The Moses Stone

by James Becker

  So from today's research it looks as if Hezekiah simply looked at the existing water channels, saw their weaknesses and decided to improve on them, rather than having the inspiration himself to create the aqueduct and then organize the work. It could be argued that his tunnel was really just a bigger and better version of the Middle Bronze Age Channel.

  Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls

  The settlement of Qumran is located on a dry plateau, about a mile inland from the north-west bank of the Dead Sea and near the Israeli kibbutz of Kalia. It's probable that the first structures there were built during the early part of the first century BC, and the site was finally destroyed in AD 70 by Titus and troops of the X Fretensis Roman legion.

  Most accounts agree that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered accidentally by a Bedu goat-herder named Mohammed Ahmad el-Hamed, who was nicknamed 'edh-Dhib', meaning 'the wolf'. Early in 1947, he either went into one of the caves near Qumran looking for a lost animal or perhaps threw a stone into a cave to drive out one of his goats, and heard the sound of something shattering. The result was that he found a collection of very old pottery jars containing ancient scrolls wrapped in linen cloth.

  Recognizing that the scrolls were old and perhaps valuable, el-Hamed and his fellow Bedu removed some – most accounts state only three scrolls were taken from the cave at first – and offered to sell them to an antiques dealer in Bethlehem, but this man declined to buy them, believing they might have been stolen from a synagogue. These scrolls passed through various hands, including those of a man named Khalil Eskander Shahin, colloquially known as 'Kando', an antiques dealer. He apparently encouraged the Bedu to recover more of the scrolls, or possibly visited Qumran himself and removed some of them – whatever happened, Kando eventually personally possessed at least four of the scrolls.

  Whilst arrangements for the sale of the relics were being made, they were entrusted to a third party for safe keeping, a man named George Isha'ya, who was a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Recognizing the importance of the scrolls, Isha'ya took some of them to St Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem – a Syrian Orthodox establishment – to try to have the texts appraised. Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Metropolitan of Palestine and Transjordan – a 'metropolitan' is a rank between a bishop and a patriarch, more or less equivalent to an archbishop – heard about the scrolls. He examined them and managed to buy four of them.

  More of the scrolls started appearing in the murky Middle Eastern antiquities trade, and three were purchased by Professor Eleazer Sukenik, an Israeli archaeologist. Shortly afterwards, Sukenik heard about the scrolls Mar Samuel had acquired, and tried to buy them from him, but couldn't reach an agreement.

  Then a man called John Trever became involved. He was employed at the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), and was an enthusiastic photographer, which turned out to be a significant hobby. In February 1948 he met Mar Samuel and photographed all the scrolls the Metropolitan owned. Over the years, the scrolls have steadily deteriorated, but his album of pictures has since allowed scholars to see them as they were at that time, and has facilitated their study and permitted translations of the texts to be made.

  The Arab–Israeli War of 1948 resulted in the removal of the scrolls to Beirut for safe keeping. At that time, no academic had any idea where the scrolls had been found, and because of the turmoil in the country, carrying out any kind of search for their source was not feasible. It wasn't until January 1949 that a United Nations observer finally discovered what then became known as Cave 1 at Qumran.

  Once the first cave had been found, further searches were carried out and the other caves in the area were explored. The scrolls were found in eleven of these caves, but no scrolls or fragments were ever discovered at Qumran itself.

  The first archaeological expedition to Qumran was led by Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. He began his excavations in Cave 1 in 1949, and two years later started digging at Qumran as well. This approach was badly flawed, because de Vaux assumed that the inhabitants of Qumran had written the scrolls, and used the contents of them to deduce what Qumran must have been.

  It was a classic circular argument, and the result was entirely predictable: because the scrolls were mainly religious texts, de Vaux came to the conclusion that the inhabitants of Qumran were devoutly religious, a sect called the Essenes. Every artefact he and his team recovered from the site was interpreted in line with this assumption, despite the lack of any empirical evidence to support this conclusion. So a water cistern became a Jewish ritual bath, and so on, and any finding that disagreed with this hypothesis was simply ignored or assumed to be later contamination.

  The Copper Scroll and its listing of tons of buried treasure, of course, flew directly in the face of de Vaux's interpretation of the site, and he dismissed it out of hand as either a hoax or some kind of joke.

  The Copper Scroll

  The Copper Scroll is still one of the more perplexing mysteries of Middle Eastern archaeology. Discovered by Henri de Contenson in 1952 in Cave 3 at Qumran, it was completely unlike any other relic found anywhere, before or since. Although generally regarded as one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, absolutely the only reason for this assumption is that it was found with other scrolls in one of the caves at Qumran. In every other respect – material, content and language – it is entirely different.

  Made from almost pure – 99 per cent – copper, the preparation of which would have been extremely difficult, and almost eight feet in length, the scroll is simply an inventory, a matter-of-fact listing of the whereabouts of an enormous hoard of treasure. The language used is unusual. It's an early form of Hebrew – what's known as a square-form script – which appears to have some linguistic affinity with pre-Mishnaic Hebrew and even Aramaic, but some of the expressions used are only completely comprehensible to readers familiar with both Arabic and Akkadian. In short, the palaeography (the style of writing) and the orthography (the spelling) used in the Copper Scroll are unlike any other known contemporary texts, from Qumran or anywhere else.

  Another peculiarity is the presence of a handful of Greek letters that follow certain of the locations listed, and the first ten of which do, as stated in this novel, spell out the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. Theories abound, but nobody has so far produced any convincing reason why this should be.

  It's been suggested that the Copper Scroll contains some thirty mistakes, of the kind that would be expected from a scribe copying a document written in a language with which he was unfamiliar, suggesting the possibility that the contents of the scroll had been copied from another, perhaps earlier, source. This, again, is pure conjecture.

  The locations of the hidden treasure listed in the Copper Scroll are both highly specific and completely useless. The depth at which a cache of gold has been buried, for example, is described in detail, but discovering the actual location requires an exhaustive knowledge of town and street names, plus property ownership information, from first-century Judea, knowledge that has been lost for two millennia.

  The general consensus among archaeologists is that the Copper Scroll probably is genuine, and that the treasures listed were hidden in the Judean desert. It's even possible that one of them has been found: in 1988 a small earthenware vessel containing a dark, sweet-smelling oil was found in a cave not far from Qumran, and one interpretation of a listing on the Copper Scroll suggests that it could have been one of the items recorded.

  The Silver Scroll

  Perhaps the most intriguing entry of all on the Copper Scroll is the last one, which states that another document had been hidden that contained more detailed information about the location of the various treasures. One translation of this enigmatic section of the text reads: A copy of this inventory list, its explanation and the measurements and details of every hidden item, is in the dry underground cavity that is in the smooth rock north of Kohlit. Its opening is towards the north with the tombs at its mouth.

  This other document �
�� which has become known as the Silver Scroll – was one of several treasures claimed to be hidden in the city of Kohlit, but the exact location of this place is unknown. There is an area named Kohlit lying to the east of the Jordan River, but there's no evidence to suggest that this is the place referred to in the Copper Scroll, and the only other 'Kohlit' in the Middle East is K'eley Kohlit in Ethiopia, much too far away to be a possibility. The other clue is the reference to the 'tombs at its mouth'. This could be interpreted to indicate a north-facing cave close to a burial ground, but is of little real help.

  But the important point is that, if the Copper Scroll is an authentic listing of buried treasure, then the reference to the Silver Scroll must also be assumed to be authentic, which means that this legendary object did exist. The authors of the Copper Scroll presumably knew exactly where the Silver Scroll was secreted, because of their accurate – though meaningless to us – description of its location. But that doesn't mean the relic is still in the same location specified in the Copper Scroll.

  The first century AD was a time of tremendous turmoil in Judea, with constant skirmishes between bands of Jewish rebels and the Roman legions, and it's certainly possible that important objects – which would have implicitly included both the Copper Scroll and the Silver Scroll – could have been removed from their hiding places and taken to locations that were more secure. The caves at Qumran were one such place, and proved to be a safe repository for the Dead Sea Scrolls for almost two millennia. It's quite possible that Ein-Gedi was thought to be another.

  Ein-Gedi

  As stated in The Moses Stone, the oasis at Ein-Gedi was one of the most important settlements outside Jerusalem during the first century AD, and was raided by the Sicarii during the siege of Masada, exactly as I described. It is certainly possible that the Jewish priests might have believed the Temple was under imminent threat fromthe advancing Roman army, and would have tried to remove their most important treasures to a place of safety. If so, Ein-Gedi would have been an obvious choice.

  If the Temple of Jerusalem had been the custodian of the Copper Scroll, Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant at this time, the presence of these relics at the oasis beside the Dead Sea would not have been unexpected. And during their raid, the Sicarii would probably have grabbed anything they could lay their hands on.

  If these Zealots did unexpectedly find themselves in possession of three of the holiest treasures of the Jewish nation, they would have done everything in their power to ensure that the hated Romans wouldn't be able to seize them, hence my fictional account of the four Sicarii clambering down from the fortress at Masada.

  The Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall

  The Western Wall – of which the Wailing Wall is a part – is one of the four retaining walls of the Temple Mount, and its construction shows a distinct gradation from the bottom to top. The courses of masonry at the base, and extending to about two-thirds of the way up, are formed from large single blocks of light-coloured stone, the biggest ones probably at least a metre cubed. Above them, significantly smaller stones have been used, all the way to the top.

  The wall isn't a single structure, though the lower part looks as if it is. In fact, only the lowest seven courses of stones have indented borders, so they are all that date from Herod's time, when he strengthened the Temple Mount in 20 BC. Above them, the next four layers of stones are slightly smaller, and they were laid down during the Byzantine period, which ran from AD 330 to 640. The third section, above that, was built after the Muslim capture of Jerusalem in the seventh century, and the layer at the very top is the most recent, added in the nineteenth century. That was paid for by a British philanthropist named Sir Moses Montefiore. What isn't visible are the further seventeen courses of stones, all now underground because of the almost constant building and rebuilding that has taken place in that part of the city.

  The Jews were banned from visiting the Wall again between 1948 and 1967, when the city was controlled by the Jordanians, but during the Six Day War Israeli paratroopers seized the Temple Mount and this area of Jerusalem. They had no strategic objective in doing so, but the site had always been of immense religious and symbolic significance to the nation. Within weeks, over a quarter of a million Jews had visited the Wall. When the Israelis took control, most of what is now called the Kotel Plaza was already built on, and the only bit of the Western Wall that was accessible was about a hundred feet long, and the area in front of it was only some ten feet wide. The Israelis razed the area, and levelled and paved the square.

  To the left of the Wailing Wall, beyond the wall of the adjoining building with its two massive buttresses, is the Kotel Tunnel, open to the public and a very popular tourist destination. The entrance is an archway set almost in the centre of the building, with a curved line of Hebrew writing above it, following the shape of the arch. Below the Hebrew is the English translation: 'The Western Wall Heritage'.

  The tour begins in a room known as the Donkey Stable, an epithet bestowed by the British explorer Charles Warren. It took workmen and archaeologists seventeen years to clear the accumulated rubble and rubbish from that room. From there, visitors walk into the Secret Passage. According to legend, the passage had been used by King David as a way of making his way unseen and underground from his citadel, which lay over to the west, to the Temple Mount. Unfortunately, the archaeological evidence suggests that the tunnel had actually been built by the Arabs in the late twelfth century AD. They had needed to raise the level of that section of the city and had built massive foundations to achieve that end. The tunnel had, in fact, been used to allow access to the Temple Mount, but for Muslim residents of Jerusalem, not Jewish worshippers. Later, the vaults had been sectioned off and used as cisterns, providing the citizens who lived directly above the tunnel with a constant supply of fresh water. This passage ends abruptly in a pile of rubble, a mute reminder of the state of the subterranean labyrinth before the Jewish archaeologists started work there.

  In the Hall of the Hasmoneans, a large chamber that dates from the Second Temple period, is a Corinthian pillar more or less in the centre. One of the indicators of the dating of the chamber is the way the stone is dressed, a mark of the way Herod's builders carried out their work, but the pillar itself dates from medieval times. It was brought in to support the roof, which was cracked and damaged and needed extra support.

  In a narrow corridor later in the tour is an absolutely massive single stone. It's over forty feet long, nearly twelve feet high and between eleven and fifteen feet thick. The best estimates suggest it weighs around five hundred metric tons, which makes it one of the largest, perhaps even the largest, stone ever used in any building, anywhere in the world, bigger even than the stones in the pyramids. Most of the cranes available today can only lift about half that weight, so the obvious question is how Herod's builders managed to shift it. And not just move it, because although it's only about three or four feet above the level of the floor in the tunnel, the original street level was at least twenty feet below that, and the bedrock a further ten feet down.

  That stone forms part of what's known as the Master Course, and research suggests that there was a very good reason for this method of construction. No mortar or cement of any kind was used when the wall was built, and the theory is that these huge stones served to stabilize it. Their massive weight kept the stones below them in place, and provided a firm base for the courses above. It's known that the wall has remained intact for some two thousand years and has survived several earthquakes, so Herod's builders were probably right.

  Har Megiddo

  Har Megiddo, sometimes referred to as Tel-el-Mutesellim or the 'Hill of the Ruler', as well as 'Armageddon', is a real place in northern Israel. It's a strategically-important location, and has been the site of dozens of battles through the centuries, including three known as the 'Battle of Megiddo'. Of these, the fifteenth-century BC clash between the forces of the Pharaoh Thutmose III and those of the Canaanites was probably the most famou
s.

  There were three possible routes the invading army could have taken as they headed north towards the Valley of Jezreel, where the enemy troops had assembled. The shortest was the middle route, a straight passage through Aruna, part of which would have meant the army marching through a very narrow ravine; the other two were longer but safer routes to the east and west.

  Thutmose sent out scouts and discovered that his enemy had clearly assumed he wouldn't take the middle road. They'd split their forces to cover the other two approaches, but had left the ravine virtually unguarded, obviously assuming that the Egyptians wouldn't be stupid enough to send their troops into such an obvious killing ground. So the pharaoh himself led his men through the ravine. Aruna only had a few enemy troops stationed there and they were quickly scattered by the Egyptian forces, who then entered the valley unopposed. They did battle with the King of Kadesh's forces, defeated them, and ended up besieging Megiddo itself, which eventually fell.

  Unusually for the time, the Egyptians spared both the city and its inhabitants, and their victory marked the beginning of around five hundred years of Egyptian rule and influence in the area.

  The Mosaic Covenant It's been generally accepted that the Ark of the Covenant was a real object, probably a highly ornamented acacia-wood box covered in gold leaf, which was carried by the wandering Israelites. The logical assumption is that the Covenant' itself was also a real, tangible object, and was kept inside it.

  According to the Old Testament, in the third month after the Exodus, Moses gave the original so-called 'Tablets of the Covenant', or more accurately the 'Tablets of Testimony', to the people of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai. This Covenant was a contract between God and His chosen people, the ten simple rules, the Ten Commandments, that later formed the basis of both the Jewish and the Christian faiths (though, as I state in the book, Exodus actually specifies that there were fourteen commandments).