The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran

by Robert Feather

  Ramses II’s ambitious building programme probably led him to make increasing demands on his construction workers, but it seems unlikely that the work the Hebrews were put to was too distant from their settlement area in the Faiyum. These considerations, however, do not rule out the possibility that teams of Hebrew slaves were drafted into Memphis, which was not too distant, or even to the Theban region.

  3. W. Gunther Plaut (ed.), The Torah – A Modern Commentary (New York: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981).

  4. Ibid.

  5. Nina Collins, ‘Perspectives’, The Jewish Chronicle, 30 December 1994.

  6. J. H. Hertz (ed.), The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (London: Sonchino Press, 1969).

  7. Plaut, The Torah – A Modern Commentary.

  8. Hebrew lettering, from the earliest available inscription (dated at c.700 BCE) found on the Siloam conduit at Jerusalem, shows a clear resemblance to Phoenician script of 200 years earlier. The ‘Siloam Inscription’, written in the same script as that on the Moabite stone of the same period (which is now in the Louvre in Paris), was originally acquired by the Museum of Constantinople. The inscription was written on the sidewall of the conduit, and it has been identified with a conduit mentioned in the Second Book of Kings in the Old Testament:

  II Kings 20:20 And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?

  During the sixth and fifth centuries BCE Hebrew had fallen out of common use and was replaced by Aramaic. By the third or second century BCE it does not appear to have evolved to more than twenty letters, as can be seen on Palestinian ossuaries (bone caskets) from that period.

  There is other evidence, however, that traces the Hebrew writing to Canaanite origins, influenced by Egyptian. Jonathan Lotan, an Anglo-Israeli scholar, ascribes the origins of Ancient Hebrew to Egyptian rather than Ugarit. He cites a number of examples of Egyptian hieratic words that were adopted into Ancient Canaanite c.1500 BCE, in his book From A to Aleph: 3 Steps to Writing Hebrew (London: Qualum Publishing, 1996). See also Jacob de Haas, The Encyclopaedia of Jewish Knowledge (New York: Berhman’s Jewish Book House, 1946).

  9. Immediately after Akhenaten the transient Pharaoh Smenkhkara ruled for a brief period of months.

  10. In converting Biblical measurements of length into metric units, the Egyptian standard has been adopted in most descriptions in this book.

  The commonly used Biblical measures of length are generally related to the Akkadian or Ugaritic cubit of 44.5cm (17.4 inches), although a ‘Royal Cubit’ of 53cm was also in use in Israel. The Akkadian and Royal Cubit may have come into use for later references in the Bible, but for earlier Old Testament references I believe that the Egyptian Cubit of 51cm is more appropriate and gives a much more accurate picture of dimension. Almost all generally quoted conversions of cubit measurements for the earlier parts of the Bible are, therefore, probably inaccurate. We can be certain of the accuracy of the Egyptian Cubit at 51cm from the size of the wooden shrine box, designed to hold the metal cubit rod and now in the Cairo Museum’s Tutankhamun collection. There is another example in the Liverpool Museum.

  11. K. von Sethe, Die altagyptishen Pyramidentexte, neu herausgegeben und erlautert (Leipzig, 1908–).

  12. The Kohathites were the sons of Levi, who was Jacob’s son. Levi’s other sons formed the tribes of Gershon and Merari.

  13. K. Skorecki, S. Selig, S. Blazer, R. Bradman, N. Bradman, P. J. Waburton, M. Ismajlowicz and M. F. Hammer, ‘Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests’, Nature, Vol. 385, 2 January 1997.

  14. For the past 3,000 years it has been the custom of male Jews who considered themselves of the priestly line to marry and to have children only with other Jews also from the priestly line.

  15. Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (New York: The Penguin Press, 1997).

  16. Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).

  17. Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. Letters between [ ] mean likely reconstructions, between ( ) glosses inserted for sense of text.

  18. Lucia Raspe, ‘Manetho on the Exodus: A Reappraisal’, Jewish Studies Quarterly, (Vol. 5) No. 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1998).

  19. Ibid.

  20. The conventional idea that Ramses II was the Pharaoh of the Exodus is, I believe, wrong. He may well, though, have been the Pharaoh of ‘the oppression’ who worked the Hebrew slaves to exhaustion fulfilling his building programme.

  21. In the Authorized version of the Bible, the rod Moses fashions is referred to as ‘a serpent of brass’. As previously mentioned in Chapter 3, brass was unknown until the time of the Romans. In the Hebrew version of the Old Testament the phrase is translated as ‘a copper serpent’.

  22. John W. Rogerson, Atlas of the Bible (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1991).

  CHAPTER 14 TOWARDS QUMRAN

  1. When Moses died, Joshua inherited the task of leading the Hebrews in the conquest and settlement of Canaan – the Promised Land. The conquered Central and Northern areas were divided amongst the tribes descended from Joseph and Jacob, but they continued to sustain attacks from the Philistines, Midianites and Ammonites.

  There followed a period of ‘Judges’, who guided the path of the new ‘tribal federation’ until c.1050 BCE, when Saul was appointed the first King and the beginnings of a dynasty were established. He was followed by King David and his son King Solomon, the latter undertaking wide-ranging social and administrative reforms and building the First Temple at Jerusalem. After King Solomon’s death the Kingdom of Israel was split into the Northern Kingdom, ruled by Jeroboam, and the Southern Kingdom, ruled by Rehoboam, Solomon’s son. It is in this period that a firm date of 945–924 BCE can be established for the incursion of the Egyptian Pharaoh Shosenq I into Jewish territory. Inscriptions on the Temple of Amum at Thebes list the towns he captured in Judah to the south, and archaeological evidence shows he reached Megiddo in Northern Israel. He is mentioned in the Old Testament as ‘Shishak king of Egypt’ (I Kings 14:25 and II Chronicles 12:1–9).

  Various Hebrew kings continued to rule, albeit with many military setbacks, in the Northern and Southern Kingdoms during the period of the Prophets Elijah and Elisha (from 870 to 790 BCE). Battles continued with Aramaeans (Syrians), Moabites and Egyptians until, in 722 BCE, the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom and dispersed its ten tribes into its territories further to the north. The Southern Kingdom, now known as Judah, came under the domination of the Assyrians until about 640 BCE, when Assyrian power started to decline and the Babylonians became the force in the region. Nebuchadnezzar II invaded the country and in 586 BCE destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, carrying the bulk of the population off into captivity in Babylon.

  Babylon’s control of Judah did not last long and in 539 BCE King Cyrus II of Persia conquered Babylon. According to the Biblical scribe Ezra (Ezra 2:64), 42,360 Jews were then encouraged to return to Israel, which was now part of the Persian Empire. The Persians behaved in a much more benign way towards the Israelites and they were able to commence rebuilding the Temple at Jerusalem, within a much contracted Judah.

  Many Hebrews, however, stayed on in Babylonia and, in Biblical terms, they eventually became the dominant literary force. The Babylonian Torah – in the wider sense of Torah as the written and oral Law – differed in many respects from the Palestinian Torah, but it was the former that subsequently established itself as the accepted canon. The Temple was finally rebuilt in 516 BCE, and when more settled conditions returned in the south, around 450 BCE, both Ezra and Nehemiah returned to Judah from Babylon. Their aim was to shore up a weakening observance of Jewish law and to secure Jerusalem as the religious centre of the country.

  Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, conquered the lands surrounding Jerusalem in 332 BCE and in 198 BCE control over the country came under the Syrian par
t of the Seleucid Empire (as opposed to the Ptolomeic Greeks, who ruled from Egypt). Attempts by Antiochus IV Epiphanes to Hellenize his inherited Empire and make his subjects worship Greek gods was the last straw for the Jews of Judah, and they revolted under Judah the Maccabee in 167 BCE. As the Hellenic Empire tottered, a free Jewish State was finally re-established in 143 BCE and a line of ‘Hasmonaean’ Jewish rulers set about re-encompassing the territories – Idumea to the south; Samaria and Galilee to the north; and the Land of Tubius to the east.

  The Hasmonaean rule lasted until 63 BCE, when the Romans swept into the Holy Land and Pompey established it as a Protectorate. There was a brief period of interruption by Parthian invaders who set the Hasmonaean Antigonus on the throne in 40 BCE. Rome responded in 37 BCE by appointing Herod the Great, an Edomite from an Idumean family, as King of the Jews. After three years of fighting he established his title, restored the Temple to its former glory, and ruled the country until 4 BCE and the birth of Jesus.

  Just to complete the picture, in 132 CE, sixty-two years after the Temple had been sacked by the Romans, Bar-Kochba led another Jewish revolt. This episode ended in disaster and brought about the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem. It was not until the fourth century CE that they were officially able to return. When they did, the reinstated Jews were increasingly marginalized by Rome’s growing support of Christianity and the integration of Greek influences and philosophy into its culture – an effect to which Judaism was not immune.

  2. The continuity of the Levites is difficult to follow from the Bible, but it is clear that some of them were ‘set apart from the community’. In Numbers 16:9 we find: ‘the God of Israel hath separated you from the congregation of Israel’. They were thus able to maintain a different form of Judaism from the mainstream, and, I believe, able to keep some of the holy writings secret from the rest of the people.

  3. Isaiah 1:11, 13 ‘“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me?” saith the Lord: “I am full of the burnt offering of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of the bullocks, or of lambs, or of the goats”…Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting.’

  Micah 3:9, 11–12 ‘Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgement, and pervert all equity…The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money; yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, “Is not the Lord among us? none evil can come upon us.” Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.’

  4. The new texts discovered at the time of King Josiah are now thought to have formed the basis for the Book of Deuteronomy.

  5. The intellectual and upper classes who returned from Babylon were more ready to adopt the language and writing of their Aramaic conquerors and that language superseded Hebrew as the main language of the people until about 200 BCE.

  There is clear evidence that the Babylonian ‘Haftorah’ or prayer texts, developed by the Jews living in what is now Iraq, were markedly different from the Eretz Israel or Palestinian version. For example in the ‘Haggadah’ (the prayer book used in the Festival of Passover), the Eretz Israel version asks five questions about behaviour at the remembrance feast. In today’s ‘Haggadah’ only four questions are asked. There are also considerable differences in the form of ‘Kaddish’, the traditional prayer for mourners, and in other standard prayers used in modern Jewish services.

  From the prayers in modern-day usage it is apparent that the Babylonian school of Hebrew scholars won out over their Eretz Israel rivals, whose influence was finally overwhelmed with the coming of the Crusaders and the destruction of their places of learning.

  6. Habakkuk 2:4.

  7. Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (San Francisco: HarperSanFracisco, 1997).

  8. The new invaders from Macedonia led by Alexander the Great conquered the country around 330 BCE, and instigated the rule of the Ptolemies in Egypt in 323 BCE.

  9. Onias III, the High Priest at the Temple of Jerusalem under the Greek Seleucid rule, resisted Hellenization under the religious persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes. His brother took advantage of the disagreements and superseded him and, as Onias IV, became High Priest. He fled to Heliopolis, in Egypt, c.172 BCE, when Menelaus bribed his way into the position of High Priest. There, Onias IV built a Temple at Leontopolis, near the Egyptian city of On. Some years later he returned to Jerusalem.

  10. Professor George Brooke, personal communication with the author, 9 July 1997.

  11. According to Philo, the Therapeutae were a first century CE studious Jewish community living in lower Egypt. They appeared to share many features with the Essenes of Judaea, and some of their antiphonal singing at Passover may be evident from some of the scrolls found at Qumran.

  12. Herr Joerg Frey’s affiliations are so long that by the time he has given them to you, you have almost forgotten his name! He comes from the Institut für Antikes Judentum und Hellenistische Religionsgeschichte in Tübingen, Germany.

  13. Shlomo Margalit, ‘Aelia Capitolina’, Judaica No.45 (São Paulo: Capital Sefarad Editorial e Propaganda, Marz, 1989). In subsequent conversations and correspondence between the author and Shlomo Margalit (early 2002), who lives in Jerusalem, he confirmed that his studies have now convinced him that the so-called New Jerusalem Scroll was almost certainly describing a temple structure that matched that at Akhenaten’s city at Amarna.

  14. Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (New York: Penguin Press, 1997). In Vermes’ translation here, letters between [ ] indicate likely reconstructions, and those between ( ) glosses necessary for fluency.

  Although there appeared to be two versions of a cubit in use in Judaea at the time of the Qumran-Essenes, one of 44.6cm and another of 52.1cm, for the purposes of comparison I have taken the cubit to measure 51cm. This latter unit is the one certain length in use in Egypt at the time of Akhenaten. Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990). An inscription found inside the Siloam conduit in Jerusalem, built by Hezekiah, King of Judah from 720 to 692 BCE, gives the length of the tunnel as 1,200 cubits. The tunnel measures 533m and this gives a cubit of 44.4cm. M. Powell (‘Weights and Measures’, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1992), gives a best averaged estimate for the cubit of 50cm ± 10 percent. See also James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt – Vol. II (New York: Russell & Russell, 1906).

  15. N. de G. Davies, The Rock Tombs of El Amarna – Part II (London: The Eygpt Exploration Fund, 1905).

  16. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt – Vol. II.

  17. W. M. Petrie, Tell el-Amarna (London: Luzac & Co.,1894).

  18. Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten King of Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991).

  19. Ibid.

  20. Michael Chyutin, ‘The New Jerusalem Scroll from Qumran – a Comprehensive Reconstruction, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Supplement 25 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). The New Jerusalem Scroll describes an idealized Holy City envisaged by the Qumran-Essenes. The Scroll was obviously of great importance to the Community as examples of its contents were found in caves 1, 2, 4, 5 and 11 at Qumran. It describes many City features in a similar manner to those in the Temple Scroll (see Chapter 1), although there are significant differences in dimensions and layout.

  21. Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson, British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by British Museum Press, c1995).

  22. Mark Vidler, The Star Mirror (London: Thorsons, 1998).

  23. Sun Rays Fall Perpendicularly on Abu Simbel, Press Release No. 225, 5.8.98 (London: Egyptian State Tourist Office, 1998).

  24. Mary Barnett, Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt (London: Brockha
mpton Press, 1996).

  25. The General Assembly Hall, The Mound, Edinburgh, is the location for the first meetings of Scotland’s Parliament, with an official opening ceremony on 1 July 1999. Sometime in the second half of 2001, the Parliament moved to a new building, designed by the Spaniard Enric Miralles, located next to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh.

  26. Roland de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).

  27. J. Van de Ploeg, The Excavations of Qumran (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1958).

  28. The Pharisees were the main religious and political opposition to the Temple priests in the Second Temple period. They preached a wider form of Judaism, related not just to the letter of the written text, but also to the Oral Law.

  CHAPTER 15 THE LOST TREASURES OF AKHENATEN

  1. John Marco Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).

  2. The body of Akhenaten has never been positively identified. It seems likely that a tomb (WV25) was prepared for him at Thebes before he transferred the seat of his throne to Akhetaten, but it was never occupied. In 1907 a burial chamber, KV55, was discovered at Wadi Biban el-Muluk, in western Thebes, which contained a shrine to Queen Tiyi, Akhenaten’s mother, and a coffin and canopic jars. It seems possible that the bodies of both Akhenaten and Tiyi were taken from the Royal tomb prepared for them at Akhetaten and removed to Thebes during the reign of Tutankhamun. The body was a male and carried the same blood group as that of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten’s brother (A2MN), indicating that it may have been Akhenaten. However, its age at death, estimated at twenty to twenty-five, is too low to confirm ownership.

  3. The name Faiyum is found in many variations of spelling; I have chosen Faiyum as the preferred variant unless it occurs otherwise in a specific reference.