King to stay with her all the days of her life. In the Bible the wife may be ‘sent away’.30
Where the author of the Temple Scroll got his information has always been a puzzle. However, if the King referred to is Akhenaten, we know he remained, for a pharaoh, unusually faithful to his wife Nefertiti, and to her alone, all the days of her life; and he was constantly attended by a bodyguard. Assuming a background of Akhetaten, and that the requirements of the Law of the King related to an idealised renewal in Israel, many of the anomalies of the Temple Scroll fall away, and reasonable explanations are forthcoming. For example the phrase; ‘He should not return the people to Egypt for war’, that appears in the Temple Scroll makes little sense for any candidate kings of Judaea or Israel, unless there was some locus in Egypt.
The king’s army council is aptly described in Cyril Aldred’s insightful Akhenaten, King of Egypt31 – the army commanders ‘formed a council of management around the king, like henchmen around their war-lord’ – in almost a paraphrase of the description in the Temple Scroll. No decisions on going to war were made without their consultation.
THE COPPER SCROLL AND THE GREEK LETTERS THAT SPELL AKHENATEN
One of the questions that has been posed on my reading of the mysterious Greek letters interspersed amongst the ancient Hebrew text is; ‘how can one be sure of this reading
? Are there any examples of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s name in Greek records?’
The simple answer is that there are no examples of his name because very soon after his death it was lost, even to Egyptian common history. It was not, I maintain, lost to the secret tradition of his followers. To quote Professor Rosalie David, Reader in Egyptology at The University of Manchester, and a world authority on ancient Egypt:
There is no Greek equivalent of Akhenaten. His previous Name, before he changed it to show his allegiance to the Aten, was Amenhotep IV. The Greek version of Amenhotep was Amenophis. Also, there is no Greek equivalent of the city, Akhetaten. I am not aware that there is any reference to either Akhenaten or Akhetaten in Greek literature, because the king and the city were obliterated from history until the site of Tell el-Amarna (Akhetaten) was rediscovered in recent times.32
There are two difficulties in being absolutely certain about any comparisons of the Greek letters. Firstly, the pronunciation of the Pharaoh’s Atenistic, or Atonistic, name is at best an approximation from the hieroglyph versions we have. One of the best examples of the fourteenth century BCE name can be seen in a double tablet cartouche now in the Turin Museum, Italy. The vocalisation from this cartouche shows that whatever the exact sounds might have been, their order is very close to similar sounding Greek letters that appear in the Copper Scroll. The odds against finding matching sequential sounds in two four-syllable words from different languages, each having approximately twenty-two different sounding letters, is more than 160,000 to 1! Secondly there can be no certainty that the Qumran scribe chose the same Greek letters as we might subscribe to today.
To come as close as possible to the choice, I consulted numerous sources of Greek dictionaries. These indicate that similar sounding names to that of Aton and Akhenaten, or Xuenaten as it is sometimes written,33 would have called for similar Greek letters as those used in the Copper Scroll. The validity of this view is re-enforced by the opinion of Professor John Tait, of University College London, who considers the reading of the Greek letters as quite plausibly the name of the Pharaoh in question.
The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Page 35