The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran

by Robert Feather

  That the name of Aten or Aton, the name Akhenaten knew his God by, is embedded throughout the Old Testament has many attesters, from Sigmund Freud34 onwards. Most recently Messod and Roger Sabbah35 have published an extensive study on the subject and conclude that Akhenaten was the forerunner of the Hebrew religion and that not only the Old Testament, but specifically the Dead Sea Scrolls, include reference to Akhenaten and Aton. They note that the name of God appears in many forms in the Old Testament, but in an earliest invocation as God of the Exodus, it appears as the Hebrew word ‘Adonai’, and as ‘Adon’.36 Many Egyptian names are read with the letter ‘D’ or the letter ‘T’ interchangeable – Touchratta or Douchratta, Taphne or Daphne, and in Egyptian Coptic the letter D can be pronounced ‘D’ or ‘T’.37 Thus Aton could well be written ‘Adon-ai’ where ‘ai’ relates God to the Hebrews38 in the sense of ‘my master’, or ‘The Lord’.

  Another example may be the first identified definitive inscriptional connection between the Hebrews of Egypt and Akhenaten’s name for God, ‘Aten’. It can be found in the Alnwick Castle collection of Egyptian artefacts, from Northumberland, in England.39 Here, on a dark blue glass rectangular object, dated to the Amarna period, is written:

  Ra nefer Xeperu Ua en Aten

  In Chapter 12 there is a discussion on the possible names the Hebrews might have been known by during their stay in Egypt. The suggestion I put forward as the most likely source was the Egyptian word ‘Cheperu’.

  A possible translation of the inscription then becomes:

  The beautiful sun God of the Hebrews the Aten

  The idea that Cheperu, derived from the name of a creator god Chepri or Khepri and often represented in ancient Egypt in the form of a scarab beetle, is not without significance, as will be seen later in this Chapter.

  THE HEBREW-EGYPTIAN LANGUAGE LINK

  In the same way that conventional scholarship has tended to veer away from Egypt as a fundamental source for biblical studies, it has wrongly attributed the origins of the Hebrew alphabet to the Canaanite coastal region. If there is one factor that defines a commonality of culture it is a commonality of language.

  Prior to the publication of the first edition of this book, in July 1999, virtually every conventional source you cared to consult ascribed the earliest forms of alphabetical writing to the Levant area and Hebrew writing as a derivative of Phoenician, which in turn was thought to have emanated from proto-Canaanite, and Ugarit, dating back to c.1550 BCE. Egyptian was seen to have had an influence on the earliest alphabet, but the original reduction of symbols, from many thousands to less than thirty, was credited to the coastal countries in the region of what is now Lebanon.*62

  In collaboration with Jonathan Lotan, an Anglo/Israeli scholar, I went against this view and included a diagram (see Chapter 15), which indicated Egyptian hieroglyphs and hieratic as the main line from which Hebrew was derived. No one is always right, and I would not claim to be, but in this instance....

  In the summer of 1998, Dr John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist from Yale University, America, and his wife Deborah, were working ‘in the middle of nowhere’, near Wadi el-Hol (Gulch of Terror), about fifteen miles from the Nile and some fifteen miles north of the Valley of the Kings. They discovered inscriptions on limestone walls, now considered to be the work of Semitic people writing in an alphabet with less than thirty letters, based on Egyptian symbols. Their findings were not published until November 1999, when they were authenticated by Dr Bruce Zuckerman, Director of the West Semitic Research Project, University of Southern California, as an earliest ever form of alphabet, which had been developed between 1800 and 1900 BCE, predating any previous find by some 300 years. The inscription apparently refers to ‘Bebi’ – a general of the Asiatics, water, a house and a god.

  According to Dr P. Kyle McCarter Jr, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Johns Hopkins University, America.

  ...it forces us to reconsider a lot of questions having to do with the early history of the alphabet. Things I wrote only two years ago I now consider out of date.40

  For Frank Moore Cross, Emeritus Professor at Harvard University:

  ...this belongs to a single evolution of the alphabet.41

  SYMBOLS OF THE ATEN

  Examples of inscriptions showing the Egyptian Aten sun disc, as detailed in note 5 of this chapter, have been discovered in many parts of Israel and are a neuralgic headache for religious historians. They do not seem to know what they represent. Evidence of the worship of the Syrian god Baal and pagan shrines on ‘high places’, throughout the early period of Israelite history, can be explained as aberrations caused by interactions with local deities, or throwbacks to the idolatry of Egypt, but why a king of Israel like Hezekiah, who was particularly strong on monotheism, should use a sun disc and a beetle as symbols remains unexplained in conventional terms.

  Both images were in fact basic Egyptian motifs and the sun disc specifically related to Akhenaten’s form of worship. Examples have been found on ancient jar handles and in other forms across Israel. Even more telling are recent finds of bullae, clay seal impressions, with the name of the seventh century BCE King Hezekiah, a reforming king who practised a policy of purging the country of foreign images and influences. Some of the seals show a two winged scarab, but two recent examples show a central sun disc with rays shooting out from above and below and an ‘ankh’ sign (life) on either side. The suggestion that Egyptian iconography, prevalent across Israel and other parts of the Middle East, was adopted simply because it had been associated with a dominant power and had anyway lost its religious significance seems quite inadequate. All three symbols are closely associated with the Amarna period, and the sun disc and ankh sign were the key elements of the Aten cartouche, representing Akhenaten’s name for God. The form of the disc, with rays emanating from above and below, is quite specific to the style of Aten imagery seen on tomb walls at Amarna, where beams of light radiate out from a central sun disc and carry ankh signs at their extremeties.

  Two bullae, in the collection of Shlomo Moussaieff, carry the Hebrew letter ‘ntnmlk’ and could well be read as ‘n-aten melech’ – relating Aten to the king.42 However, perhaps the most embarrassing discovery, for devout religious followers, is an inscription found on a storage jar at Kuntillet Ajrud, in the Negev area, dated to the eighth century BCE. This has been interpreted as depicting God with his consort. Other inscriptions are read as ‘I bless you by Yahweh... and by his Asherah.’ The idea of God having a consort is, of course, a complete anathema to Judaism. Whether Asherah refers to a goddess of fertility or simply a female deity is not certain.

  In the light of my theory connecting worship of God, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, back to the monotheism of ancient Egypt, there is an explanation that might provide solace. The scene depicted on the Kuntillet Ajrud storage jar (see Figure 23) shows a small snake’s head in the top left-hand corner and the two central figures have been interpreted as representing the Egyptian god Bes. I believe the scene is one of Egyptian memory, rather than a contemporary scene in Israelite religiosity.

  Whilst the two figures identified as Bes do have characteristics of this Egyptian folklore figure of music and merriment, the imagery seems to me much more like one where two important figures, seated on throne chairs, are being entertained by a lyre-playing courtier. The Bes icon was always a favourite of Nefertiti and the Akhenaten family, as demonstrated on a ring (shown top left of Plate 14 in the illustration section of this book) considered to have belonged to Nefertiti. It is possible, therefore, to come to a quite different interpretation of this controversial scene.

  The small snake is a typical Egyptian hieroglyph symbol (having the sound ‘F’ ), deriving its design from the Egyptian corn viper. It appears in the cartouche of Aten, and in this sense means ‘in the name of (Aten)’. More significantly it appears in exactly the same relative position to the head of Akhenaten in a number of Egyptian reliefs; for example, one found on a fragment of parapet, now in the Brook
lyn Museum, New York, shows King Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti making an offering to the Aten. The relative sizes of the Kuntillet Ajrud figures – that I take to be that of the King, wearing the triple ‘Atef ’ (crown) and the Queen wearing the single crown – are highly reminiscent of other representations of the couple adorned with their royal headgear.

  That there is an Egyptian dimension to this inscription was, indeed, sensed by École Biblique scholar, Émile Puech. In a lecture he gave on two Davidic Psalms, to a conference on Forty Years of Research, held in Israel, in 1988, he quoted the similarity of the salutation formulae at Kuntillet Ajrud to that seen on a papyrus from Saqqara in Egypt.43

  The association in the inscription, which has been read as: Yahweh and ‘his asherah’44 is also reminiscent of the fertility goddess associated with Yahweh by the pseudo-Hebrew community at Elephantine, and it seems that this association continued on through a strand of monotheism into Canaan. Any idea that the Kuntellit Ajrud inscription shows Jahweh with his consort is therefore, I believe, completely wrong, and it almost certainly portrays King Akhenaten with his Queen, Nefertiti.

  SUMMATION

  The additional information in this Chapter is intended to supplement previous evidence and answer the main criticisms that have inevitably been forthcoming from staunchly orthodox circles in academia. In developing some of the more detailed responses, it is suggested that even stronger arguments have emerged to substantiate the overall thesis. Aspects of these arguments have now been given a visual dimension with the screening of a TV Documentary, based on the book.

  Entitled The Pharaoh’s Holy Treasure the one hour Documentary was first shown on BBC2, on 31 March 2002, and featured interviews with leading scholars from America, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Egypt. Much of the presentation fleshed out confirmatory opinion on a possible connection between Qumran and Amarna, whilst other interviewees rejected some of the findings and could not accept the full implications of the new theory.

  Two major interviews were omitted by the editors from the TV Documentary on the basis that they were: ‘too supportive of the theory and would damage the controversial balance of the programme’. One of these interviews was with Professor John Tait, of the University of London, Vice Chairman of The Egypt Exploration Society, and a world authority on Egyptian and Greek texts. On being asked for his reading of the mysterious Greek letters that appear interspersed in the Hebrew text of the Copper Scroll, which I read as Akhenaten, he reiterated his view, and that of Professor Rosalie David, Egyptologist at Manchester University, that my interpretation was not unreasonable.

  Figure 23: (Top) Drawing and inscription on a storage jar found at Kuntillet Ajrud, dated to the Eighth or Ninth century BCE. (Courtesy BMP.) (Bottom) Section of Palace parapet from Amarna, now in the Brooklyn Museum, New York, showing snake in the same relative postition to Pharaoh Akhenaten’s face as on the Kuntillet Ajrud jar. (Courtesy Brooklyn Museum.)

  Robert Feather’s suggestion that the name of the Egyptian king Akhenaten can be read is something I was very interested to hear. The first reaction from someone like me is that that king was written out of Egyptian history deliberately after the end of his reign. It’s certain he was consistently written out of official king lists and therefore one’s first thought is that the name will just not be known later. To me, one of the fascinating things is just to be made to consider whether that name could have lingered on. Egyptologists nowadays are very interested in the difference between the official orthodox records and a view of how Egypt was run, centring on the king, and the possibility of detecting less official beliefs, less official traditions. The trouble is it is very difficult to find such evidence, as in the case of the copper scroll material, but it is a challenge. Immediately I am worried by purely technical questions here, about how the name could be written. The suggestion is, I think, that in this case we are dealing with oral tradition, something passed on by word of mouth and not relying on written records. We are talking about, presumably, a period of something like a millennium at least, therefore changes are bound to occur and one is not going to expect a very exact representation. The other big consideration is that these are Greek letters, and Akhenaten’s second name – the name in his second cartouche – was originally in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  We are immediately faced with the problem that the Greek alphabet cannot properly represent every sound in the Egyptian language. This is a problem with which those who invented the Coptic script, in the third century of the common era, had to cope with – the lack of a way of writing certain sounds. They came up with the dodge of using some native Egyptian characters to fill the gaps. Now, if you have not yet thought of doing that your attempt to represent some Egyptian sounds is going to be second best. But no more second best than the way we in England would now represent Indian words, Hindi, Arabic, or Chinese words. Unless you put in a lot of horrible scholarly dots and dashes, you are going to finish up with an approximation.

  One of the letters that’s perhaps the main worry is the reading of the letter that they took as the Greek gamma, but then they would have been faced with the problem that they couldn’t have a very accurate reproduction, and I think it’s just about acceptable that they might come up with the solution of using the letter gamma.

  So, someone hearing a name in oral tradition could come up with this group of letters to represent the name of Akhenaten, it’s not unreasonable.45

  The second major interview that was omitted was with Professor Harold Ellens, of Michigan University, and his views are amply set out in the Foreword to this edition.

  Professor Shiffman ended his parody on the future of Dead Sea Scrolls research, at a conference celebrating the fiftieth birthday of their finding, in the voice of an evangelical preacher:

  For up to now you have collected parallels and there has arisen the thought that Jesus, or perhaps his teacher John the Baptist, was a member of the Qumran sect or even that Jesus had been killed at Qumran....46

  These remarks might well have enticed me to look more closely at the relationship of early Christianity with Second Temple period Judaism, and more particularly to the special form of Judaism practised at Qumran. As it was I had already embarked on such an endeavour when I came across the quotation. Who would have thought that Professor Shiffman’s throwaway remarks would strike so close to the truth?

  APPENDIX –

  TRANSLATION OF THE

  COPPER SCROLL

  The following translation of the Copper Scroll is from The Treasure of the Copper Scroll by John Marco Allegro (Routledge & Kegan Paul,1960), reproduced with the kind permission of Mrs Joan R. Allegro.

  © Copyright the Estate of John M. Allegro

  GLOSSARY

  Apocrypha – Sacred ‘hidden’ (from the Greek ‘apokryphos’) Jewish texts, written during the second Temple period and up to 135 CE, which are additional to the thirty-nine books accepted as part of the Hebrew Old Testament. They are known from the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament and were accepted as canon texts by the Catholic Church but excluded from the canon of the Protestant Churches at the time of the Reformation. They include the Books of Judith, Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus – not to be confused with Ecclesiastes, which is part of the Catholic, Protestant and Hebrew Bibles. In the Rabbinnic period of the Middle Ages, rabbis tried to suppress Ecclesiastes as it counsels behaviour on the basis that human life is preordained and that oppression and injustice have to be accepted. They nevertheless felt obliged to accept it as part of the holy canon because of its attribution to ‘Kohelet, son of David’, although modern scholars now think it is probably a third-century BCE text. Other Biblical-related Jewish texts, rejected by the Catholic and Protestant Churches, are called Pseudepigrapha.

  Akkadian – A Semitic language originating in the Tigris–Euphrates region in the third millennium BCE. In use at the time of Akhenaten in Egypt, and as the diplomatic language of the Levant, until superseded by Aramaic.

&nb
sp; Aramaic – A Semitic language dating back to 900 BCE. The lingua franca of the Persian Empire and used extensively by the Jews after they returned from the Babylonian exile. The cursive script replaced ancient paleo-Hebrew for both secular writings and holy scriptures.

  Assyrians – Semitic tribes of ancient west Asia that dominated the Middle East in the eighth century BCE and into the late seventh century. They conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel around 722 BCE and laid siege to Jerusalem, in the Southern Kingdom, in 701 BCE.

  Babylonians – see Mesopotamia.

  BCE – ‘Before the Common Era’, taking year ‘zero’ as the date of Jesus’ birth.

  Books of the Dead – Egyptian funereal ‘incantation’ texts, dating back to 2700 BCE found on pyramid and coffin texts, first consolidated as some 200 chapters at the beginning of the New Kingdom period, c.1540 BCE. The chapters’ spells, hymns, litanies and magical formulae describe rituals and procedures for the dead body in its state of afterlife, and include a description of the last judgement of the deceased. In this procedure, the heart of the deceased is weighed against ‘maat’ or truth and cosmic order, symbolized by a feather. Judgement on a person’s moral behaviour, to decide whether they could enter the land of the dead, was delivered by forty-two judges and the god of the underworld, Osiris. Texts were written in Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic or demotic script on papyri, or extracts inscribed on amulets and incorporated into the coffin with the mummified body. One of the best known examples is the Book of the Dead prepared for Ani, a royal scribe, dating from the Theban period of 1420 BCE. The 24m-long papyrus is housed in the British Museum, London.