by Adam Palmer
What next? Embrace a Buddhist? Wicca? Satanism?
And now, these Jewish interlopers were in the sacred corridors of the Vatican, translating documents found in Rome and claiming them as their own… using them to justify their actions of the past and being greeted as honoured guests. And it seemed that they had found clues to other similar documents in Jerusalem – documents dating from the time of Christ or shortly thereafter.
He was glad that he had been contacted by HaTzadik and asked to keep an eye on the visitors from England. At least there was one Jew who, despite his lack of acceptance of Christ, at least showed the humility to respect the Church and her teachings. The priest prayed that God would open the heart of HaTzadik and his followers to the acceptance and love of Christ.
In the meantime, the priest would serve God by calling his allies and warning them of the plans of these vile people.
Chapter 63
“It’s locked!” one of the twins screamed.
“But where’s the key?” shouted the other.
“It ought to be in the lock. It’s dangerous not having a key in the lock! What if there’s a fire and you need to get out quickly?”
“We do need to get out quickly!”
They could hear the nasty man banging on the door of the room at the end of the corridor and shouting at them, saying God was going to punish them for breaking their promise.
“Where is it?”
“It must be somewhere!”
They were panicking now.
“There!”
She was pointing at the wall. The other looked round and up.
“Where?”
“On the hook.”
She tried to reach it, but it was too high. The other one tried, but she couldn’t reach it either. They could hear banging on the door of the room where they had locked the man. And then the handle started rattling.
He was trying to get out. He was going to get out! Any minute now, he’d break the door down!
One of them tried to jump and grab the bunch of keys. She couldn’t reach it. The second tried… same result. The first one tried again, this time managing to get her fingers too it, but not to pull it off the wall. The second one tried and she too made contact, but failed to retrieve the keys. Finally, the first one tried, jumping with all her might and timing her grab perfectly.
This time she succeeded, but dropped the key on the floor, unable to support its weight in her fingers. The other scooped it up off the floor.
“Quick we’ve got to find the right key!”
Several of the keys were obviously the wrong size or shape and wouldn’t even fit the lock. Eventually they found one that fit. But it didn’t turn. They tried another, with similar lack of success.
By now the banging and rattling and shouting was becoming so loud that the girls were terrified. They were sure he was going to get out and if he did they didn’t know what he would do, he sounded so angry. Finally the third key went into the lock and turned. They managed to get the door open just as they heard something break in the other room.
Not waiting to discover if that meant that the man had got out, they raced out of the flat, into the corridor and down the stairs. From there they raced into the street, turned one way – without even caring which way it was – and started running down the pavement.
“Stop those girls!” A man’s booming voice called out behind them. They looked back to see the man running after them. Several people looked at them but no one stopped them. Then a man blocked their path and they were filled with terror.
In desperation, the one who was in front darted out into the road. A car screeched to a halt and the driver leaned to shout at them for being so stupid. Ignoring him, the girl waved her arms in the air as if waving at some one in the distance. She turned to her twin who was still on the pavement and called out: “It’s a police man!” Then she turned back the way she had been facing and shouted “over here!”
By the time she looked back to her twin, she saw that the man who had been chasing them had turned round and was now running in the opposite direction.
Chapter 64
“Is there not one of you capable of performing a simple task without getting it wrong? You are shamed in the sight of Hashem if you cannot even do one thing write when the survival of the true Jewish people is at stake!”
Once again HaTzadik had been let down by those whom he trusted. And once again he was furious.
“It wasn’t my fault. They were cunning little vixens and they tricked me!”
This did nothing to assuage HaTzadik’s anger.
“Tricked you! Tricked you! They were eight-year-old girls! How could they have tricked you?”
“They lied to us! They promised that they would not try to escape… and then they set a trap for me.”
The man’s tone was pleading. It was not that he feared HaTzadik. He feared only the wrath of God. But he was ashamed. And he wanted to hide his guilt. But he couldn’t blame the others. He was in charge… and he was alone with them at the time.
“Did it not occur to you that little girls might lie? Especially as they are the daughters of Chilonim.
Chilonim was a term, for non-religious Jews. HaTzadik continued.
“You are an idiot! You knew they weren’t Yiras Shamayim!”
In other words, they were not God-fearing Jews; therefore they couldn’t be trusted.
“I am sorry my teacher, I’m sorry.”
“Just make sure you stay away from the house. The police will come looking. In fact, do go back there and clean out anything that can link them back to us. Do it quickly and then get out of there!”
Shalom Tikva ended the call, his mind in turmoil. This was a bigger failure than those of his son. With his son’s failure, at least there was no trail to follow. He had hired strangers in the attempt to kill Klein and they had ended up dead and thus unable to talk. When he failed to kidnap the youngest of the Sasson girls, at least he had made a clean getaway, unless they got the number of the car and traced the rental back to his son’s name. But aside from that Baruch was now on his way back to Israel and so the British police couldn’t arrest him.
But this failure was different. The girls had run away from a apartnment and they could identify the flat and lead them back there. The one thing he had going for him was that the girls were probably traumatized and so would initially be counselled by psychologists before eventually being asked to help the police find the house. That gave them a window of opportunity. And that was why he had told his follower to go back to the flat and clean it out.
The phone rang again.
What is it this time?
But as he looked at the readout on his mobile phone, he saw that it was a foreign number. It looked vaguely familiar. At the back of the mind he suspected some kind of a trap. But what could they do from the other end of a mobile phone.
“Yes?”
“Hallo…”
The voice spoke in English. But it was not a British accent – it sounded like an American.
“Yes?”
“Is that Shalom Tikva?”
HaTzadik hesitated.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Father Enoch. You remember you asked me to tell you if anyone showed an interest in the Domus Aurea parchment.”
“Yes?” said HaTzadik realizing what he was about to hear.
Over the next few minutes, Enoch told HaTzadik about the visit of Daniel, Ted and Sarit, including their apparently successful decipherment of the manuscript and the fact that they had also found out about a similar document in the Temple Mount tunnels and were coming to Israel to meet the Israeli professor whose team had discovered it.
At the end of the call, HaTzadik thanked Brother Enoch for his assistance and spoke a few pious sounding words about “the brotherhood of our peoples” and the “wickedness of the Zionist impostors who pretend to be Jews.” Then he called an Arab friend. As he waited for an answer, he realized that he now had a perfect oppo
rtunity. His grievance was not with the Sasson family, but with Daniel Klein.
And now Daniel was unwittingly about to enter the lion’s den.
“Shahaid, I have a favour to ask of you.”
Chapter 65
“This is the most preposterous theory I’ve ever heard.”
Seated in a Jerusalem café with her British and Irish guests, Professor Leah Yakarin, didn’t trouble to hide her opinions. In the rough and tumble world of academia, she knew that one had to fight one’s corner with vigour or go down to a tougher slugger. It was like prize-fighting, except that it was usually gloves off and to hell with the Queensbury rules.
“Any more preposterous than the theory that Essenes didn’t really exist?” asked Daniel.
The Essenes were one of three, or possibly four, Jewish factions that existed in Judea in between the second century BCE and the first century CE – the others being the Sadducees, an aristocratic priestly sect notionally descended from Tzadok the first High Priest in Solomon’s temple, and the Pharisees, a sect of learned but humble men. Some scholars, basing their beliefs on the writings of Josephus, also identify a fourth school of thought – the “Sicarii” – whom Josephus distinguished from the Essenes. Both Essenes and Sicarii – so named for the dagger or sica that they carried – are sometimes referred to as zealots. But the Sicarii were believed to be of Galilean origin, whereas the Essenes were identified with Jerusalem,
But Professor Yakarin was one of a small number of academics who argued that the Essenes were real or a figment of the imaginations and propaganda of certain Greco-Roman writers.
“There is no credible evidence that the Essenoi existed,” said Professor Yakarin, using the Greek name by which Josephus had called them. “The Dead Sea Scrolls, which the Essenes supposedly kept and guarded, make no mention of them. The so-called Essenes were former priests who had lost a power struggle. The Biblical scrolls were removed from the Temple… when they were ousted by other factions.”
Daniel was in an argumentative mood.
“But not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls were Biblical texts. Some were about daily life and other matters. One of the scrolls describes a small sect living communally in the Dead Sea area. That can hardly be a reference to Jerusalem.”
“No, but that scroll may have been by the priestly sect who fled from Jerusalem. They may even have lived in Qumran or Masada. But that doesn’t make them a separate sect – just a group of deposed priests hiding out from their enemies in a civil conflict. But it didn’t mention the name Essenes. And all that talk about ascetic lifestyles is just a load of baloney. Josephus had spent three years travelling in Judea with an ascetic called Banus who probably filled his head with those ideas. And as a scholar he read about the Spartans and their lives of deprivation. He was writing a mythology for his Greco-Roman audience.”
“Look, I’m no great fan of Josephus myself,” said Daniel. “But the Essenes weren’t only described by Josephus. Pliny the Elder and Philo also mention them. And in fact Pliny mentioned them even before Josephus. He even said they lived in Ein Gedi – right by the Dead Sea and Masada.”
“Yes but Pliny’s total summary of them is confined to no more than half a dozen lines. And what does he actually say about them? That they didn’t use money, that they existed for thousands of generations – and that they never married!”
“Okay so he exaggerated a little, but that – ”
“A little? Look I’m not saying that its impossible for a celibate sect to maintain itself like the Shakers, through conversion and recruitment. But for how long? And remember the Shakers operated in America which had a larger population from which to recruit new members. Also Pliny insisted that all the Essenes were men. They didn’t recruit women at all. That sounds like some sort of Spartan sect or some sort male-only club that characterized certain groups of Christians. And that kind of Christianity was itself an outgrowth of certain Greco-Roman traditions, not Jewish ones.
But in Greco-Roman tradition, the life of deprivation was associated with military preparedness, not devotion to God.”
“Not necessarily Daniel,” said Ted. “The Stoics were hardly militaristic.”
“And according to Josephus the Essenes were,” replied Daniel.
“Which leads right back to my theory,” said Leah Yakarin. “Josephus was writing fiction to appeal to his Greco-Roman readership.”
“Maybe not entirely fiction,” Ted suggested. “Maybe just gilding the lily.”
Leah Yakarin thought for a moment.
“If they were celibate, then they would have really been a small sect – and probably wouldn’t have lasted more than two generations at most.”
Daniel stepped in.
“Okay but Josephus says that the Essenes did marry. It may be that a small number carried there asceticism to the extreme of celibacy. And Philo wrote about them even earlier, crediting them with similar communal lifestyles.”
“But Philo didn’t speak Hebrew, despite his Jewishness. He was essentially a Greek of Jewish origin. And he may also have been pandering to Greek ideas. He didn’t even call them by the Latin form, Esseni, or even the Greek form, Essenoi. He called them Essaioi without an N and said it meant ‘holy’. It was Josephus who called them Essenoi and Pliny called them Esseni.”
“We’re getting a bit hung up on nomenclature here,” Ted stepped in. “Surely whatever they called themselves, we can all agree that they existed?”
“No we can’t!” snapped Professor Yakarin, still fighting her corner. “We can accept that there were communities living in the Dead Sea area, Qumran, Ein Gedi and even Masada. But that doesn’t mean they were a large ascetic sect. They were deposed priests who lived in exile from Jerusalem after losing a power struggle.”
Daniel decided to bring the discussion back on track.
“We’re moving a bit of the point here. We were talking about the Domus Aurea manuscript.”
Leah Yakarin shook her head.
“I remain sceptical about that too. You said yourself, you never saw the original – just an image on a computer screen.”
“Yes but we do have the original of the map.”
“Which you still haven’t shown me.”
“We don’t want to take it out too much,” said Ted. “You know what excessive handling can do to a document.”
“Of course I know. In fact a Russian colleague of mine has pointed out that there’s been a lot of careless handling of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
“Then I’ll ask you to take our word… for the time being.”
“I trust your integrity Professor Klein. Your reputation precedes you. But what is it you want from me?”
“Well we understand that your archaeological team discovered a parchment manuscript, that hasn’t yet been deciphered, in the Temple Mount tunnels.”
Leah sat still as she considered this.
“Not exactly in the tunnels. It was in the earth removed from the excavations at Solomon’s Stables between 1996 and 1999.”
Ted looked confused.
“But wasn’t King Solomon much earlier than the rebellion against Rome – I mean like a thousand years before that?”
“The name Solomon’s Stables is actually a misnomer,” said Leah. “It actually dates to the time of Herod the Great. One of his prestige projects was to extend the Temple Mount platform with twelve rows of vaulted arches, supported by eighty eight pillars on huge stone blocks. The space below became storage space.”
“And that’s been excavated?” asked Ted incredulously. Wouldn’t that threaten the structural integrity of the entire site.”
This was Ted’s area of expertise.
“Tell me about it,” said Leah, shrugging her shoulders.
“And the Muslims didn’t object?”
“It was the Waqf who did it – to build another mosque.”
Ted was about to ask what the Waqf was when Daniel stepped in to explain.
“The Muslim religious trust that controls th
e Temple Mount.”
But it was Leah Yakarin who was in her element now.
“We told them it was dangerous, but they did it anyway. It could have led to the Dome of the Rock or the Aqsa mosque collapsing. And then they’d have blamed us.”
“But when you said they found it in the earth, do you mean they just handed a mass of earth over to… what? The Israel Antiquities authority.”
“Not exactly Professor…”
“Hynds,” he reminded her.
“They weren’t doing a proper archaeological dig for research purposes. They were just digging it up to build another mosque. They put the earth on trucks and unceremoniously dumped it in the Kidron Valley near the Mount of Olives. They knew that it was likely to contain priceless artefacts associated with the long Jewish period before the Muslims invaded but they just didn’t care. As far as they were concerned, if the historic artefacts associated with the Jewish period were destroyed or lost forever, so much the better.”
Ted picked up on this.
“But you said something was found.”
“A lot of things were found. You see the Israel Antiquities Authority didn’t want to get involved. After effectively allowing the Waqf to get away with an act of brazen anti-Semitic vandalism, they kept a low profile. But others weren’t so willing to allow thousands of years of archaeological evidence of the Jewish connection with the temple mount to be wiped out by a bunch of Philistine savages. So in 2005 a salvage operation was mounted under the auspices of Bar-Ilan University.”
“So it’s in Tel Aviv?”
“No. Bar-Ilan are supervising. But any artefacts found are stored in Jerusalem.”
“And you were in charge of the project.”
“Not exactly. I was one of several historians asked to review and analyze the finds at the time when they made the discovery. But since then, my controversial views on the Essenes led to a big falling out and so I was asked to resign from the project. Anyway, the project is still going on and so far we’ve found flint tools dating back some ten thousand years, ostraca, jewellery, clothing, coloured stone and glass fragments that we think come from mosaics, official ritual seals, something like a thousand ancient coins, statuettes and figurines, ivory dice, game pieces made of animal bone, mother of pearl furniture inlays, weights of both stone and metal and – as you mentioned – a parchment manuscript found inside a clay jar. And as you said a parchment manuscript written in Hebrew lettering but in a language that we cannot decipher. We’re not even sure what linguistic group it belongs to.”
