God's Gold (9 page)

So far, everything I had read about previous attempts to find the Temple treasure of Jerusalem could be comfortably excluded. In terms of scientific accuracy it simply wasn't worth the paper it was written on.

Driving south out of Jerusalem down the Judean Hills to the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, my ears popped. The lush, landscaped parks of the Holy City gave way to an alien world of open space, uncultivated and barren. Even under the pleasant skies of late April 2005, the hills were largely bare. Sporadic wiry green bushes desperately rooted for water amid the most arid of sandy brown soils.

Unchanged since biblical times, this wilderness is hostile to all forms of life—the perfect place to retreat from society and meditate about the meaning of life, like various Old and New Testament prophets, but home to no man: wilting 104-degree Fahrenheit temperatures for nine months of the year, few freshwater sources, and infertile saline soils. Here and there Bedouin lazily attended their goatherds; the occasional inquisitive camel looked up from the roadside.

Haze danced off the looping road winding down to the northern tip of the Dead Sea. Already, in spring, it was baking hot. A particularly vile smell of rotting eggs drifted off the distant lake, a noxious concoction of naturally formed dry salt and sulfur. The road plateaus out at sea level and I swept passed the military checkpoint and turnoff north to Tiberias and Beth Shean in the Galilee through the West Bank.

I steered south on a deserted sea road meandering toward the oasis of Ein Gedi, Beersheba, and eventually Eilat and the Red Sea. Not a single person could be seen, not a welcoming blade of grass. The landscape is stunningly alien. The Dead Sea refuses to sustain marine life;
the flat foreshore is thick with reeds, and sulfurous spits of sand form narrow bays far too shallow for use as natural harbors. What on earth did the Romans make of this place when they were dispatched here in AD 68 to decapitate the few Jewish revolutionaries making trouble on the edge of the civilized world? Were they proud of the vastness of the empire or, after sweating pounds marching south, did they start to question the wisdom of war? The Tiber's cool, caressing winds must have seemed a world away.

My destination was Qumran, a tiny oasis in this desert wilderness, whose occupants are credited as the authors of the two-thousand-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls. Craggy mountains composed of loose pockets of sandstone and rock—giant dollops of geological apple crumble—dominate Qumran. Over the centuries earthquakes and landslides have concealed a labyrinth of caves overlooking the ancient settlement. But between 1949 and 1962 illegal looting by roaming Bedouin, and subsequent research by Jordanian, Israeli, and American archaeologists, uncovered one of the most sensational finds of the twentieth century: religious books and social commentaries written on 850 leather and papyrus scrolls.

One document, however, turned out to be unique: scroll 3Q15 was the only example written on copper and has nothing to do with divine issues. When first translated by Dr. John Marco Allegro in Manchester, England, in October 1955, the Copper Scroll (as it is more conveniently called today) proved a sensation by apparently revealing the hiding places of thirty-one tons or more of gold and silver worth a cool $3 billion. Many specialists maintain to this day that the scroll lists the hiding places of Jerusalem's Temple treasure, spirited away around AD 70 to prevent it from falling into Rome's eager hands. Could they be right?

If the Temple treasure isn't under the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, in the Vatican, or tucked away in Rennes-le-Château under the watchful guard of a knight of the Priory of Sion, where on earth is it? Of all the weird and wonderful possibilities, the curious case of the Copper Scroll offers the most tantalizing reason for optimism to date. Without doubt the most unusual of the Dead Sea Scrolls, this document has
courted controversy ever since it was found propping up the inner wall of Cave 3 at Qumran on March 14, 1952. For a year and a half its mysterious content remained sealed, although the unique copper medium generated more curiosity than the likelihood of an innovative read. If the other 850 Dead Sea Scrolls were anything to go by, this would turn out to be either a biblical tract or ancient community rulebook. As it turned out, nothing would be further from the truth.

The first hints that the folded leaves contained something unusual emerged in 1953. After staring at some uncleaned, obscure letters scratched onto its eroded copper surfaces through a glass museum showcase in Jerusalem between September and October, an obsessed German professor, K. G. Kuhn, arrived at the outrageous conclusion that the scroll was nothing less than an inventory of buried treasure, perhaps deposited two thousand years ago by the Essenes, a pious Jewish sect who lived in the secluded wilderness around the western Dead Sea. As John Marco Allegro later recalled in
The Treasure of the Copper Scroll
(1960), “Some blamed the heat of the Jerusalem summer, others the strength of the local
‘arak,
few took the learned professor seriously.”

Nobody would really be sure about the scroll's content, however, until it was opened and translated, a precarious job that held every chance of shattering the brittle metal. Certainly no suitable laboratory facilities existed in the Middle East. So in the summer of 1955 Dr. Allegro, the first British member of the Dead Sea Scroll editorial team and a lecturer at Manchester University in England, arranged for the copper to be opened at the College of Technology in Manchester with precision saws designed to cut through human skull bone in brain surgery. The successful operation revealed three plaques about one millimeter thick and 11.5 inches high, riveted together to form a unique 8-foot-long document.

Even though formal publication had been allocated to the Polish scholar and former priest Józef Milik of the Dominican École Biblique in Jerusalem, Allegro couldn't contain his excitement. Soon after the opening he broke protocol by personally translating the text and, in the process, confirmed that the scroll was indeed an inventory of buried
treasure. In October 1955, Allegro wrote to inform Lankester Harding, director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, that “these copper scroll are red hot…. Next time you're down at Qumran, take a spade and dig like mad by the airhole of the iron smelting furnace…there should be nine of something there.”

Despite facilitating the opening in Manchester, and thus being the key to the Copper Scroll's stunning revelations, Allegro soon found himself sidelined. Roland de Vaux, the head of Jerusalem's École Biblique et Archéologique Française, and editor in chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication team, informed Allegro by letter that he found his reading of the text inaccurate, and somewhat haughtily thanked him for “making transcriptions in case an accident should happen.” Perhaps these more cautious elder statesmen of archaeology had good reason to dampen Allegro's enthusiasm. Privately they were aware that he was a controversial figure, a maverick who could not be trusted to stick to professional scholarly ethics. After all, this was the man who would even tell the BBC that his interpretation of the commentary of the book of Nahum from Cave 4 at Qumran suggested that the Essenes had worshipped a “teacher of the righteousness,” who was crucified by gentiles and was expected to rise from the dead. Sound familiar? Allegro's theory that Christianity's own messianic worldview was disseminated from the highly religious Essene Jews was considered an unqualified smear against the Church. A hornet's nest of public resentment had been stirred up.

Allegro's frustration at being unable to publish details about the Copper Scroll continued to simmer. In 1958 his book
The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal
went into a second edition and, as he wrote in a letter, if he could update it with the spectacular results from Cave 3 at Qumran, “it would sell another million.” Other than the odd comment, however, he reserved his translation and interpretation for a major new book, walking a tightrope by publishing
The Treasure of the Copper Scroll,
the same year that Milik's official report on the scroll appeared in the
Annual of the Department of Antiquities in Jordan.
Allegro beat the official publication team to the punch and got his exclusive.

For the first time, the Englishman's impressive translation exposed the full wonders of this “treasure map.” Here was a formulaic description of sixty-one buried items listing types of wealth, quantities, and locations. For instance, Items 1 and 7 read respectively:

Over the last forty years the Copper Scroll has been dissected and debated in hundreds of articles and special conferences. Yet other than the facts that the scroll dates to the Roman period, is written in proto-Mishnaic Hebrew, and is a list of sixty-one buried items of varying monetary value, a dense fog still swirls around the text. The scroll is unique in metallic composition, paleography, language, content, and genre, and even though the text is extremely well preserved, scholarly opinion remains as wide as the Grand Canyon. The doyen of Dead Sea Scrolls studies, Professor Frank Cross of Harvard University, identified the script as a late Herodian substyle of the “vulgar semiformal” hand of AD 25–75. The official publication by Józef Milik, on the other hand, favored a far wider potential date range of AD 30–130.

Today, most scholars accept the Copper Scroll treasure as real. But who owned it, why was it concealed, and under what historical circumstances? Everyone seems to have their own favorite theory:

1. The treasure was tithes collected by Essene priests. The scroll was an inventory of treasure of the Essene bank, hidden by members of the Qumran community either before or during the revolt of AD 66–70 and recovered afterward.
   
2. The treasure is so great that, if real, it can only have been objects saved from the Jewish Temple of Jerusalem destroyed in AD 70 and hidden by its priests.
   
3. The Essene community of Qumran was destroyed in June AD 68, and reoccupied by the Zealots (Jewish patriots named after Greek
   Zelotai
   famous for their suicidal last stand against Rome at Masada). The Copper Scroll records sacred materials, tithes and tithe vessels sanctified by dedication or actual use in God's service that the Zealots had plundered from the holy places for money and to buy food. The scroll was written and hidden in Cave 3 during the three months of Zealot occupation at Qumran before the settlement fell to Rome.
   
4. The treasure was money that the Zealot general, Eleazor ben Simon, captured during a battle with the Roman governor Cestius Gallus in autumn AD 66; Cestius's baggage had been transporting public taxes.
   
5. The scroll was a record of accumulated funds that were still systematically collected after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 for rebuilding and maintaining a new Jewish Temple at some future date. The funds were deliberately hidden away to await the arrival of the day of redemption.
   
6. The treasure comprises redemption funds accumulated as religious taxes and tributes. Because Jerusalem was inaccessible due to the Roman siege (and later its destruction), the tribute had to be deposited in genizas (sanctified synagogue storerooms) between the First and Second Jewish Revolts against Rome, pending the rebuilding of the Temple. As imminent disaster approached around AD 135 with the failure of the Second Jewish Revolt, the positions of the inventory were registered in the Copper Scroll.
   
7. The scroll is a record of treasure hidden by Simon Bar-Kokhba during the Second Jewish Revolt in autumn AD 134.
   

One piece of evidence, seven incompatible interpretations from some of the world's greatest minds. Even the magnitude of the Copper Scroll treasure is open debate. Dr. Allegro could be a loose cannon at
times, but to his credit he possessed extremely perceptive powers of observation and was a brilliant scholar. Calculating the volume of treasure was a simple process, or so he thought:

The quantities certainly seem impressive, but are misleading because nobody has successfully worked out the equivalent weight or value of the talent in first-century AD Israel. This was clearly not the talent of rabbinical literature or of Old Testament times because, if true, the eighty talents of gold stored in two water pitchers listed in Item 33 would have weighed 1.5 tons, an impossibility for clay pitchers measuring less than eight inches in height. The mathematics simply do not balance.

Allegro concluded that the talent concerned was close to the Greek
mina
of 12 ounces, yielding an overall comparative value for the treasure of about $1 million (in 1960). Elsewhere, the Copper Scroll's treasure has been estimated to be anywhere from 58 to 174 tons of precious metal. On the basis of another Dead Sea scroll, 4Q159, where the talent equates to 6,000 half-shekels, the 5,000 talents of the Copper Scroll have been equated to a staggering $3 billion.

Although the jury clearly remains out about the exact value of the Copper Scroll treasure, the overwhelming majority opinion accepts that this document refers to money and religious objects originating in the Second Temple of Jerusalem. If correct, the answer to my quest would lie somewhere in the stifling heat of the Dead Sea wilderness.