The Last Testament
Page 20
As he unwrapped it now, reading again those first few words, he felt his body convulse with anticipation. In the market he had been able to make out only the opening words: the rest were obscured, their meanings out of reach. To decode the full text, he would have to study it closely, using some of his most arcane reference books. He would labour over it all night.
The thought thrilled him. He hadn’t felt this way since…since, when? Since his work on the Bet Alpha site, discovering the houses that adjoined the synagogue, which proved the existence of an entire Jewish village from the Byzantine period? Since his work, as a student of Yigal Yadin at Masada? No. The exhilaration he felt now was on an entirely different scale. The closest comparison, he was ashamed to realize, was with the moment when, as a shy sixteen-year-old, he had lost his virginity to Orna, the nineteen-year-old beauty on his kibbutz. The ecstasy rising in him now was explosive, just as it had been then.
I Abraham, son of Terach…
He was desperate to find out what it said, but there was a feeling in his gut like a lead weight. What if he were wrong? What if this was an extraordinary case of mistaken identity?
Shimon tried to calm himself. He got out of his chair, shook his head, like a dog shaking off drops of rain, and sat down again. The first task was to confirm that this really was the word of Abraham; the meaning would come next. He breathed deeply and started again.
The text was in Old Babylonian language. That, thought Guttman, fitted: it was the dialect that would have been spoken eighteen centuries before Christ, when Abraham was commonly believed to have lived. He looked back at the text. The author gave his father’s name as Terach and identified his sons as Isaac and Ishmael.
It was conceivable that there had been other Abrahams who were sons of other Terachs, even possible that they lived at that time and in that place. These other Abrahams might even have had two sons. But two sons with those exact names, Isaac and Ishmael? It was too much of a coincidence. It had to be him.
The door opened. Instinctively, Shimon placed his hand over the tablet to hide it.
‘Hello, chamoudi. I wasn’t expecting you back. Aren’t you meant to be with Shapira?’
Shit. The meeting.
‘Yes. I was. I mean, I am. I’ll phone him.’
‘What is it, Shimon? You’re sweating.’
‘It was hot out. I was running.’
‘Why were you running?’
He raised his voice. ‘Why all these questions? Leave me alone, woman! Can’t you see I’m working?’
‘What’s that on your desk?’
‘Rachel!’
She turned around, slamming the door behind her.
He tried to calm himself, looking back to the text, his eye tracing the line in which the author named his hometown as Ur, the Mesopotamian city where Abraham was born. He saw the seal on the reverse side of the tablet, in the space between the text and the date at the bottom, and repeated in another corner and again on the edges. It had not been made by a cylinder, the seal used by kings and men of wealth, the carved stone tube that could be rolled into the soft clay, thereby leaving a unique marking, a signature. Nor was it a series of crescent shapes, etched into the clay by the use of the author’s right thumbnail. No, it was a pattern found much more rarely than that, one that Guttman instantly recognized-and found unaccountably moving.
It was a roughly circular pattern, formed by a criss-cross of lines. Shimon had seen it only twice before, and one of those was in a photograph. It was formed by pressing into the clay the knot found at the fringes of a male garment, of the kind worn by Mesopotamian men at exactly Abraham’s time. Such fringed garments had faded from history, with one exception: the Jewish prayer shawl. Shimon would only have to step outside his house to find an ultra-orthodox Jew waiting at a bus stop, or buying a paper, wearing the exact same garment now, nearly four thousand years later. And here was its mark, pressed deep by Abraham, son of Terach.
Regardless of what it said, the importance of this object, no more than four inches high, less than three inches wide and barely half an inch thick, could not be overestimated. It would be the first significant archaeological evidence of the Bible ever discovered. Sure, there was the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, on display among the pharaohs and mummies of the British Museum. One of the five scenes shown in the obelisk’s sculptured relief depicted the Israelite king Jehu, paying tribute to the Assyrian monarch. Jehu appeared in the Bible and this obelisk, found by Henry Layard in the nineteenth century, corroborated it.
But Jehu was a minor character in the great Bible story. Of the lead players, from the patriarchs to Moses to Joshua, the archaeological record had yielded nothing. Until now. Here it was: physical confirmation of the great forefather himself.
Surely it was too good to be true. What if it was a fake? Guttman thought back to the scandal that had spooked scholars and historians the world over. He and his friends had followed it with a mixture of Schadenfreude and fascination. In 1983 the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had declared the Hitler diaries genuine and had paid for it with his reputation. His mistake was simple. He had wanted to believe they were real. Now, sitting in his Jerusalem home, Shimon Guttman knew how Trevor-Roper must have felt: he wanted so desperately for this tablet to be what it seemed.
He looked at its reddish-brown clay, precisely the shade any expert would expect from Iraq in that period. It was craggy and weathered, the way pieces of this vintage always looked. Guttman brought the tablet closer to his eyes: the angle of each line of the cuneiform script, each syllabic character, was entirely as it should be. And the wording. Every phrase, every formulation, was idiomatically and historically fitting: in front of the judges have attested thus…There were only about half a dozen people in the world who could fake an item as well as this-and he, Guttman, was one of them.
But a fake made no sense. Trevor-Roper had got the Hitler diaries wrong because he had overlooked a crucial fact. Someone had brought them to him, wanting his validation. A vast fortune rested on his verdict. There was always a risk of a con.
This was not like that. No one had come to Guttman, trying to pass off this tablet as the last will of Abraham. On the contrary, he had found it. If it hadn’t been for his impulse visit to Aweida it would still be in that marketplace now, sitting in a tray, ready to be sold off to some know-nothing collector. A smile spread across Shimon Guttman’s face. Logic was on his side.
To believe this was a fake, you would have to believe a series of wildly unlikely propositions. That someone had gone to painstaking and expensive trouble to inscribe a clay tablet that could pass as a four-millennia-old Mesopotamian relic. That this trickster had then, without mentioning it, dumped his handiwork in the hands of an East Jerusalem market trader, in the hope that fate would bring one of the world’s few cuneiform experts into the trader’s shop. That this expert would see this item in particular, picking it out from everything else in the shop, that he would translate it and comprehend its profound significance. The faker would be gambling that all those circumstances would materialize, and for what? What would this con artist have earned from his trick? Certainly not money, since Guttman had paid nothing to a trader who had no idea what he was giving away. No, if this was a fake, the trickster would surely have brought it to Guttman demanding millions of dollars.
The cold, rational truth was that it made more sense to believe this tablet was genuine than to believe it was phoney. The logical leap entailed by the latter was greater than the former. It had to be real.
His mind was racing. How on earth had it got here? It had come to Jerusalem from Iraq, part of the huge outflow of antiquities since the fall of Saddam: that much was obvious. Whether it had come via Beirut, Amman, Damascus, it hardly mattered. How it had been found in Iraq, whether it had been in the ground until recently or plundered from a collection, perhaps even a museum, was unknowable. Maybe the authorities under Saddam had found it and hidden it from view; perhaps they had never realized its
significance.
What fascinated Shimon Guttman was its earlier journey. The tablet was written in Hebron, the place where Abraham was buried, the place so holy in Judaism that Guttman and his fellow radicals had been determined to restore a Jewish presence there as soon as they could after 1967. Did this mean that Abraham had lived his last days in Hebron, then? His two sons had been involved in his burial, but did this discovery mean there was some kind of final deathbed scene, involving the father and his two heirs? Had there been a dispute the aged patriarch had to resolve?
Guttman wondered how the tablet would then have got back to the land of Abraham’s birth, Mesopotamia. Perhaps one of the sons had taken it there. There was no mention in the Bible of Isaac returning to Ur, but perhaps Ishmael had gone back, to see for himself the town where it had all begun.
This, he realized, could be his life’s work. Translating this tablet, decoding its history, displaying it in the great museums of the world. It would make his name forever-it would be known as the Guttman tablet-he would be on television, hailed at the British Museum, toasted at the Smithsonian. Scholars would tell and retell the story of how he had stumbled across the founding document of human civilization in a street market on a hot afternoon in Jerusalem.
This small, silent object had taught him something he had not expected to discover about himself. He realized that he was, despite his recent decades of activism, an archaeologist first and foremost. The mere discovery of this tablet, whatever its ultimate meaning, thrilled him as a scholar. It was the connection with Abraham, the sense that he had, like those telescopes in New Mexico, made contact with a faraway world, that delighted him more than he could say.
But the other voice in his head, that of the political campaigner, would not be stilled. It had been nagging away throughout, desperate to know the exact meaning and significance of this document, and now its impatience boiled over. Guttman duly reached for the three or four key volumes required in the deciphering of cuneiform and got to work.
I Abraham, son of Terach, in front of the judges have attested thus. The land where I took my son, there to make a sacrifice of him to the Mighty Name, the Mountain of Moriah, this land has become a source of dissension between my two sons; let their names here be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael. So have I thus declared in front of the judges that the Mount shall be bequeathed as follows…
Guttman couldn’t help it. He was overwhelmed all over again. Here was Abraham referring to one of the defining episodes in world culture, the akeda, when the great patriarch led his son up Mount Moriah, there to sacrifice him to the god in whom he had become the first believer. For centuries, Jews had struggled to understand what kind of father could slay his own child and what kind of God would ask him to do it. And, make no mistake, Abraham had been ready to do it, raising his blade, only staying his hand when an angel descended to announce that God did not demand this act of child sacrifice after all. It was a moment that would bind Abraham and Isaac and their children to God for ever more, sealing them into the covenant between God and the Jews.
Now here was textual proof of that event. But that was not what made Shimon Guttman giddy. He read the words again, syllable by syllable, in case he had made a mistake.
The Mountain of Moriah…has become a source of dissension between my two sons, let their names here be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael.
Mount Moriah. The Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site. Tradition held that this spot, where the angel had saved Isaac, was the centre of the world, the Foundation Stone on which the universe had been created. The Jews of ancient times had built their temple here and, when it was destroyed by the Babylonians, they had built it again. All that was left now was the Western Wall, but this place remained the spiritual centre of the Jewish faith.
Yet Mount Moriah was holy to Muslims, too, those who traced their ancestry back to Ishmael. For them it was Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, the place where Mohammed had ascended to heaven on his winged horse. After Mecca and Medina, it was the Haram that was holiest.
…this land has become a source of dissension between my two sons; let their names here be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael. So have I thus declared in front of the judges that the Mount shall be bequeathed as follows…
Here the characters were faded, as if the carving had gone less deep. Guttman opened a desk drawer and pulled out a magnifying glass. Some of the formations were novel: they required checking against other texts, looking for repetitions that might suggest a specific local usage. More than two hours later and it was done.
When it was, Shimon Guttman gripped the desk in front of him. He needed to feel the solidity of the wood, its mundanity. For the enormity of these words was now apparent. Forget the fame and glory of an unprecedented historic discovery. What he had in front of him would change everything. People had fought for millennia over control of this holy site, all sides believing themselves to be the children of Abraham. At different times, Jews, Muslims and Christians had claimed it, each believing they were its true heirs. And now he, Shimon Guttman, held the document that would settle this question forever. All who regarded themselves as the descendents of Isaac and Ishmael, Jews and Muslims, would have to be bound by this, the word of the great father himself. It would change everything.
He fumbled for his phone before realizing that he didn’t know by heart the number he meant to call. He quickly logged onto the computer, searching for the website. He called up the contacts page and immediately dialled the number.
‘My name is Professor Shimon Guttman,’ he said, his voice parched. ‘I need to speak to the Prime Minister.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
R AMALLAH , THE W EST B ANK , T HURSDAY , 8.30 AM
Khalil al-Shafi knew that, in reality, this was only half a meeting. He had the head of the presidential guard, along with the heads of three other security forces here. But the leaders of the military wing of Hamas were not here, nor of the Gaza police force. If this was a unity government, he had joked with his wife that morning, then he would hate to see a disunity government.
In jail he had planned and strategized for this moment over many years. He had anticipated every Israeli move and prepared a series of possible countermoves. To each of those, he had predicted a range of Israeli reactions, calculating in advance the appropriate Palestinian response to each. If you opened up his head, he thought, you would see a flow chart more complex than the circuit board for the space shuttle.
But he had not factored in sufficiently the durability of Palestinian divisions. He had assumed that by the time serious talks came around there would be a single Palestinian leadership. Indeed, he had taken for granted that his own release would only have come about if the Palestinians had formed a united front. They had cobbled together a coalition, but that was not the same thing.
He had made another error during those long stretches inside Ketziot jail, confined to a cell measuring six feet by four and a half feet for twenty three hours a day. He had always anticipated that the final straight of negotiations would be punctuated by outbreaks of violence on both sides. There would always be hardliners who would move to sabotage progress and atrocity would be their obvious tool. It had happened in every peace process the world over. Al-Shafi knew: he had studied them in footnote detail.
What he had not prepared for was this, attacks which no one claimed and no one could explain. He turned to Faisal Amiry, head of the security operation that was the closest the Palestinians came to an intelligence agency.
‘How is it possible that this attack was staged from Jenin? It’s far, no?’
‘It is far, sir. But if a team were able to get over the wall-’
‘We would know about it. Wouldn’t we?’
‘There may be others who knew.’ It was Toubi, a veteran of the old PLO struggles going back decades. He hated Hamas with a passion.
‘The trouble is, it doesn’t seem like them,’ Amiry replied. ‘It’s not their style. A raid, in then out.’
‘Rogue elements?’ asked al-Shafi.
‘That would be something, wouldn’t it, if our friends in Hamas were losing their legendary discipline?’ It was Toubi, with too much of a smile on his face for Khalil’s taste.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Amiry. ‘So far they have stayed remarkably united. The political bureau in Damascus has decided that these talks should work. That we should get an agreement, then call the Israelis’ bluff and demand they honour it. That’s the strategic decision they’ve taken.’
‘And without Damascus, there’s nothing any of the rogue elements can do?’
‘Correct, Mr al-Shafi. They just don’t have the equipment, the training, the money. Nothing.’
‘Jihad?’
‘We wondered about Islamic Jihad. But we have a very good source inside there. He says they are as surprised by this as we are.’
‘What about the target?’
‘That is the strangest thing of all. If you were aiming for loss of life, you’d have turned right out of the kibbutz fields, aiming for the residential buildings. But they were at the museum. Where they only took one life.’
Toubi was nodding. ‘Or not gone there at all. Once they got over the wall, they could have struck Magen Shaul. Why hike all the way to Bet Alpha?’
‘I know why.’ It was al-Shafi, who had got out from behind his desk and was now attending to a chessboard he kept in the corner of his office. A leftover from prison, the chess. He would play entire games in his head, taking both sides, sometimes lasting days. During the spells of solitary confinement, it kept him sane. Now he always had a game on the go.