I believe that Setnakhte was the Pharaoh of the ‘Exodus’ and that it was towards the end of this period of ‘chaos and upheaval’ (around 1200 BCE), under his benign rule, that Moses, a Prince of Egypt, took the opportunity to gain the release of the Hebrews and lead them out of Egypt to the Promised Land.20
BACK TO THE COPPER SCROLL TREASURE
From the point of view of our ‘treasure hunt’, the important feature to be drawn from the Exodus story is that the Israelites took out of Egypt treasures, some of them Temple-related. There were also Egyptians and Egyptian priests amongst their numbers, some of whom came from On, a place known to be a traditional centre for sun-associated religions, the place where the first Temple to Aten was built and a place likely to be sympathetic to Akhenaten’s new religion. These accompanying priests may well have carried with them the knowledge of where some of the treasure of Akhenaten’s Great Temple and Treasury were buried. They also had access to copper. How do I know that?
The Old Testament gives several clues. In Numbers 21:4–9, for example, there is a curious passage that is quite out of context. The Children of Israel are getting fed up with wandering around in the desert, short of food and water, and they start grumbling at Moses. Worse still, they are suddenly plagued by a horde of poisonous snakes, biting and killing many of them. The Israelites plead with Moses to intercede with God on their behalf to protect them. So what does Moses do? He takes some copper and beats it into the shape of a serpent. Anyone who looks at the ‘copper snake’ is immediately cured of the poisonous-snake bites.21
There is a possibility that this copper was obtained from copper mines known to exist at Timna, in the north-eastern part of Sinai, but this would imply that the Children of Israel tarried for a long period in that area to learn the skills required in mining, smelting, purifying and fabricating the product – which seems unlikely. Midianite tribes, who lived east of the Gulf of Aqaba, are said to have had a shrine at Timna where they worshipped a small copper snake measuring 12cm in length.22 It is very possible this is the snake being referred to in the Old Testament, as Moses instructed the Children of Israel to annihilate virtually all the Midianites, and they took bounty from them that may well have included this snake.
However, the strange incident of Moses making a copper snake, and other examples of copper being used in the Tabernacle for pans and overlays before any encounter with the Midianites, answers the question. Copper, in raw material form, was available to the people of the Exodus and must have been brought with them when they left Egypt.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
TOWARDS QUMRAN
A brief journey through history, covering a period of 1,000 years from the time the Israelites entered Sinai from Egypt, bridges the gap between Moses and the tantalizing Qumran-Essenes, inhabiting a remote corner near the Dead Sea in Israel around the time of Christ. Figure 12 gives the historical landmarks on which to pin an evaluation of how the monastic community at Qumran might be related to the priests of Akhenaten. A fuller description is given in endnote 1 for this chapter.
When Moses left Egypt to lead the Children of Israel towards the Promised Land, I believe he took with him some of the Akhenaten priests amongst a mixed company of Egyptian nobility, soldiers and general helpers. They, in turn, became the natural guardians of the holy treasures, the Ark of the Covenant…and many secrets.
One group of these priests who left Egypt with Moses were known as the Levites. They were consecrated by Moses to serve in the Tabernacle and eventually formed part of the select priests of the First Temple (built by Solomon in Jerusalem, around 950 BCE).2
THE LEVITE PRIESTS
What the precise role of the priestly Levite guards was between the time of Joshua, the ‘Conquistador’ of Canaan, and the end of Solomon’s reign in the time of the First Temple is unclear. The Torah gives different answers for different periods.
Early on the Levites are assigned the priestly office – the guardians of the Tabernacle (Numbers 1:50) and, in Exodus 32:26–29, as the sons of Levi, they are manifestly warrior priests prepared to use the sword to root out idolatry amongst the Children of Israel.
Other parts of the Bible give them different roles. Deuteronomy 33:8–10 allots the Levites a role as keepers of the Thummim and Urim,*35 teachers of the law, burners of incense and placers of sacrifices on the altar. In earlier traditions they are known as ‘Palace guards’. The Levites, equated with priests in the Bible, are shown special consideration throughout the Torah. It appears that the Levites descended from Aaron, Moses’ Biblical brother, and were to perform the priestly functions, whilst the other Levites were to perform other sanctuary duties (Numbers 18).
Whilst King David ruled, the northern Levite priests based at Shiloh (who claimed descent from Moses) were favoured, but they suffered badly under Solomon and even worse under Jeroboam, giving them every reason to become isolated from the community.
In the time of the Judges and the Kings of Israel, the injunction that priests could only be from Levite stock seems to have been varied: Samuel, an Ephraimite, performed the role of priest when the sanctuary was initially established at Shiloh (I Samuel 1 and 2), and in the time of King David the priests were entitled Zadok and Ahimelech (II Samuel 8:15–18).
Ezekiel 40:46 is even more specific in stating that the position of high priest should be reserved for Zadokites, descendants of the sons of Levi, and it appears that the Zadokite priests dominated the role for several hundred years from Solomon onwards.
PORTENTS OF DISASTER
The period before the invasion from the north by the Assyrians is one of prophecy and castigation of the Jewish people for straying from the path of God, by the line of prophets from Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah during the period 800–700 BCE. As we approach the time of the fall of the First Temple, the prophesying becomes more strident and more doom-laden.3
We see also, before the period of the next invasion from the north by the Babylonians, that there is a movement from within a priestly group to get ‘back to basics’, to return to the teachings of Moses in the deserts of Sinai. A ‘new’ Testament4 is suddenly discovered in the time of King Josiah, who ruled from 637 to 608 BCE, and this is the first hard evidence we have that there were secret texts being kept by the priesthood that were not available to the general populace, or even to the monarchy.
Figure 12: Time line from Sinai to Qumran.
After the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (Chaldeans) and the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, the majority of Israelites were taken as prisoners to Babylon. Those that were taken comprised mainly the upper classes and intellectual sectors of the community. (This is one of the reasons why the Babylonian version of the Talmud came to dominate Jewish thinking, rather than the Judaean or southern version.5) The line of the transitional and post-First Temple prophets, commencing with Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, now sang a different tune. Along with condemnation for pagan practices comes the predictions of divine retribution on the enemies of Israel, and the encouragement that the meek and religious will survive.
It is these themes that were taken up, or perhaps originated, by the Essene movement. They are exemplified by the teachings of the Prophet Habakkuk (‘The righteous shall live by his faith’)6 who is believed to have prophesied around 610 BCE. These teachings were of profound significance to the Qumran-Essenes, and are given prominence in their recording in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls – a Midrashic (see Glossary) commentary on the first two chapters of the Old Testament book.
EMERGENCE OF THE QUMRAN-ESSENES
This ‘community apart’ began transforming itself into a separate religious group that was, I believe, the early Essenes; an ultra-religious faction of this sect eventually evolved to become the Qumran-Essenes of the Dead Sea.
We pick up the thread of the priestly guardians of the Covenant before the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem c.586 BCE. It is in this period that the line of priestly inheritance came under greate
st threat. The sacred Ark of the Covenant and the treasures of the sanctuary were in jeopardy and, whilst some sacred items had already probably been carried off to Babylon, like the bulk of the Jewish tribes (as the Old Testament asserts), the rest of the treasures may have been hurriedly hidden in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Some of the priestly guardians may have been been able to remain in Judah, others may well have been carried off to Babylon and the region of Damascus. When the Persian King, Cyrus II, overran the Babylonian Empire in c.540 BCE, he gave permission for the Jews to return to their homeland. Not all took up the offer, but of those that did, the priestly guardians would have had every reason to be amongst them. Their first task was to start rebuilding the Temple.
I believe that it was at this stage in history that, under the influence of prophets like Ezekiel and Habakkuk, the Levite priestly guardians became even more estranged from the central control of the Temple’s activities and began reformulating their religious philosophies.
The situation is beautifully summed up by Richard Friedman in his brilliant book Who Wrote the Bible? 7 The Aaronic priests had been dominant in the south, in Judah, but are confronted with the arrival of refugees from the fallen northern kingdom. They bring rival priests, who trace their ancestry back to Moses, and Biblical texts that denigrate Aaron. The theme of disputing priests, begun in the deserts of Sinai, continues. The Aaronic priests of the south win the initial struggle and proceed to rewrite some of the holy texts to reinstate Aaron and his descendants as the true priestly line that should have the sole right to officiate in the Temple.
Conventional understanding is that the Qumran-Essenes ‘emerged’ around 200 BCE, but a few scholars now accept that their influences and writings are based on much older experience. One of these scholars is the highly respected Ben-Zion Wacholder, a partially blind Professor from the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. At the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls – Fifty Years After Their Discovery’ Congress, in Jerusalem in July 1997, he created a real stir by standing up and announcing that he believed Ezekiel was ‘the first Qumran-Essene’. In his paper Professor Wacholder drew attention to what he called enigmatic lines in the ‘Ezekiel’ Dead Sea Scrolls, one of which refers to ‘the wicked of Memphis whom I will slay’. Enigmatic indeed! Why would God be interested in avenging people in Egypt?
If my contentions are correct, the northern priestly guardians began welding themselves into a very different Jewish sect in Babylon and, on returning from exile around 540 BCE, accelerated that process in reaction to what they termed the misrule of the newly entrenched Aaronic Temple priests.
Under the Persians the population was treated with respect. Religious life in Judah continued relatively uninterrupted whilst Aramaic became the predominant language, as opposed to paleo-Hebrew. However, something happened soon after the end of the fourth century that frightened the guardian Levite priests into seeking a safe refuge. That something was the prospect of once again being ruled by ‘pagan’ Egypt8, and by the second century BCE a leader arose, a Teacher of Righteousness, who would crystallise their beliefs.
The priestly guardians scoured around for a place of refuge. Like their ancient predecessors, they looked for a secretive place that was near to water, to enable them to perform the purification rites that were part of their code. The choice was limited. There was, nevertheless, a honeycomb complex of caves on the shores of the Dead Sea that would serve their purpose well for the next 250 years – Qumran.
Although the Dead Sea was too salty to provide potable water, they chose a place where there was a spring, some 4km south of Khirbet Qumran. Here they worshipped, scribed, studied and died.
A MODERN VIEWPOINT/SECOND OPINION
I have discussed the basic theory connecting Akhenaten’s ‘new religion’ to that of the Qumran-Essenes with Professor George Brooke, Co-Director of the Manchester–Sheffield Centre for Dead Sea Scrolls Research, and a world renowned authority on the subject.*36 He has recently been appointed editor for a new series of books entitled The Dead Sea Scrolls (being published by Rout-ledge) and organized a recent exhibition of the Copper Scroll at Manchester Museum, from October 1997 to January 1998.
Professor Brooke goes along with the general idea that Egyptian influences could well have penetrated into the philosophy of the Qumran-Essenes and comments ‘Egypt would have been a place where a Jewish association would feel comfortable and its religious environment would be consistent with monotheistic traditions.’ However, he proposes another route by which the influences might have travelled.
The alternative theory he suggests is that the knowledge the Qumran-Essenes might have acquired about the monotheism of Akhenaten, and Egyptian religion in general, may well have been imbibed at a later date, namely in the sixth century BCE, possibly through the associations Ezekiel and Jeremiah had with Egypt.
As outcasts from Temple life and privilege after the destruction of the First Temple, the priestly group that was eventually to evolve into the Essenes, disillusioned by the failure of God to protect their holiest place, may well have been looking for an alternative form of Judaism to sustain them in their relative isolation, a form that might distinguish them from the mainstream body of Jewish religion.
There was undoubtedly considerable contact between Judaean Judaism and the settlements of Jews who were dispersed to Egypt after the destruction of the First Temple. (Most of the dispersions were to Babylon and to parts of the Babylonian Empire east of Jerusalem. But several thousand captive Jews were taken to the northern Nile delta region of Egypt.)
Professor Brooke maintains that, if my theory that a residual strand of Akhenaten’s monotheism survived within a group of priests in Israel is correct, what would be more natural than that they, as a proscribed group of Jewish priestly thinkers, might find sympathetic understanding with another ostracized Egyptian group with similar monotheistic beliefs? Contact between Jews dispersed to Egypt and those remaining in Israel after the destruction of the First Temple is known to have taken place after 550 BCE. There could well have occurred, therefore, an interchange of information, bringing the ideas of Akhenatenism and some of its secrets to this Jewish sect. Professor Brooke notes that:
At its outset the Essene movement was predominantly priestly and is evidence of a priestly pluralism in the three centuries before the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. The Jewish priesthood in Egypt was clearly revitalised at the time of Onias IV by his move to Heliopolis in the second quarter of the second century BCE,9 the very time at which the Essene movement was being established in Judaea.10
Whilst my view remains that the Essenes (and, subsequently, the Qumran-Essenes) gained their knowledge of Akhenatenism through a direct connection to the Akhenaten period, rather than through Professor Brooke’s later and indirect linkage, the net outcome does not alter the essence of the Egyptian influences that I have proposed. However, it would have an impact on how the Qumran-Essenes acquired the knowledge contained in the Copper Scroll.
I also discussed some of my theories with Jozef Milik (see Plate 10(top)), the man who led and organized the original Dead Sea Scrolls translation team working on scroll fragments at the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. Born in the village of Serwczyn, Poland, eighty-one years ago, he was educated at the University of Lublin and came to Jerusalem from the Biblical Oriental Institute at Rome as a Catholic priest at the end of 1952. He was the doyen of Qumran scroll research, the first person to produce an official translation of the Copper Scroll, and he has dedicated his life to the study of ancient Middle Eastern texts. When I met him in the autumn of 1998 at his Paris home, it was with some degree of awe that I talked with him about my theories and ideas. Although his eyesight is now poor, his mind is still razor sharp and on several occasions he corrected me when I mixed up a name or was unsure about a reference.
When I asked him if he still considered the Copper Scroll to be a fraud, he replied without hesitation, ‘No, no, no it is absolutely excluded…it was found under metres and metres of earth…it was found
with small fragments of manuscripts of the library.’ However, he still considers that the contents of the scroll ‘do not correspond to reality’ – to be based on legend – and he referred to similar lists of treasure found in Egypt. Why the document was written ‘was a problem’.
Jozef Milik agreed that the numbering system in the Copper Scroll could have come from Egypt and could date back to the time of Akhenaten but found it difficult to make a connection right back from Qumran to Akhetaten equating the jump as equivalent to the claim of the Freemasons that they can trace their origins back to Solomon’s time. When we came to discuss the Copper Scroll translations in detail, he did not find it easy to accept my reasoning for the connections I proposed. However, he was far from dismissive, asking probing questions and acknowledging with surprise that some of the evidence appeared convincing, and yet puzzling. He agreed that there was a lot of concordance between Egypt and the Jewish nation but suggested the Therapeutae as a possible link between Egypt and the Essenes.11
(Currently Monsieur Milik is working on the decipherment of a bilingual inscription found on a second century BCE temple in southern Syria. The inscription describes four gods who were worshipped there – Ben Shammen, Isis, a local goddess Shiyiah and the Angel of God – Malach el Aha.)
AKHENATEN’S HEIRS
If my assumptions – that the Essenes of Qumran were the heirs of the priestly guardians of the Covenant and can be traced back to the priests of Akhetaten – are correct, then we would expect to see many ‘fingerprints’ in their activities and writings to mark them out from the general Jewish population.
These expected fingerprints would include:
a different version or conception of the generally accepted Torah teachings and a closer relationship with the religion of Akhenaten
The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Page 18
