God's Gold (11 page)

Today we can be certain that the settlement of Qumran—allegedly the home where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by dedicated Jews—was not the isolated monastic settlement envisaged by Roland de Vaux. One clinching piece of evidence is the rich collection of 679
ancient coins the site has yielded, 94 dating to the period of the First Jewish Revolt.

The large cluster of coins recovered certainly creates a headache for enthusiasts of the Essene theory because Josephus was explicitly fascinated by the nonmaterialistic character of the sect, which forsook all earthly pleasures to serve God. Emphatically, he noted:

Science also casts a long shadow over the idea that whoever occupied Qumran was truly reclusive. It has long been assumed that the settlement's clay pots were produced for exclusive use at Qumran and the surrounding caves. This image fitted neatly with the idea of Qumran as an Essene settlement because in-house production ensured that the sect need not deal with the outside world and could also guarantee that their pots would not be rendered ritually unclean by being handled by Gentiles or menstruating women.

However, samples of pots from both Qumran and the surrounding scroll caves have recently been examined by Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), a process that identifies the unique chemical “fingerprint” of the clay using nuclear chemistry. The results show that only about 33 percent of the pottery was local to Qumran, with the rest imported from Jericho. Even more disturbingly, the so-called scroll jars weren't even crafted from a clay source local to Qumran. The link between the people of Qumran and the Dead Sea scrolls has thus been fully severed. The “holy trinity” linking the scroll and Qumran to the Essenes lies in pieces. Whoever lived there, it was certainly not the exclusive sect of super pious Jews known to Josephus.

But what about eight Jewish ritual baths that dominate Qumran,
the largest concentration in Israel and surely certain proof of extreme Jewish piety at Qumran? Even this time-honored assumption is no longer clear-cut. Just how efficient can these baths have been in such an arid part of the world? Qumran is not fed by natural springs and, in antiquity, relied on the meticulous channeling of water during the few occasions when winter flash floods swept the area. Even with the capture of this rainfall, Qumran would still only have received a miserly two to four inches of rain each year. While this was enough for date palm cultivation, ensuring the flow of fresh water for ritual purity was quite impossible.

If Qumran was really occupied by a pious Jewish community undertaking ritual immersion several times a day, this behavior would have been wholly counterproductive. With no constant means of replenishment, the water within the pools must have stood stagnant for up to nine months between rains. Full-body immersion in such disease-ridden waters, or even the simple washing of the hands and face, would have been sufficient for the bather to contract the parasites
Ascaris lumbricoides
(roundworm) and
Trichuris trichiura
(whipworm) or other enteropathogenic microorganisms that are friends of cholera, hepatitis A, and shigellosis. The notion that the occupants of Qumran would have exposed themselves to such a harmful environment is simply absurd and opens up the possibility that these water features were more about spectacle and social prestige than religious observance.

Even though the full answer to the riddle of Qumran remains unresolved, the Essene model becomes increasingly hard to justify. The site can only have been owned and controlled by a wealthy Jewish landlord, a member of the Rome-loving ruling class of Judea. The current “keeper” of Qumran (artifacts, diaries, and master plans), Jean-Baptiste Humbert, believes Qumran is more reminiscent of a Pompeian villa than a rural estate. The eastern extension may have been a triclinium (dining room) with flashy plaster decoration and fancy tiles.

So where does this leave the Copper Scroll as a possible map identifying the hiding places of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem? With the Essenes out of the picture, the probability opens up that the scrolls were
not their property at all. Instead, the scrolls could represent ancient wisdom accumulated in Jerusalem and relocated to the Dead Sea to escape the wrath of Rome. This alternative idea could also mean that the list of treasure in the Copper Scroll was compiled by Jewish priests in the Holy City itself.

Today we know of 57 caves holding ancient cultural remains within a network of 279 caves and crevices that honeycomb the mountainside at Qumran. The 850 scrolls are also hugely diverse in subject matter and date, spanning a period from the end of the third century BC to AD 68 or later (the Copper Scroll is the latest deposit). And this massive body of writing could hardly have been the work of a few scribes toiling at one site like Qumran: paleography points to the hands of five hundred different scribes. Quite simply, the only place on earth that could have produced and stored such an educated collection in the first century AD was Jerusalem.

So, if the Copper Scroll was not a list of hidden Essene treasure, and if the majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated in Jerusalem, surely this makes the likelihood that the Copper Scroll describes the wealth of the Temple more than plausible? Not exactly: nothing is ever simple with Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There are worrying objections to the Copper Scroll/Temple treasure theory. If your most prized possession was on the verge of being seized by an enemy force, such as the Romans in Jerusalem, would you calmly pour yourself a glass of wine and slowly set about the laborious process of writing a shopping list of your earthly belongings? The Copper Scroll bears no resemblance to a list hastily jotted down on a memo pad. Its formality is more akin to hiring a specialist in calligraphy. And incising on copper rather than writing on papyrus must have been at least ten times slower. If the threat was immediate, you would surely have made some rapid notes on a scrap of paper and run for the hills. The desperation of the Jews in Jerusalem and the meticulous record keeping of the Copper Scroll are incompatible. Also, why resort to laboriously etching on copper when ink and papyrus would have been far simpler and swifter?

Furthermore, if the treasure was so sacred, why conceal it in locations that can at best be described as temporary hiding places? Many of the “secret” hiding places were random and wholly unsuitable for even short-term concealment. Thus, 42 talents were hidden in a salt pit under some steps; others were placed in cavities, fissures, and the spur of a rock in a cistern. Untithed goods and 70 talents even ended up in a wooden barrel in an underground passage. Equally temporary was the dam sluice and winepress pit holding 200 talents of silver. But perhaps most desperate of all was the decision to hide wealth beneath corpses in graveyards, a very strange practice for observant Jews. Thus, Item 55 reads:

The scroll text also suggests that the innovator was not planning for a long-term eventuality. The descriptions of the hiding places are vague, and it is highly questionable whether even a native intimate with the local landscape could have identified the place-names from the scroll itself. Even more strange, most of the topographic citations are not actual names but coded mnemonic indicators, highly abbreviated references that would have made sense only to a select inner circle. Would Jewish High Priests really have relied on such ad hoc descriptions to stash away, and more important to recover, the most important treasures known to man?

The incompatibility between the enduring copper medium of the scroll and the relatively uninspired hiding places cited has led to strong arguments that the Copper Scroll actually describes Jewish taxes rather than Temple treasure. As soon as the scroll was translated, John Allegro quickly pointed out that various terms in the document indicated tithes. Temple economics was based on an annual half-shekel poll tax levied
throughout Israel and among the Jews of the Diaspora, which was used for the upkeep of the Temple and its services. Israel also levied a cattle tithe for feast days in Jerusalem, while charity collections for the poor were collected every third year. For John Allegro, at least some of the wealth in the Copper Scroll was just this kind of basic taxation.

If the Copper Scroll's wealth was real, the tax model interpretation makes best sense. Certainly, the geopolitics of the First Jewish Revolt and pattern of treasure interment remain completely illogical. Why preserve something on copper for perpetuity when its supposedly invaluable contents refer to materials hidden in places meant to be known only to a select few insiders, but which were nonetheless relatively easy to locate? The use of copper reflects a desire to preserve memory of the concealed treasure long term. Yet the scroll's style and nature of the hiding places could only have permitted short-term concealment. The scroll is a confusing paradox. The dubious character of the scroll is cemented by its mysterious final entry:

The interpretation of such text is surely the stuff of a fictitious treasure hunt. In reality, not one item on the Copper Scroll inventory has ever been found, even though Israel is one of the most intensely excavated countries in the world. In the golden age of excavation in the 1990s, the country possessed the largest number of archaeologists per capita in the world. You might have expected at least a slither of silver to have materialized. But nothing has come to light apart from Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, which begs one final question: If the caves of Qumran were such reliable hiding places, why on earth didn't the author of the Copper Scroll hide his blessed treasures inside them?

A passionate John Allegro, convinced he had deciphered the modern locations of the ancient names listed in the scroll, even led expeditions to Jerusalem, the Vale of Achor, and Qumran between 1960 and 1963 to uncover the legendary treasures. Despite the support of King Hussein of Jordan, the team returned to England empty-handed.

There is one very good reason why nothing in the enigma of the Copper Scroll adds up. It can't have been Essene wealth because the sect shunned material goods. It clearly wasn't precious religious Temple treasure because such poor hiding places would never have been acceptable. And nowhere at all are the gold candelabrum, silver trumpets, and other chief instruments of Jewish faith worshipped in the Second Temple of Jerusalem mentioned.

If the treasure was ever real, then it can only have been tax collected after the Temple of Jerusalem had been razed. Just as many Jews today still devotedly save money in a tin labeled
FOR JERUSALEM
, so it would seem that within the decades after the First Jewish Revolt the Temple tax was privately reintroduced. But rather than plans for a new Temple ever coming to fruition, the iron fist of Rome gripped the province of Palestine ever more tightly. Finally, Judea exploded into the Second Revolt under Bar-Kokhba (AD 131–135). Once again Jerusalem and the Dead Sea were flooded by troops, leaving no alternative but to conceal the Temple taxes in the most convenient hiding places. Perhaps no treasure has ever turned up because Rome tortured Jewish priests into disclosing these places.

To me this interpretation is still highly charitable. I share the opinion of Józef Milik, the official expert on the Copper Scroll, who denounced the document as ancient Jewish myth-making, an inspirational piece of fiction mourning for a brave old world destroyed and doomed to oblivion. Typically, in
Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea
(1959), he writes that the scroll

A nonliteral interpretation of the Copper Scroll has also been backed up by T. H. Gaster, who proposed in
The Dead Sea Scriptures
(1976) that the scroll was humorous literature, a literary invention addressed “to hearts and minds of men who were looking to an imminent restoration of the past glories of Israel.” In other words, once the Temple fell under the might of Rome in AD 70, such folklore was written as myth to remind Jews living in the Diaspora of a faded golden age and, more important, to offer hope for a future revival of Jewish fortunes within Israel. As fascinating and multilayered as the Copper Scroll undoubtedly is, the document certainly takes us no closer to the truth behind the fate of the iconic objects in the Temple treasure of Jerusalem.