**51 An Egyptian magician who, in the Bible, confronted Moses.
CHAPTER 18
*52 Interestingly, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible has one of these cities called ‘the City of the Sun’ (Isaiah 19:18).
*53 Stone coffin.
*54 The Triumphal Arch of Titus in Rome shows treasures being borne away, which include silver trumpets from the Second Temple.
*55 Collections of instructions and discourses dating from c.2250 BCE to the eleventh century BCE. The ‘Instructions of Any’ and of Amenemipet son of Kanakht, composed during the New Kingdom period (1550–1069 BCE), bear most similarity to Biblical wisdom texts such as Proverbs.
*56 A saying of the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE), popularized by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society.
CHAPTER 19
*57 From the time of King Saul to King Solomon.
*58 Lived c.485–424 BCE, c.276–194 BCE and 60 BCE–21 CE, respectively.
CHAPTER 20
*59 After Moses’ revelation from God in Sinai, E refers to Him as Yahwe.
*60 Isambard ‘Kingdom’ Brunel was a British engineer who built the 32,000 ton Great Eastern ship, in the mid-nineteenth century, which required the largest chains ever manufactured for its launch.
*61 Kando was an Arab trader who had previously acquired a number of Dead Sea Scrolls from the Bedouin.
*62 Similarly dated inscriptions have been found in the Sinai Peninsula.
GLOSSARY
*63 Torah is also used in a wider sense, meaning the whole of Jewish teaching.
ENDNOTES
CHAPTER 1 THE COPPER SCROLL – TWO THOUSAND YEARS IN HIDING
1. Some definitions of the term ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ use it in a general sense, meaning any scrolls found along the shores of the Dead Sea or even relating to them. In this book the term ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ applies specifically to those discovered between 1947 and 1956 in the eleven caves near to Qumran on the Dead Sea.
2. Scorification is a refining process that removes impurities from metals. It is usually applied to the purification of copper, gold and silver ore and involves mixing the impure ore with granulated lead and borax as a flux. The mixture is heated in a muffle furnace to volatilize low melting point impurities and to combine the rest with lead oxide and borax to form an easily removable slag.
3. My last publishing venture involved the purchase of an old Robert Maxwell company, which published magazines on chess and bridge!
4. Mohammed edh-Dhib and his brother, Bedouin from the Taamirek tribe, were searching for two lost black-haired goats in the hills that run along the shores of the Dead Sea. Climbing up the lower slopes of a hillside they entered a dark musty cave and stumbled against a pile of sherds, around which lay clay pots, pieces of leather and some jars….
Without realizing it, they had discovered the first tranche of the most important biblical texts ever found. Between 1947 and 1956 a further ten caves, all within a few kilometres of each other, were to yield up an historian’s dream, ranging from complete scrolls to tiny fragments; in all some 80,000 items. The caves are located close to what was the site of an ancient settlement of ultra-religious Jewish Essenes, at Qumran, on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. The place is known to the Bedouin as Khirbet-Qumran – the Stone Ruins of Qumran.
The brothers, not knowing what to do with the seven scrolls they had found, in what is now known as Cave 1, showed them to a Syrian shoemaker in Bethlehem, nicknamed ‘Kando’, whom they knew dealt in antiquities. Kando took four of the scrolls to the Archbishop-Metropolitan of St Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem, who promptly acquired them for the equivalent of £24. This priceless acquisition must rank as one of the bargains of all time.
The Metropolitan had in his possession the oldest complete Hebrew version of the Old Testament Book of Isaiah. (Two versions of Isaiah were found in Cave 1, given the super-fixes a and b, which were written in ancient forms of Hebrew. 1QIsaa, dated to 202–107 BCE, contains all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah, apart from a few missing words. It has thirteen significant variations from the Hebrew Masoretic text in use today but otherwise is remarkably similar. 1QIsab was written around the time of Jesus and is less complete, but it is closer to the traditional Hebrew text. Prior to the discovery of these Isaiahs, the oldest known Hebrew version was the Cairo Codex, dated to 895 CE. The Metropolitan had also acquired a Manual of Discipline for the Qumran-Essenes, a commentary on Habakkuk – a minor seventh century BCE prophet, and a Genesis Apocryphon, which retells and enhances the Old Testament Book of Genesis.
The three other scrolls from Cave 1 comprised an incomplete version of Isaiah (1QIsab); a War Scroll, which describes how the Qumran-Essenes (as ‘the sons of light’), were to wage a final battle against the ‘sons of darkness’ – those who did not follow their beliefs; and a scroll of Thanksgiving Psalms. These three scrolls were acquired by Professor E. L. Sukenik, of the Hebrew University of West Jerusalem, on 29 November 1947.
Shortly after this purchase, on 14 May 1948, Israel declared its independence and war broke out between Arabs and Jews. The Archbishop-Metropolitan, Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel (whose name testified to his allegiance to Arab, Christian and Jewish traditions), lived up to his pragmatic nature and promptly fled, via Syria, to Lebanon. One can visualize him scurrying across the runway to catch his plane, with four priceless scrolls tucked under his billowing cassock. He ended up in America where the scrolls were briefly put on display at the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, in 1951, but it was not until June 1954 that our mercurial Metropolitan popped up again, having placed the following advertisement in the Wall Street Journal:
“The Four Dead Sea Scrolls”
Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC, are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.
Box F206, The Wall Street Journal.
Here fate intervened. As my story unfolds you will find that I am quite a fan of fate and coincidence. By chance Professor Sukenik’s son, Yigael Yadin (an Army officer who would later rise to become Deputy Prime Minister of Israel), was in New York and managed, after a hectic scramble around for money, to acquire the scrolls for $250,000 (through an intermediary, a New York banker/industrialist Samuel Gottesmann).
After the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank of the Jordan, the caves and ruins at Qumran came under their control and subsequently have been the subject of continuous archaeological activity. It was also in 1967 when the last remaining major scroll, the Temple Scroll, was acquired from our ubiquitous friend Kando, who was still living in Bethlehem and had secreted the 9m long scroll under his bed for eleven years!
All seven major scrolls from Cave 1, and the Temple Scroll, now reside in the Shrine of the Book, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Other fragments from Cave 1 have found their way to the Museum of the Department of Antiquities, Amman, Jordan; the Palestine Archaeological Museum, in East Jerusalem (now renamed the Rockefeller Museum); and to the Bibliotheque Nationale, in Paris.
5. G. Bonani et al., ‘Radiocarbon Dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls’, Atiqot 20 (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority,1991); A. J. T. Jull et al., ‘Radiocarbon Dating of Scrolls and Linen Fragments from the Judean Desert’, Radiocarbon 37 (New Haven, Conn.: American Journal of Science, 1995).
6. Israel Carmi, ‘Dating Dead Sea Scrolls by Radiocarbon’, The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty – Years After Their Discovery: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress July 20–25, 1997 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society in cooperation with The Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, 2000).
7. Jull et al., ‘Radiocarbon Dating of Scrolls and Linen Fragments from the Judean Desert’.
8. This figure was correct at the time of the First Edition, but by 2003 the amount of Dead Sea Scroll texts still to be published had dropped to less than 10 per cent. Prior to their discovery the oldest Hebrew versions of the Old Testament were the Aleppo Codex, dating to the tenth century
CE, preserved in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, and the Ben Asher text, dating from 1008, now in the Russian State Library at St Petersburg. The Aleppo Codex was written in Palestine, taken to Egypt in the eleventh century and found at Aleppo, Syria, in the fourteenth century. It has suffered fire damage and is not complete.
Virtually all previously discovered Biblical documents, apart from the Dead Sea Scrolls, are known to us from copies or references to earlier documents by later writers. They have therefore been subjected to inaccuracies in copying and adjustments by the writers to meet doctrinal objectives. George Brooke, ‘The Treasure Under Your Noses: 50 Years of Manchester and the Dead Sea Scrolls’, Lecture at The Manchester Museum, 6 December 1997.
9. Flavius Josephus (37–100 CE), a Jewish historian who became a Roman citizen and wrote, amongst other things, about the Essene community and their settlement on the Dead Sea.
Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE). Gaius Plinius Secundus was born in Como, Italy, of an aristocratic Roman family. After a spell in the Roman army he later devoted himself to writing historical treatises on subjects like oration, and the history of Rome. A friend of Emperor Vespasian, he died during the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
Judaeus Philo (c.20 BCE to c.40 CE), a Jewish-Egyptian philosopher and Greek scholar, who was born in Alexandria. He worked at Alexandria on Bible commentary and law and mentions the Qumran-Essenes in his writings.
10. Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1928).
11. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, ed. Joyce Irene Whalley (London: Sidwick & Jackson, 1982).
12. David Scholer, Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, trans. by C. D. Yong (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishing, 1993).
13. Ibid.
14. There has been considerable argument about whether there was a scriptorium at Qumran. In particular, Norman Golb (Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996)), does not believe that there were writing tables. As de Vaux (R. de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Oxford University Press, 1959)) pointed out, received opinion is that scribal tables did not come into use until the eighth to ninth centuries CE, but he cites examples as early as the third century CE. Nevertheless, de Vaux is convinced that the Qumran tables were for writing, not eating, and most scholars today accept his interpretation. There are, in fact, examples of tables being used as early as the fourteenth century BCE, as illustrated in the tomb of Huya at Amarna, Egypt, which shows scenes from the workshop of Iuty, chief sculptor of Queen Tiyi. See Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti, Egypt’s Sun Queen (London: Viking, 1998).
15. References in the literature differ about the date the Copper Scroll was discovered. John Marco Allegro, in his book The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), gave the date as 14 March 1952, other historians quote 20 March. I obtained a definitive date from the person who found the Copper Scroll, Henri de Contenson, Directeur de Recherche Honoraire au CNRS. According to him three excavation teams, led by J. T. Milik, D. Barthélemy and Monsieur Contenson himself, began work in March 1952 on various sections of the hills overlooking Qumran. M. Contenson, with a team of ten Bedouin, arrived on site on 10 March and, after preparatory clearing work on Cave 3, found the Copper Scroll on 20 March. Robert Feather, Recorded Interview with Henri de Contenson, Paris, 16 January 1999. See also E. M. Laperrousaz (ed.), Qoumran et les Manuscrits de la Mer Morte (Paris: Les Editions Du Cerf, 1997).
CHAPTER 2 BULLION BY THE BILLION
1. The original international team working on the Dead Sea Scrolls at the École Archéologique Française de Jerusalem (sometimes referred to as École Biblique) and the Palestine Archaeological Museum – later renamed the Rockefeller Museum – comprised Father Jozef Milik and Father Dominique Barthélemy of the École Biblique; John Strugnell and John Allegro from Oxford University; Patrick Skehan and Frank Moore Cross from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; Claus-Hunno Hunzinger from Germany; and Jean Starcky from France.
2. Mishnaic Hebrew is not known as a fully recognizable form of language until the Rabbinic period of 200 CE onwards, but its early development can be seen in a number of Dead Sea Scroll texts and in the Copper Scroll, which was thought to be copied at least some 140 years earlier. Textual comparisons with the Bible have shown usages drawn, for example, from Ezekiel and Isaiah, therefore indicating an allegiance dating back to at least 700 or 800 BCE.
3. The language and writing system of ‘Ugarit’, in northern Syria, developed around 1500–1400 BCE under the influence of cuneiform (a wedge-like lettering); Akkadian from the Mesopotamian and Sumerian regions. Ugarit reduced the number of letters required from the many hundreds in use in other languages, to a mere twenty-seven. Under the influence of Ugarit and Egyptian hieroglyphs, ‘Proto-Canaanite’ writing was developed in Canaan around 1400–1300 BCE, initially using twenty-seven letters, but by the thirteenth century BCE twenty-two letters. By the eleventh century BCE, Phoenician influence established a normal form of Proto-Canaanite (subsequently referred to as ‘Phoenician’), of twenty-two letters written horizontally from right to left. ‘Paleo-Hebrew’ evolved largely from this form of ‘Phoenician’, around the ninth century BCE.
4. 68 CE is the last possible date for the Copper Scroll to have been engraved by the Qumran-Essenes, as their settlement was destroyed by the Romans at that time. Apart from evidence of a few Qumran-Essenes turning up to help the Zealots resist the Romans at the mountain fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea, where, in 73 CE, 960 Jews committed suicide to avoid capture, history knows nothing more about the Qumran-Essenes.
5. There are at least a dozen authoritative translations available of the Copper Scroll and between each of them there are many variations on phrases, individual words and letters that give completely different readings to the meaning of the text. As an example of the differences of opinion amongst scholars, Jonas Greenfield, (Journal of the American Oriental Society 89 (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 1969)), in criticizing the official translation of the Copper Scroll, disagreed with thirteen per cent of the vocabulary.
6. Jozef T. Milik, ‘Le Rouleau du Cuivre de Qumran (3Q15)’, Revue Biblique 66 (Paris: Librairie V. Lecoffre, 1959).
7. John Marco Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
8. M. Baillet, J.T. Milik, and R. de Vaux, Les ‘Petites Grottes’ de Qumran: Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
9. Whilst most scholars now agree the Copper Scroll was engraved by the Qumran-Essenes and relates to real treasure, some of the early workers at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, such as Father de Vaux and Father Jozef Milik, did not take its contents seriously and thought them to be based on fable. A small minority, including Norman Golb of the University of Chicago, and Manfred Lehmann (Revue de Qumran, October 1964), maintain that the Copper Scroll was not a work of the Qumran-Essenes.
10. Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll; Florentino Garcia Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); Albert M. Wolters, The Copper Scroll: Overview: Text, and Translation (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (London: Allen Lane, 1997).
11. John Marco Allegro, the first translator of the Copper Scroll, could not understand the values the Biblical Talent was giving (even though he was using a Talent of 45lb, rather than the more usual value of 76lb), so he quite arbitrarily downgraded the estimates of weights by 1/60 by applying the next Biblical unit down.
12. Geoffrey Wigoder, The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Facts on File, 1992).
13. According to Joseph Fitzmyer – Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Paulist Press, 1992) – the Copper Plaque (as he calls it) contains no sectarian terminology and does not mention anything connected with the Community. Professor Lawrence Schiffman, of New York University, ide
ntifies numerous words in the Copper Scroll that do not appear elsewhere in the Dead Sea Scrolls (‘The Vocabulary of the Copper Scroll and the Temple Scroll’, International Symposium on the Copper Scroll at The University of Man chester Institute of Science and Technology, 8–11 September 1996).
14. Theodor H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975).
15. Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996). John Allegro thought that the treasures were hidden by Zealots – a fanatical band of Jewish rebels who fought against the Romans from 66–73 CE, when they were finally crushed at Masada.
16. M. R. Lehmann, ‘Identification of the Copper Scroll Based on its Technical Terms’, Revue de Qumran 17 (Paris: Éditions Letouzey et Ané, October 1964).
17. Thomas Bradshaw, The Whole Genuine Works of Flavius Josephus (London: Alex Hogg, 1792).
18. John Marco Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1956); P. Kyle McCarter, The Mystery of the Copper Scroll: The Dead Sea Scrolls After Forty Years (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991); J. K. Lefkovits, ‘The Copper Scroll Treasure: Fact or Fiction?’, International Symposium on the Copper Scroll, The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, 8–11 September, 1996; Michael O. Wise, ‘David J. Wilmot and the Copper Scroll’ at the International Symposium on the Copper Scroll, Manchester–Sheffield Centre for Dead Sea Scrolls Research, 1996; Albert Wolters, ‘History and the Copper Scroll’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 722 (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1994).
19. Joseph Conklin and Michelle Andrea, ‘Jeremiah’s Wheelbarrow: The First Temple Treasure of the Copper Scroll of Qumran and the Land of Redemption’ (http://shell.idt.net/conklin/jeremiah.html)
20. Conklin and Andrea have Ezra returning from Babylon some seventy years after the destruction of the First Temple, i.e., in 516 BCE, whereas most authorities date their return to around 458 BCE.
The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Page 39